First Lady & Lindberghs

When President Chiang Kai-shek can snatch time to go home from China's everlasting wars, he goes to the world's daintiest First Lady, to girlish Mei-ling (nee Soong*). who went to Wellesley, bangs her hair like a Victorian debutante, adores jade and jewels, is Methodistly devout. Last week First Lady Mei-ling again complied with a request she seldom refuses --the urgent request of a visiting Wellesley alumna for audience. Audience with China's First Lady is always at tea. Tea was served last week in the First Lady's small, closely guarded red brick and grey cement house at Nanking, her husband's capital. Why does she never join him in the field? Why have they no children? What is her chief interest? Impossible though it might seem to ask at least two of these questions, they have all been answered to Wellesley alumnae during the past year by China's delicately frank First Lady. Her latest, neatest answer: "I have always wondered how much having children puts mothers out of commission for public work. What China needs now are women free to train other women!"

Chief public work of First Lady Mei-ling is her orphanage for the children of soldiers killed in her husband's battles. Asked about joining President Chiang in the march, she gently said: "Yes, I have often thought of that, often! But it has never seemed wise to put both our lives in jeopardy at the same time." Up to last week all Wellesley visitants continued to report that First Lady Mei-ling pours tea in a Chinese gown of finest silk, wears shoes of Wellesley (not Chinese) cut, speaks English with a Boston accent, affects plenteous diamond & platinum rings, priceless jade earrings. When an alumna exclaims, "What a beautiful old vase!" Mme Chiang is apt to reply gracefully, "Yes, quite old. But that white jade one there is older, 800 years. . . ."

"Wonderful!" Mrs. Charles Augustus Lindbergh is a Smith alumna. Few such have teaed with First Lady Meiling. But for Anne & Charles Lindbergh the First Lady staged a very special tea last week at which President Chiang managed to be present.

To the Colonel the President offered China's brand new Aviation Medal, never before conferred. Colonel Lindbergh agreed to accept his medal publicly from President Chiang at 10 a.m. next day.

Tea-talk was mostly about an aerial survey of China's stricken flood area (TIME, Aug. 24 et seq.) begun last week by the Lindberghs. Already they had made several flights, snapped pictures, plotted flood maps.

Next day Colonel Lindbergh would make another flight, more daring. To gain space he would leave Mrs. Lindbergh in Nanking, would carry two doctors and medical supplies to flood-stricken areas near the Grand Canal. "Wonderful!" cried First Lady Meiling. Said President Chiang, "Colonel Lindbergh, your services are invaluable."

Violent Hopes. Swish, splash, the Lindbergh plane alighted next day on a watery waste near Hinghwa, east of the Grand Canal and 70 miles from Nanking. With famished yells, Chinese in sampans and in tubs paddled for the plane, snatched at boxes of medical supplies which the two doctors proceeded to unload. "Ah, food!" cried a snatcher. Seizing some boxes of absorbent gauze he ripped one open, tried to eat the white stringy stuff, raged to find it not food. Other Chinese snatched, bit, fell to reviling the two doctors, one a Chinese. Said Colonel Lindbergh afterward: "It was one of the most heartrending, yet terrifying scenes I ever saw." Lest the plane be mobbed, swamped, destroyed, its motor roared. Dodging neatly between sampans, the Colonel put on speed. "As our ship took off," he related, "the people realized that no relief had arrived for them and their violent hopes sank. " Back in Nanking, the Colonel took counsel, announced that he would attempt no more succor flights. "I am convinced," said he, "that the only way to place doctors in the flooded towns would be to send them with a military escort." Later Col onel & Mrs. Lindbergh said they would make further "survey flights," would carry a League of Nations observer over China's flooded flats.

* "The Soong Dynasty," most potent Chinese family, includes the First Lady's brother, Finance Minister T.V. Soong, and her sister, Mme H. H. Kung, wife of the 75th lineal descendant of Confucius. Split off from the Soong Dynasty by a family & political quarrel is Mei-ling's sister Mme Sun Yatsen, Communist-sympathizer, widow of the late, great Dr. Sun who founded the Chinese Republic.

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