The Lady and the Panda Page 5

  Harkness's group negotiated the short but tumultuous length of the waterfront up to the calm of an American favorite, the Palace Hotel. The conservative old Palace, white with red trim, was handsome and more than respectable, though its day as the best hotel in the ever-changing Shanghai had come and gone. The Palace was now dwarfed in stature and style by others, particularly its neighbor across Nanking Road, that luxurious wonder, the twenty-story, air-conditioned Cathay. Inside the Palace's gleaming mahogany-paneled lobby, as was painfully obvious on this day, the modern marvel of air-conditioning had not been installed. It didn't matter. Harkness was on a budget, and at twelve dollars a night, the little hotel that had been good enough for Bill during his long stay in Shanghai was good enough for her.

  From the moment she settled in to Bill's old digs, the introductions and invitations poured in, and she wrote home immediately, frantic for the satin evening slip she had forgotten to pack.

  Within days, a fleet of pilots from the China National Aviation Corporation, or CNAC, which was a partnership between the Chinese government and Pan Am, began to court her. There was a Frenchman in hot pursuit, a German Jew, and a “darling” young pilot in his twenties who buzzed around, taking her out often. Speaking of her youngest suitor, she joked to friends that she'd “like a son to be like him.” Among her many new pals was an American newspaper reporter named Victor Keane, a fun-loving graduate of her own alma mater, the University of Colorado. The two fell in tight with each other, and the hard-drinking, wisecracking Vic showed her the town.

  Certainly there was plenty to see. The first word under the “nightlife” section of one mid-thirties guide to Shanghai was “WHOOPEE!” And if the reader required more of an explanation, it was provided: “High hats and low necks; long tails and short knickers; inebriates and slumming puritans… When the sun goes in and the lights come out Shanghai becomes another city.”

  At about seven in the evening, Harkness would find herself sitting in a low wicker chair on the great verandah of the Race Club, sipping gimlets and chatting up a whole new smart set. The club was a lush, green twelve-acre oasis in the heart of Shanghai, and as night closed in and the sky darkened, Harkness could watch the surrounding city begin to blaze with light, its candy-colored neon signs snapping to life with luminous threads of violet, magenta, and fuchsia braided into Chinese characters.

  At the Chinese clubs, local gangsters danced the rumba to Russian orchestras. Chinese rich boys with jet-black hair, brilliantined to a lacquer finish, squired modern Chinese girls in stiletto heels and highnecked brocade silk sheaths slit up to the hips. Revelers could try a Polish mazurka or the Parisian Apache, the carioca, the tango. Crooners and torch singers bawled American jazz through the night.

  Harkness and Keane would commence with drinks in the afternoon, sometimes finding themselves having “closed up Shanghai at six the next morning.” Cocktail hour, it was said, ended in Shanghai “anytime between 2 A.M. until Breakfast,” and then for most it was off to Delmonico's, in the Chinese territory, for a plate of scrambled eggs just before dawn. Exhausted partygoers then would head back to their hotels, where the early-morning vacuums would have already started humming.

  Harkness couldn't have asked for a better guide than Vic Keane. He was the picture of the suave, good-natured American in Shanghai. He lived amicably away from his wife, while in a large, handsome apartment he kept a beautiful and possessive White Russian mistress, whom Harkness described as “a really entrancing creature who speaks practically no English, but enough I gather to make his life fairly miserable.” When he had to make trips out of town, his wife not only took over the reporting job for him but also assumed guardianship of the mistress, who was “as helpless as a kitten.”

  Shanghai was a place of serious debauchery and vicious crime.

  Because Western nations had carved it up into three distinct sections—the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese area—there were ample cracks in the system, allowing crime to fester. A lax moral atmosphere, multiple jurisdictions, and incredible wealth combined to make Shanghai “an outlaw's haven.” And the riches were truly enormous. Six million dollars a month was paid out in protection money in the opium-distribution rackets alone.

  Curious about the notorious drug, Harkness found someone who could take her deeper into the hidden side of Shanghai for a better look. In her letters home, she described him only as a Norwegian newspaperman, hard at work on an exposé of opium use in the city. He may very well have been Henry Hellssen, “Denmark's globetrotting journalist,” who was in and out of Shanghai during that period. The two explored the dark, narrow streets of Chapei, the old Chinese City, which was rarely seen by westerners, who found it repugnant and frightening. The few who did venture this way were likely to be addicted to “the pipe” themselves.

  In the Chinese parts of Shanghai, Harkness saw beauty and a vibrant history. “All of China, eating, sleeping, living, and loving there as they have for thousands of years—all in the dirty, and airless streets,” she wrote. Harkness pressed on, game to infiltrate even the most wretched dens. With her newspaper chum as guide, she made her way into a filthy, ramshackle building, where the air was redolent, Harkness said, with the sweet and sickening scent of opium. The westerners stayed to observe a Chinese man and woman as they lay on couches smoking long pipes filled with the drug.

  Through such wanderings, she was discovering that there were two Shanghais, and that it was the Chinese one that beckoned to her.

