Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past
| Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 陳潔如回憶錄 | ||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 陈洁如回忆录 | ||||||
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Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Ch'en Chieh-ju is a book by Jennie Chen Jieru (as Chen Chieh-ju), with Lloyd E. Eastman as the editor and author of the introduction. It was the final work with work done by Eastman.[1]
Chen was the second wife of Chiang Kai-shek, and this book is a memoir of her experiences with Chiang.
Background
Chen hoped to get revenue by publishing a book, and Chiang had encouraged Chen to keep a diary, allowing her to remember what people said in conversations.[2] Chen told her story to a friend, a banker in Hong Kong named James Lee. He secretly wrote the memoir in English.[1] The Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang's political party, attempted to prevent Chen's recollections from going public.[3] The KMT had asked Chen to give the party all of the correspondence she had.[4]
Eastman, a professor, made some copyediting, including in regards to the use of English, and wrote his own footnotes.[1] The Taiwan edition published in 1992 includes an introduction written by Wang Ke-wen, a professor who studied the KMT who identified which parts of the memoir were not accurate.[2] Book reviewer Gregor Benton wrote that Wang "finds so many mistakes and untruths in it that Wang is unable to accept the veracity even of its account of Chiang Kai-shek's personal behaviour toward Jennie."[1] Eastman himself stated Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past "contains a number of errors, both large and small".[1] However Eastman reasoned that the memoirs were largely accurate because of her presence at various events, her seven-year marriage, and several of her pre-breakup accounts being, in the words of Roger B. Jeans of Washington and Lee University, "remarkably free of acrimony".[2]
Contents
The book includes copies of letters written by Chiang and letters written to Chiang.[5]
Jeans stated that Chen had "understandable bitterness at her treatment by Chiang", which, along with the financial rationale, "naturally arouses skepticism among readers."[2]
Reception
Benton wrote that he wished that there were additional footnotes that discussed which parts of the accounts were or were not reliable and a text comparison of the letters to events which would have proven parts of the memoir true. He stated "Had enough of the letters been corroborated, I would feel safer accepting controversial statements by Jennie not open to such checking."[6]
An American secretary named Ginny Connor, who took her own notes of Jennie Chen's memoirs, stated that Eastman's status of a professor meant he successfully proved that Chen's words were true, and Connor stated her desire to write her own book using the memoirs she had.[4]
References
- Benton, Greg (December 1994). "Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Ch'en Chieh-ju. Edited and with an introduction by Lloyd E. Eastman. [Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. 273 pp. £20.95. ISBN 0-8133-1824-6.]". The China Quarterly. 140. Cambridge University Press: 1162–1163. doi:10.1017/S0305741000053091. JSTOR 655213. S2CID 154586250.
- Jeans, Roger B. (Spring 1995). "Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Ch'en Chieh-ju ". China Review International. 2 (1). University of Hawaii Press: 61–64. doi:10.1353/cri.1995.0033. JSTOR 23728729. S2CID 144601654.