It was in America, however, that Madame Chiang really shone. She was so popular during her wartime tours of the US that she became a folk hero. Everywhere she went she was wildly acclaimed, her public speeches were attended by crowds of up to 30,000 people and the media adored her. She was so well regarded that she made the cover of Time magazine for the second time (the first had been with her husband as "Man and Wife of the Year"), was the model for "Dragon Lady", a sort of Air Force fairy godmother in a popular comic strip, and appears in a stained glass window in a Massena, New York church as "the First Lady of Christendom".
The tours of the United States were not all popular acclaim and radio broadcasts. Madame Chiang was on the fund-and-sympathy raising circuit, she worked hard and did well. Her good looks and Western demeanor emphasized similarities rather than differences between two cultures. To fail to admire Madame Chiang was almost an admission of being a Communist sympathizer.
One of her triumphs was squeezing a number airplanes out of Roosevelt. The other was her address to Congress on February 18, 1943, only the second woman and the first Chinese to do so. Madame Chiang's appeal for help against the Japanese was so moving she received a four minute standing ovation. The emotional tidal wave was a concern to senior politicians, it was rumored that the bestowal of the airplanes was an effort to persuade her to end her trip to America.
Madame Chiang also wrote a great number of books and articles, primarily for the American market. She remained in the forefront of the fight against Communism until the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan. In 1965 she returned to the United States to plead for war materiel with which to retake Mainland China, but received no aid.
When Chiang Kai-shek died Mei-ling again returned to the United States. She lives in New York, where she observed her hundredth birthday by opening an exhibit of her own paintings.
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