The Lady and the Panda Read online

IN THE FALL OF 2002, a small band of travelers—Ruth Harkness's niece Mary Lobisco, Mary's daughter Nicole, Hazel Perkins's granddaughter Robin Perkins Ugurlu, Jack and Su-Lin Young's daughter Jialing “Jolly” Young, and I—retraced Ruth Harkness's steps from Hong Kong to Shanghai, down the Yangtze, toward the still-wild Tibetan border. We hoped to rediscover as much of the explorer's world as possible, and to help one of our members complete a mission.

  Among Mary's possessions as we headed deep into the Chinese interior was a small container of ashes and soil that had been exhumed from her aunt's grave site in Titusville. She planned to return them to the land where Harkness had experienced her greatest joy.

  Sixty-six years is a long time—time enough for a trail to grow cold, particularly in China, where war has ravaged the land, and a zealously repressive Cultural Revolution attempted to sweep the country clean of all vestiges of Chinese culture, everything from books to temples. It was unlikely, I was warned by every expert I consulted, that anything would be left of these sites as Harkness knew them.

  We were very happily surprised. We visited the beach at Repulse Bay in Hong Kong where Harkness had enjoyed a refreshing swim with her ship's captain in the summer of 1936; we walked the creaking halls and skimmed a hand along the polished mahogany banisters of the Palace Hotel in Shanghai; we listened to a jazz band, made up of elderly musicians who had played in the 1930s and '40s, at the old bar at the Cathay (now the Peace Hotel) on the well-preserved Bund. And we were dwarfed by the great soaring cliffs of the famous and famously doomed Three Gorges of the Yangtze, just before they were forever altered by a giant dam.

  In Chengdu, we visited the lush, green campus of the West China Union University, now the West China University of Medical Sciences, and we took pictures of the only remnant of the city's once massive and protective wall. In the bar of the ultramodern Sheraton Chengdu Lido Hotel, as we sat munching peanuts and drinking Tsingtao beer, our guide, Steven Chen, talked to us about where we wanted to go next—Old Wenchuan certainly was not a typical destination for tourists. That might be troublesome, yes, but we figured that it actually boded well for our mission. The more the place had been left alone, the better. Outside Chengdu, where the border between China and Tibet constantly tacks back on itself, there are, in fact, villages tucked away in the shade of the great mountains that have been forgotten by time.

  In a caravan of three Jeeps, we drove northwest along the big, smooth Chengdu-Guanxian Expressway, covering in less than an hour the distance that took the Harkness expedition two days by foot. We were headed for the Qionglai Shan, the mountains of Ruth Harkness's great adventure, the place she called “that lost triangle of the world.”

  Following the curves of the mighty boulder-strewn Min River, we eventually found our way to the old stone village of Wenchuan, which had, in the intervening years, been eclipsed by a second, more modern city nearby with the same name. We entered what was left of the old perimeter walls, walking down the streets that Harkness had traveled so many years before. Some tall concrete towers were wedged in between older buildings now, and telephone poles jutted from the wet pavement. But still remaining were the warm, handsome old stone houses with tiled roofs and massive, yellow-painted double doors. The street was as alive as ever with industrious people cleaning, shopping, and trading news. The magic lived on in this mountain village.

  We made our way down twisting lanes and back in time to a stone courtyard piled high with baskets and wood and bushy brown animal pelts and bones, and then to a fence separating it from another courtyard. Through its slats, we could see the curly-tipped tiled roof and open loft of what looked like Harkness's “ruined Buddhist Ghost Temple.” Scattering dozens of brown chickens in wide arcs around our steps, we approached, holding up Harkness's photo against the great building. It was a perfect match: the magnificent black-tiled roof, the sturdy round pillars, the carving in the wood that separated the two floors.

  This was where, sixty-six years before, a makeshift curtain was set up in the second story for a road-weary Harkness to take a sponge bath. This was the place in which she slipped out of expedition clothes, then into a beautiful padded silk dressing gown for a little touch of well-earned luxury. Where she gratefully sipped hot tea after a long day of marching, and where she and Quentin Young had christened each other “Colonel” and “Commander.”

  It was hard to leave, but we finally tore ourselves away, with the most sacred part of our mission still ahead of us.

