I'm re-reading Barbara Tuchman's magnificent "Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945" and was surprised to find that Eugene Chen is mentioned. Shouldn't have been since he was a player but it was nonetheless a bit of a jolt. You might be amused/offended/interested/delighted/curious to hear her description of your ancestor:
"While Chiang concentrated on his drive toward Nanking, former southern capital, and Shanghai, the locus of money power, Hankow seethed in the ardent atmosphere of international revolt. Borodin was the gray eminence and real leader, Mme Sun Yat-'sen, nee Soong Ch'ing-ling, the presiding spirit, and Eugene Chen, reputedly the best brain in the Kuomintang, the New Foreign Minister. Small, clever, venomous, West-Indian, born of part Negro parentage and Western educated, in gold-rimmed spectacles and white spats, Chen, who could not write Chinese and scarcely speak it, was famous for his grandiloquent English and consuming hatred of the foreigner, which soon made itself felt." |