  THE WESTERN-RULED SHANGHAI that Harkness saw in 1936 had been in the making for centuries, but it really got into gear over a British trade imbalance that built throughout the 1800s. English merchants were buying up silk and tea from China but selling little or nothing in return. The self-reliant Chinese didn't want anything, and were pleased with the way trade was going—their goods heading out, silver flowing in. The Brits eventually came up with a commodity that they could sell—cheap opium from India and Persia. Once only the drug of the wealthy in China, it could now be sold inexpensively for a mass market. And the populous country made for one hell of a mass market. In the 1830s, enough opium poured in to keep twelve million inhabitants smoking. Not wanting their citizens addicted to the drug, Chinese officials attempted to keep it out.

  The livid opium merchants were able to press the British government into putting its guns in the service of their cause, with an outcome that was entirely predictable. With no comparable army or navy, China lost the 1839–1842 Opium War. In victory, the British crafted an incredible agreement, the Nanjing Treaty, which granted them unrestricted trade, as well as land rights in five major ports. Quickly, the United States, France, and other countries demanded their own table settings for the feeding frenzy.

  It was all a shock to China. Traditionally, the country had been able to maintain an exalted position nearly on reputation alone. Its strength was in moral, not military, standing. In dealings with fellow Asian countries, China, with its ancient civilization and Confucian canon of honor and ethics, had always been treated with respect. It called itself Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world, ruled by the Son of Heaven. And indeed, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Koreans all seemed to agree, incorporating the best elements of Chinese culture into their own.

  The inherent dissonance between China and the Western world would have terrible consequences. The Chinese viewed foreign relations not as a commercial opportunity but as a cultural endeavor. Selfsufficient and revered, China was accustomed to courtly and rigid formalities. All strangers were barbarians and were expected when approaching the emperor to humble themselves by bending down and performing the “kowtow.” The country's high-ranking, well-educated envoys and emissaries would never debase themselves by undertaking issues of trade and money. To the crass, tough, and greedy westerners, it all added up to an unlocked storeroom.

  Now the culture that had invented both paper and printing was being handed documents containing insulting demands. The count
ry that had produced the first compass and gunpowder was at the mercy of bullying foreign fleets, which used these inventions against it. Worse, under the new rules of extraterritoriality, foreign nations had the unlikely right to abide by their own laws in certain designated places, such as the busiest and most lucrative ports in the nation. “We are being carved into pieces like a melon!” was a common cry. The occupiers developed a sense of entitlement and superiority that Harkness found offensive.

  The funny thing was that much of the snobbery was affected. People became whatever they wanted in Shanghai. In this city, it was impolite to ask about someone's past because it was assumed there was something to hide. As in American gold-rush towns of the 1800s, what counted here was drive and ambition, not family connections. For most, Shanghai was a temporary stop—and the more temporary, the better. The point of coming here, according to one newspaper, was “to make money and get out.” Yet many foreigners stayed, decade upon decade, joking that they couldn't go home because they wouldn't know how to get along without five servants anymore.

  IT WAS TOO EARLY in her trip for Harkness to have developed a routine. In the drenching, one-hundred-degree heat of that summer in Shanghai, she sometimes found herself holed up in her hotel room, sitting naked on her bed, banging out letters home on her portable typewriter.

  Some days she would pinch pennies and have the thirty-cent lunch served at the YMCA. For low-key socializing, she'd go to dinner with Elizabeth Smith at a favorite little sukiyaki restaurant in Japantown. Within a small, screened private room, they would sit on cushions before a low table and enjoy fried prawns and seaweed. They drank hot sake from tiny blue bowls and watched as the food was cooked right before them.

  The dress-designer-turned-explorer also discovered the most talented tailor in the world here in Shanghai. “ZIANG TAI: Any Kinds of Ladies Tailor and Skin, Etc” read his business card. Ziang would conjure perfect dresses with matching jackets from the sketches that Harkness drew for him. Each would cost the equivalent of two American dollars. Playing the part of the oblivious socialite, Harkness would write, “There is really nothing like the stimulus of a new dress to brighten the atmosphere.”

  There were days when she would take an aimless ride in a rickshaw, immersing herself in the choreographed commotion of the streets, where banners in bold Chinese characters waved down through shafts of sunlight, advertising sales, silks, mah-jongg sets, live birds, ivory. She found Shanghai to be “a great sprawling rambling” place filled with beautiful faces.

  How preposterous, she wrote home, that westerners say the Chinese all look alike. The people she saw on Bubbling Well Road were as different from one another as the pedestrians on Fifth Avenue in New York. And in those faces she rarely, if ever, detected anxiety. She came to believe that the poorest Chinese peasant had something most Americans, even the richest—perhaps particularly the richest—never knew: inner peace.

  Harkness saw there were two Shanghais, and it was the Eastern version she was drawn toward. ALFRED T. PALMER/COURTESY JULIA PALMER GENNERT

  Just down the street from her hotel, she could shop on the ultracosmopolitan Nanking Road. Every luxury item in the world was carried here. There were goldsmiths, silversmiths, silk emporiums, and shops carrying sandalwood carvings. Several blocks west of the Bund, the waterfront promenade, were the top Chinese department stores, Sincere and Wing On, in whose food sections one could “buy ‘thousand-year-old eggs,’ dried grasshoppers, Russian caviar, Camembert cheese, and Hormel's soups.”