  THERE WAS NO question that Ruth Harkness would have wanted to be buried in China. Bill was there, of course, and the last nine years of her young life were testimony to the fact that away from her beloved Asia, she could not be happy.

  After releasing Su-Sen in July 1938, she took up residence at the Palace Hotel in Shanghai once again, contemplating her life. She knew that as long as she stayed in the East, there was a chance of contentment. Yet her choices were being narrowed by world events and her own finances. Within months, all of eastern China would be firmly in the hands of the Japanese—ports, railroads, and big cities included. The whole world now, not just Shanghai, was changing, jerked along in a torrent of violence.

  Harkness watched as waves of desperate Jewish refugees poured in from Germany. She entered the hospital, probably to have an ovary removed. Then with nothing to do and nowhere to go, she slipped into a “degenerate frame of mind.” Toying with the idea of setting up a home in Shanghai, she had lunch with New Yorker writer Emily Hahn and her little gibbon, Mr. Mills, to discuss sharing an apartment. She had an intense affair with Fredi Guthmann, a mysterious Jewish gem merchant from Argentina with “a face like Christ” and the soul of a poet. But nothing worked out. “I've simply got to find myself again,” she wrote.

  Harkness headed for India, not really knowing why.

  Darjeeling, in northeast India, was the lush, green summer retreat of the British at the foothills of the 28,000-foot Kanchenjunga, or “great five-peaked fortress of snow,” the third-highest mountain in the world. A place of mist-shrouded tea plantations, it soothed Harkness's troubled soul.

  “It is beautiful here—I wish you could have some of it,” she wrote home. From this safe distance, she could sit in the sunshine and watch the plumes of snow shooting high in the air from avalanches that crashed down the mountains. “For the first time in the last four years I believe I am approaching the state of being a normal human being,” she wrote. In her hotel room, Harkness nestled by the coal grate or sometimes sat outside in the sunshine, sipping hot tea and reading Gone with the Wind. Forgoing both meat and cocktails, she had begun to feel “marvellously well.”

  Restless by the middle of December, she hired porters and a pony, starting off on what she called “a ramble,” during which she would stay in “dak bungalows,” Hindi terminology for traveler's rest houses, set along well-worn post roads. Carrying her own food and bedding and supplying her own servants, she stayed at a few of these furnished cabins. She followed the Lhasa trade route toward Natu La, the 14,200-foot pass on the border between Tibet and the Himalayan state of Sikkim. “We passed caravan after caravan of mules and tiny donkeys no bigger than big dogs bringing down Tibetan wool to Kalimpong in Northern India whence it is shipped to America and England for rugs,” she wrote.

  On Christmas Eve, she was settled in just the way she liked it—“at the end of the world,” cozy in a bungalow, and sitting before a roaring fire with a ten-year-old copy of The China Journal to read. A sharp wind howling down the pass outside only added to her satisfaction.

  On her return from the border, she spent two days with the British political officer in Sikkim, Basil Gould, and his family at the British residency in Gangtok. Gould, one of the rare westerners who had traveled deep into Tibet, showed her his pictures from Lhasa. “You can imagine the utter fantasticness of the country and the architecture of the monasteries—for once in ‘Lost Horizon’ Hollywood did not ‘go Hollywood’ enough,” Harkness said.

  She was soon back in the sad
dle, off again by horseback through the rugged, lush hills, her mind now filled with those snapshot images. “This trip is the very best thing I could have done,” she wrote to Perkie; “it has settled me and made me know what I want to do—1939 at home—the Spring of '40 to Lhasa!”

  With renewed vigor, she continued her travels, landing near Darjeeling just after New Year's Day, then making her way to Calcutta, Allahabad, Bombay, and finally, on February 16, 1939, Liverpool.

  HARKNESS WOULD REACH England in the wake of Floyd Tangier Smith's triumphant tour there with an astonishing cargo of five giant pandas, which had arrived just before Christmas. It had been harrowing for him, placing him closer to death than to life just as he was accomplishing what he had always dreamed of.

