The Lady and the Panda Read online

  The mountains seemed to erupt with mystical signs. Their silhouettes, blacker than the night they were enveloped in, would sometimes emit mysterious twinkling lights. They came from areas where no people could possibly be. It seemed so far-fetched that when she wrote of the sight to friends back home, she assured them that she “wasn't tight.” What she saw was real, and would be observed by a man of science many years later, who would attribute the phenomenon to something more prosaic than sprites—phosphorescent fungi or the like.

  To Harkness, she was seeing the unexplained. And she was hearing it too. An almost indescribable sound seemed to lift right off the slopes. It wasn't the wind, or the cries of wild animals. One night, the rhythms were particularly strong. “Their cadences of three tones were endless,” she wrote home. “It is a very difficult thing to explain but it's like silent music, if that makes sense. Sometimes it's like a harp, the zing, zing, zing of fine drawn strings; then it's a bell and then it's a drum—deep toned like the Ghost Temple's drum-bell.” Out here, she had faith in a way she never had been capable of in a church. “I'm not fooling,” she wrote. “I believe in the spirits of these mountains.”

  In this mood, she could mull over the pages of her fantasy story of the forest girl. Her agent would end up calling the work “tripe,” and in fact its premise was as clichéd and simplistic as its author was original and complicated. But it did seem to allow her to distill her roiling emotions. Her fictional world mirrored her own dilemmas. Did she belong in the United States or China? Could she, in fact, love a man like Quentin Young, or would it always be Bill? “Jungle Magic” was no roman à clef, but bits of Harkness and the people around her were woven all through the characters and plot.

  BY THE MIDDLE of November, there was suddenly hope—good news had come in from the field. The hunters had sent back carefully wrapped packages of panda dung. It was fresh, and judging from the size of the droppings, the men believed the animal to be a good-size young adult. Overjoyed, Harkness reaffirmed her trust in the gods, and in Whang, the holy man who was leading the trackers. He came to see her a short time later to deliver his assessment. Sitting down for a cigarette and a cup of tea, Whang communicated his belief that within a week they would have a panda.

  On November 19, late in the afternoon, the hunters arrived at the castle, summoning Harkness downstairs. In a dark corner of a lower room she saw a wretched and frightened black-and-white bear, about seventyfive pounds. It was tethered and trussed from nose to tail. The animal, which they presumed to be female, could not move, and cried out in little panicked laments. With a bamboo muzzle fashioned over her nose, she would have been unable to take food or water during the trek here. Tears stung Harkness's eyes. Though custom dictated a slow and methodical haggling with the men over price, she couldn't stand to see the animal remain this way for even another minute. She stared at the pitiful panda as the hunters conveyed the story that eighty men and several dogs had participated in the capture. They would all have to be compensated. Harkness didn't ask questions; she merely shelled out the cash. She “paid through the nose,” she said, because she just wanted to have “Yin” carried immediately up to her room, without taking the time to quibble.

  Harkness ordered a cage be built so the animal could be free of her shackles, and in the meantime, she had as many of them removed as possible. The sorry state of the captive made her sick. “For the night and day,” Harkness wrote, “the poor baby crouched in a corner and sobbed. I practically did the same.” She was tortured by the animal's suffering. “This is all a miserable business,” she wrote, “and if I ever accomplish this, God help me I'll never be responsible for capturing another animal of any kind.”

  Harkness, whose experience with pandas had been from the gentle Su-Lin, tried to comfort the wild animal. But Yin wanted none of it. “I tried to approach her and she'd rear and strike and hiss rather like a cat,” Harkness wrote. “My hands are still a mass of scratches bites and are badly swollen from my attempts at pacification.” She must have thought yet again about how things had been the year before. Of Su-Lin's serene face tipped up toward her own as he greedily gulped his formula. Of the comfort of Quentin Young's body next to her own. Of the tenderness and physical exhilaration she had then.

