Wives
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Mao Fumei (毛福梅, 1882–1939) Died in the Second Sino-Japanese War during a bombardment. Mother to his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo.
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Yao Yecheng (姚冶誠, 1889–1972) Came to Taiwan and died in Taipei.
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Chen Jieru (陳潔如, "Jennie", 1906–1971) Lived in Shanghai. Moved to Hong Kong later and died there.
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Soong May-ling (宋美齡, 1898–2003) Moved to the United States after Chiang Kai-shek's death. Arguably his most famous wife. She bore him no children.
In an arranged marriage, Chiang was married to a fellow villager named Mao Fumei. While married to Mao, Chiang adopted two concubines (concubinage was still a common practice for well-to-do, non-Christian males in China): he married Yao Yecheng (姚冶誠, 1889–1972) in 1912 and Chen Jieru (陳潔如, 1906–1971) in December 1921. While he was still living in Shanghai, Chiang and Yao adopted a son, Wei-kuo. Chen adopted a daughter in 1924, named Yaoguang (瑤光), who later adopted her mother's surname. Chen's autobiography refuted the idea that she was a concubine. Chen claiming that, by the time she married Chiang, he had already divorced Mao, and that Chen was therefore his wife. Chiang and Mao had a son, Ching-kuo, and a daughter, Chien-hua.
According to the memoirs of Chen Jieru, Chiang's second wife, she contracted gonorrhea from Chiang soon after their marriage. He told her that he acquired this disease after separating from his first wife and living with his concubine Yao Yecheng, as well as with many other women he consorted with. His doctor explained to her that Chiang had sex with her before completing his treatment for the disease. As a result, both Chiang and Ch'en Chieh-ju believed they had become sterile, which would explain why he had only one child, by his first wife; however, a purported miscarriage by Soong May-ling in August of 1930 would, if it actually occurred, cast serious doubt on whether this was true.
Read more about this topic: Chiang Kai-shek
Famous quotes containing the word wives:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was amongst the virtues like the great Turk in his seraglio of women, and I chose to dwell with that virtue which looked the fairest in my eyes and gave me at that season most pleasure. In short, I made wives of them: I first admired them, then made them my own property, and if they would not submit to my will, I again turned them off and divorced them.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“That’s right, son. That’s why I keep my hat on, so my horns don’t show. Why I’ve got more wives than Solomon hisself. At least that’s what folks around here say. And if they don’t say it, they, they think it.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)