  When he had finally gotten his healthy giant-panda count in Chengdu up to six in the fall, he found himself scrambling for a way to get them, and the other wildlife he had collected, out of the country. Unable to secure air transportation for the menagerie, and too ill to take them on the grueling and dangerous overland route from Chengdu to the coast near Hong Kong, he had his wife, Elizabeth, step in. She survived a month of hardship overseeing the caravan of trucks, while he flew to Hong Kong to convalesce in a hospital. Minus one panda killed in an accident, Elizabeth got the other five safely to Hong Kong, where they all boarded the SS Antenor with her husband on November 16.

  After being fêted in London, Smith, free of his cargo, would head to New York, where Harkness would already be living. In mid-July, when they once again were just miles from each other, Floyd Tangier Smith died at the age of fifty-eight.

  THE QUICK YEAR Harkness had planned to spend in America preparing for an expedition to Lhasa turned out instead to be a plodding and “futile” one. The world at large was becoming ever more chaotic—Hitler had already taken Austria and then brazenly overrun Czechoslovakia; Mussolini invaded Albania. In May, when the seasonal fog lifted over Chongqing, the Japanese began their terror-bombing campaign. Germany and Russia shocked observers by signing a nonaggression pact. And when the Führer took Poland in September, England and France declared war. The United States, clinging steadfastly to neutrality, began to wrestle with its conscience, soul, and sense of safety.

  The adventuring game was on hold for just about everyone, including Harkness. The benched explorer, virtually bankrupt from her last expedition and uninspired by life, seemed unable to make a career of writing. For the “humpteenth time,” she said, she found herself back in New York trying to “start life over again.”

  In the early fall, Harkness participated in a benefit for Chinese relief, then began a long-anticipated lecture tour of the Midwest. Using “The Alton Railroad” stationery, on November 4, 1939, she summed up her experience: “The Social season in Missouri has been unexcelledly brilliant but slightly wearing—the friends of Mrs. Harkness—‘that rare exotic individual, the turbaned, hair-parted-in-the-middle sort of person who wears leopard coats and jade earrings without looking startled’ have all slept peacefully through her most intellectual efforts.”

  Back home, she again felt aimless and broke. “If there is anything in the world a little more useless than another, it is an unemployed explorer,” Harkness would write. “Sometimes,” she said, explorers “even get to the point where they aren't quite sure what there is left to discover. Then indeed is the world a bleak and unromantic sphere.”

  In that frame of mind one gray January day in 1940, she went out to lunch with her literary agent, Jane Hardy, at the Algonquin Hotel, where the two concocted an expedition to South America.

  ON FEBRUARY 23, 1940, at five o'clock in the afternoon, Ruth Harkness set sail for Peru on the Grace liner Santa Elena, in order to, according to The New York Times, “study the descendants of the Incas for comparison with the inhabitants of Tibet.”

  In Lima, however, ensconced in an elite pension run by American Hope Morris, who was said to be a cousin of Wallis Simpson, Harkness, the ultimate urbanite, found herself caught up in “a rather elaborate nothing,” which, she pointed out with some humor, often kept her up late at night.

  Eventually, she joined forces with a handsome, reserved entomologist, whom Harkness would call Sandoval in a later book, Pangoan Diary, but Noriega in letters home. They would travel far inland in search of what would turn out to be a nonexistent “Peruvian panda.”

  Noriega was something of a mature, South American version of Quentin Young: gallant, intelligent, and patient. With his help Harkness set up house in his tiny, poor home village—renting, for less than a dollar a month, her own thatched-roof “chalet,” which had, like most others in the town, no doors or windows. She learned to cook tortillas, beans, rice, and fideos, a kind of pasta; she got involved in local intrigues, many surrounding Noriega's malevolent sister-in-law; and she drank whatever locally brewed booze was available. Days were taken up with the tasks of procuring groceries and cleaning. Evenings were spent playing rummy, talking, and drinking. Harkness would write of her time here in Pangoan Diary, which contained none of the intensity and joy she had brought to The Lady and the Panda.