  Now, as she sat helplessly watching the poor panda, she must have had a thousand thoughts. She had finally received word from Quentin Young—he was in Macao, the Portuguese colony outside Hong Kong. She had written him back immediately, asking him to join her in her quest for a male panda, and to help her transport the animals to the States. But that was not to be. Another letter from Young would say that he and Diana had had a baby girl on November 19—the very same day Harkness got her panda. He told her that since he didn't have the good fortune to have a male, he thought Harkness would get a male panda. He also told her that he and his wife would name the baby after her, Harkness reported, though in fact, they did not.

  It was clear that for this trip, Harkness would remain on her own. At least she had one panda in hand. If she could get the animal out alive, it would be the second panda to come to the West, and that would mean she had trumped Smith again. But the impending victory seemed less than hollow. Even though Harkness had her prize, she felt so disheartened that for two weeks she couldn't even bring herself to write letters.

  “Really I can't describe the days,” she would write when the black spell had partially lifted. “Just endless waiting, waiting waiting with not a thing in the world to do.” It had gotten so cold that she wouldn't even tolerate stripping down for a sponge bath. “Haven't had my clothes off for about ten days now,” she wrote. “I confine my ablutions to hands face and teeth, and hate to do that, I did wash my feet yesterday and was a little appalled when I got a whiff of them.” Her hair had gone unwashed since the start of October.

  As miserable as she felt, though, she wasn't quitting. She could easily have headed out with Yin, but she was still bent on getting another panda, and she resigned herself to the fact that she might just finish out the winter here, spending months more in this unhappy state.

  At least poor Yin finally had a cage, which allowed her to be released from her restraints. With some freedom of movement, the animal began to settle down. “She is sweet now,” Harkness reported, “and inflicts no intentional injury but she every now and then gives me a nip.” Fresh bamboo was brought in for her, while simultaneously, Harkness tried to interest her in vegetables so that she could survive far from these forests. The bamboo-obsessed bear would not touch them. And, though giant pandas must eat almost constantly, the disoriented animal slept most of the day through, eating pounds and pounds of tough bamboo in the still of the night. “How I'm ever going to shift her diet God only knows,” Harkness wrote. She was distraught about it because in no time at all, she had become very attached to the poor creature. “I love her dearly,” Harkness wrote; “she is particularly entrancing when she stands on her head,” she said, describing a common giant panda behavior.

  Since she couldn't go inside the cage with the panda, Harkness would clean the area with long fire tongs. “It's great sport,” Harkness said, “because she takes them in her paws and then we have a battle to see who'll keep them. She uses her paws exactly like hands and is she strong.”

  Harkness soon felt that the cage was too small for the animal, so she decamped to a draftier portion of the castle, sacrificing her own comfort to that of the bear. The new, loftlike quarters were not only larger but had a dirt floor, which would be cozier for Yin than the stone one. Eventually, Harkness would give up the room entirely to the bear, fearing that building a fire for herself would make Yin too warm. So she moved in with Wang next door, where she could have heat but still be close enough to hear the comforting sounds of Yin munching bamboo through the night.

  Through experimentation, Harkness discovered that the panda would accept a mixture of milk with thin cornmeal gruel. She was elated, even though she had to share her only bowl with the animal in order to feed her.
“She has her milk from it,” Harkness wrote, and “at dinner I have soup in it and later I use it to brush my teeth.” Feeding time was as much fun as cleaning. As Harkness would attempt to pour the gruel through the bars of the cage, the panda would alternately place a paw and muzzle in the rapidly filling pan on the floor, and then try to bite at the bottle it was all coming out of.

  WITH FEWER COMFORTS, and the prospect of unending months of this life, Harkness made all kinds of plans and determinations in her head, while having no idea, really, how things would come out. If she failed to get a second panda, she figured she would leave Yin in Chengdu with Wang, then offer her services to the Chinese government, though what she could do, she wasn't sure. “It's a dream I've been dreaming ever since I've been here to do something for China,” she said. “I've been plotting and planning some way to help my beloved China!”