  Frequent bouts of malaria and heavy drinking took their toll. Toward the end of 1940 she wrote home to Perkie with a confession, punctuated by frequent ellipses, which probably reflected the galloping nature of her thoughts: “My mind never stops and the pressure sometimes is bad; then that's when I drink and my God Perkie it worries me…I drink for oblivion … and I drink alone as you do and it worries me like hell; it wouldn't be so bad if I didn't go over the edge at times and then I am filled with remorse and say never again… but I do. In fact, I am having a drink right now…”

  She was falling into a forlorn mood, writing in reflection: “Sometimes an intense sense of the deep and ultimate loneliness of every human being suddenly grips me, and I am sad.”

  Since Bill's death, she had spent her life, she said, “wandering the lonely world. Searching sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Often it seems to me that I have lost my destiny and am hunting to find it again.”

  Perhaps, deep inside, she knew she never would. For those who have experienced a fleeting moment of “illumination,” her favorite mystic had written, there could be an awful aftermath in its wake. “This feeling exists only for a moment,” wrote the author, under the name Yogi Ramacharaka, “and leaves one at first in agony of regret over what he has seen and lost.” This “is the song of the Soul, which once heard is never forgotten.”

  By the time Harkness returned home in January 1942, she was physically broken. Admitted to the hospital almost on arrival, she was prepared—eager at times—to shed this body, this life, without a backward glance. Within months, Pangoan Diary was published, receiving positive, if not rave, reviews. Over the next three years, Harkness would wander around, to Mexico and New Mexico, then back to New York.

  Her health had not rebounded and never would, while her drinking had only intensified. The deterioration would begin to show in some of her magazine writing. She sold a few strange articles to True, a men's magazine whose stories were sometimes literary and very often lurid. One, on her history of panda hunting, was full of inaccuracies, even reporting that Quentin Young had given her Su-Lin in a provision basket. From these perplexing pieces, the wild explorer settled into a tamer venture, making a small living writing two ten-part series for the very civilized Gourmet magazine. Focusing on recipes and often high farce, Harkness wrote “Saludos” on life in Peru, beginning in 1944, and “Mexican Mornings,” from her time in Tamazunchale, in the east-central state of San Luis Potosí, starting in February 1947.

  The two series are similar—often to a discomfiting degree. Anecdotes, sayings, even characters first presented in “Saludos” were at times transplanted to Mexico for a barely veiled retelling in the second series. Bending reality was part of keeping the wolf from the door, for though the Depression was over for the country, Harkness's own financial position was more precarious than ever.

  On the Fourth of July, 1946, the out-of-work ex
plorer found refuge with an old friend who had been married to Hendrik Willem van Loon, the best-selling and award-winning author who had died two years before. Chunky and strong, with close-cropped gray hair, Helen “Jimmie” Criswell van Loon had possession of a big, handsome, three-story Dutch colonial, Nieuw Veere, which overlooked a beautiful cove in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. The van Loons had known everyone in politics and publishing, and Nieuw Veere had in its prime hosted a long parade of celebrities. Even President Roosevelt was counted as a friend.

  Jimmie ran a cheery household that included a Swiss couple, William and Elsie Spiess, working as chauffeur/handyman and housekeeper, and their teenage daughter, Sieglinde. As soon as Harkness moved in, she felt very much a part of the Nieuw Veere family.

  Young “Sig,” now Linda Spiess Ash, idolized Harkness, recalling decades later how the former explorer could, even then in her brokendown state, still dress with panache, lighting up a room just by entering it. Harkness took Sig under her wing, telling her stories and making presents of the little souvenirs she still had among her ever-dwindling personal possessions.

  Nieuw Veere held the promise of a comfortable and intellectually stimulating life. Harkness was given as her bedroom Hendrik's great handsome study, with its cases painted Chinese red and filled with books. During quiet days at home, she could collaborate with Jimmie, a Bryn Mawr graduate who had earned a reputation as a fine editor, having labored over her husband's works for years. Ready to pitch in for the cause, she often typed up Harkness's various manuscripts.

  Problems, however, crept into the country idyll. Harkness, beset by medical problems, made frequent visits to the doctor and dentist. Sometimes, as recorded in Jimmie's diary, the former explorer would spend entire days in bed “feeling lousy.” Through it all, Harkness's writing stalled out. Night after night she was, as she had once put it, drinking for oblivion. The problem was extreme, casting a shadow over the household and only compounding her increasingly awkward predicament of not being able to scrape together the funds to cover her rent.