  Cavaliere had begun sending her a little newsletter, compiled from radio reports and published by the missionaries. What she was hearing of the war between Japan and China horrified her. On November 11 Chinese troops had begun their retreat out of Shanghai and toward the capital of Nanking. But within no time, the government itself would be fleeing from that city to Hankou, which for eight months would become the capital of unoccupied China. Harkness was desperate for America to care, to help. But at home the mood was resolutely isolationist, with millions signing petitions to “Keep America Out of War.” She promised herself that at the very least, she would do what she could. Bagging pandas from China, she thought, would be senseless if China couldn't reap some reward from it. She would find a way for the animals—assuming she would get two—to aid the Chinese people. In the meantime, she had sent a war-relief contribution and received Chinese Liberty bonds in the mail. She hoped somehow to rally her fellow Americans to do the same.

  If the panda or pandas were to be of any help, though, Harkness had to get them to civilization alive. Smith's fiasco with his two loomed like a nightmare, and the escalating war with Japan was threatening to block her way out. She had managed to fly a good distance of her trip in, but she figured the airline would not allow a large panda or two on board, so heading home through French Indochina was not an option. The Yangtze? She wondered if she could somehow swing that. But the thought of arriving in Chongqing and asking to be evacuated on a U.S. gunboat with two giant pandas seemed far-fetched—she already felt like a renegade with American officials there. Though there was no easy solution, the effort of strategizing was helping to pull her out of her fog.

  On the first day of December, she forced herself to lighten up, writing home once again. As local villagers peered in through her windows, nearly obliterating her light, she set herself up as close to her fire as she could get, placing her typewriter on a suitcase, and sitting on the floor. Try as she might to hide it, her first letter out carried the residue of her funk, and it frightened her friends back home. She mentioned the capture of Yin casually, as though they would have known about it somehow already. Harkness didn't seem to be thinking clearly.

  Within weeks, even the false cheer she labored to exude was gone. And on an overcast, forlorn day she wrote home again. “This is getting to be a miserable lonely business.” Her letters were peppered once more with despair. “It is much harder to achieve contentment in the midst of solitude, with not a thing in the world to do,” she wrote. With the holidays approaching, she was writing, she told her friends, from a place where “there are no Sundays or Christmases.”

  As gray as things were for Harkness, the image of the explorer was being treated to a Technicolor blast in the United States. Her story was emerging once again, this time in the color-saturated comics pages of American papers. The Quaker Oats company had paid Harkness two hundred dollars to feature her exploits in a splashy comic-strip advertisement. “A Great American Explorer tells what a Quaker Oats breakfast means to folks who lead lives of adventure,” it read in papers across the country. Seven panels, in bright red, yellow, blue, and green, portrayed a beautiful and sophisticated Ruth Harkness intent on capturing a panda.

  Su-Lin was also front and center in books, articles, toys, and ads. Two American women produced a small fifty-cent children's book for Rand McNally called Su-Lin. Newspapers everywhere grabbed any excuse—“Su Lin Doesn't Mind Winter at All”—to report on the panda and run his photo.

  Giant pandas were so irresistible that even the unlikeliest products used them for promotion. A clothing company featured a giant panda holding a dress and carried the legend “Panda-ring to Your Desire for Cool Cute Wash Togs.” Calvert whiskey employed the likeness of a foxylooking giant panda to accompany the poem

  The panda is a choosy beast,

  On bamboo shoots alone he'll feast;

  You too, if wise, will choose with care,

  And call for CALVERT everywhere!

  Both Marshall Field's and Carson Pirie Scott & Company produced dueling plush-toy Su-Lins. There was a jointed thirteen-and-a-half-inch toy panda for $2.50 and a more conventional panda version of the teddy bear. By Christmastime, Su-Lin toys would be all the rage, clutched by some of the most famous chubby hands in North America, including those of the Dionne quintuplets in Ontario.

  None of the profits for the toys were earmarked for Harkness, though she did make money selling her manuscripts. Harkness's agent wrote to her that her children's book had been accepted by the Literary Guild, and she would receive seven hundred dollars at publication. Adding in the money due her for The Lady and the Panda, she wrote with happy disbelief, “My books will have brought me $1,500.00 before being published.”

  ASIDE FROM THE GRUEL, “Yin baby” would accept nothing but bamboo, making the prospect of keeping her alive outside the bamboo zone seem impossible. Compounding the somber situation, some unsettling news arrived. Harkness heard over the bamboo telegraph that Smith was back in the field, hunting pandas. He might show up anywhere, even spoiling things with all those hunters she was employing. She had seen enough of his tricks to know that with him, anything could happen. He might just put as much energy into foiling her as he would into trapping.

  In letters home she would refer to him for the first time as her “rival.” But Harkness was always game, and the new challenge revved her up. She gauged the competition, preparing to meet it head-on. Of Smith's sudden reemergence, she said, “That doesn't worry me, because if I can't do it successfully, he can't.”

  Although Smith had not, in fact, made it back into the action by then, having spent the fall in England, Harkness had been very much on his mind. His indignation seemed to energize him as he partnered with the British Museum and the London Zoo. In order to cement his newly forged alliances, the American so proud of his patriotic ancestors filed an application for British citizenship.

  With his latest associations, and the money from his sister, he planned to get right back into the field to bag “bigger and better Pandas.” He was even feeling upbeat enough to write magazine articles in England, taking credit for the capture of Su-Lin. “During my recent spell of four years in Western China,” he wrote, “I have succeeded in securing at my collecting headquarters a baby and an adult male and a female of the giant panda.… Only the baby is still in captivity.” And in another article: “It has been my great good fortune,” he said, “to have been the active agent in effecting the capture of the only three Giant Pandas that have ever been taken alive.” “The first specimen thus secured,” he went on, “the baby Panda recently sold in Chicago—it was not my privilege to take home myself.”

  He happily laid out his thoughts on many aspects of panda hunting. He said the giant panda was lazy, comparing it in size to “a good-sized hog” and in personality to “a contented, well fed brood sow.” He bragged that he had perfected a system of foolproof lures for capturing giant pandas. He could not, unfortunately, share them with the readers, however, for they were “trade secrets” and his “sole property.” He also told this whole new audience about the hazards of facing bandits, and of the difficultie
s of dealing with what he described as astoundingly stupid native hunters.

  THINGS BEGAN to look up a bit for Yin. Strained vegetables were added to her gruel, and whenever Harkness approached the cage now with the basin and the bottle, the panda trotted over like a dog. Even better, in Harkness's mind, was the fact that Yin had flown into a rage one day. “She stormed around and swore at me in Chinese,” Harkness wrote. Not only did Harkness believe that the passion of the animal was a good sign, but in the throes of her fury, Yin thrashed, then ate some cornstalks that were in the cage. Harkness was so delighted that it didn't matter that the strong animal had also raked her thumb, causing it to blow up to twice its normal size. That Yin was eating something other than bamboo was solace enough. The development may have even been enough for a little celebration. In the cold castle, Harkness finally relented, taking a bath in a washbasin, scrubbing her hair for the first time in two months.

  Despite the mood-lifting powers of a good shampoo, Harkness had had enough of her isolation. She began making plans to start back to Chengdu on Christmas Day.

  Wang suggested that they cover ground by the dark of night to avoid curious crowds along the way. She thought it might be worth a try, but travel was treacherous enough as it was in sunlight; at night it would be hair-raising.

  She still believed she would leave Yin with Wang in the city, going off to make herself useful in Hankou, while the hunters continued their work. She had received a clipping from the papers saying that passports were being invalidated, so leaving China was now even less of an option. Not that she had the money to sail to the United States and return anyway.