  In order to negotiate her way, Harkness began to pick up the bastard language known as pidgin English, a trading tongue that mixed English, Chinese, Indian, and Portuguese and followed the pronunciation, idiom, and grammar of Chinese. Pidgin English solved one problem, that of basic communication, while creating another, making Chinese speakers seem simpleminded. According to the guidebooks, “Catchee one piece rickshaw” meant “get a rickshaw.” “Talkee my” was “Let me know.” “Chop chop” meant “quickly.” “How muchee?” was “How much is that?”

  In all of her rambles, Harkness was never afraid, although some crimes, such as armed robbery, were so commonplace that Ralph Shaw, a British journalist in Shanghai, reported that they weren't worth coverage. Kidnappings too were so frequent that most wealthy Chinese employed bodyguards—often big, strapping Russians—for protection. There were “more gangsters in Shanghai than Chicago ever saw in the heyday of Capone,” Shaw claimed.

  The headlines in the city's papers screamed of suicides and gruesome crimes, and while Harkness was in town, there were plenty. Within days of her arrival, an American military officer leaped to his death from her hotel. A Chinese man's head was found near the Moon Palace Hotel. And the headless, nude body of a Chinese woman was discovered chopped up and stuffed into a leather suitcase near the Shanghai Rowing Club.

  Drugs, gambling, prostitution. Chinese gangsters in pinstriped suits carrying tommy guns. Triad bosses displaying long, opium-stained nails and wearing silk brocade gowns. International con men who found refuge in the city that didn't require a passport. Shanghai was a hideout for criminals of all countries. In this wild town, the top bad guys were colorful celebrities, with schemes that could exist only in Shanghai. Huang Jinrong, or “Pockmarked Huang,” not only ran the biggest racket going—the notorious Green Gang—he was also a high-ranking Chinese detective with the French police. He and his associate Du Yuesheng, or “Big-Eared Du,” wielded power equally with municipal officials, gangster kings, and more. With their henchmen they were guns for hire in the massive political upheavals that would change China forever. When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government wanted to teach a lesson to organized labor or Communists, Huang's bone breakers were called in.

  Along with crime, there were ample doses of vice. Shanghai boasted the longest bar in existence. And by 1930, it possessed more prostitutes per capita than any other city in the world. Here, the most depraved people from all walks of life came to satisfy their urges. One particularly twisted warlord from Shandong Province, a six-foot-seven maniac with a shaved skull, loved to sweep into Shanghai surrounded by soldiers numbering in the thousands. Fond of decapitating enemies and posting their heads on telegraph poles, Chang Tsung-chang played as hard as he butchered. He was said to keep forty-two concubines, and he once sodomized a teenage boy during a dinner party as all the guests and singsong girls looked on.

  Shanghai debauchery was legendary, but for the foreigners the city was not quite its lively self in the summer of 1936. Western residents traditionally decamped to cooler country places for the hot season, and the exodus was especially noticeable in this brutally steamy year. Harkness saw that “everyone who can afford to leaves Shanghai during July and August; they go to the hills, they go to Japan, they go North.” The deflated party scene, though, was of no consequence to her. Harkness had already begun losing interest in it all anyway. Something surprising was happening. As the hard-drinking dress designer became more and more intoxicated with China, she found herself indulging less and less in cocktails. She wanted to keep fit for the expedition, and she was starting to have a sense of how she could chart her own course. Deliriously, she wrote, “I think I am happier here than at any time since I left home.”

  DURING THE MONTHS in Shanghai, Floyd Tangier Smith behaved like an ardent suitor. He cleared the decks for Harkness, making himself available to her at all hours, enjoying everything from prelunch drinks to meals and late-night talks. It made his wife, Elizabeth, “jealous as hell,” Harkness knew, to sit at home night after night while her husband was out with the woman who seemed to have attracted every married and unmarried man in Shanghai. “The talk usually started with previous expedition affairs, and ended always, no one knew quite how, with Buddhism, or Tibetan mysticism and adventure,” Harkness said.

  Floyd Tangier Smith done up in traditional Chinese silk. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Sometimes tucked away in her hotel room, with the sounds of the river traffic wafting through the wi
ndows, the careful listener and the tireless yarner would sit sipping whiskey sodas and talk about China's distant borderland. The darkly attractive widow had no trouble drawing out the homely, rawboned older man. He was all too eager to pontificate, even though he must have looked and felt awful—suffering as he was from sciatica and a recurring case of malaria. But nothing, it seemed, could keep him from these all-important talks with Harkness.

  She was just as eager to have them, for it was time to get down to business. The first step—before organizing the expedition, applying for permits, or mapping out the journey—would be making a decision about partnerships. She had scores to settle, and Bill's ashes to collect. She wanted desperately to untangle the mystery of his death and his finances. All roads led to Floyd Tangier Smith, who in turn stood at the fork of another, the one leading out of Shanghai and into the wild. Harkness would have to tread carefully. She had to be tough-minded and pragmatic, particularly where Smith was concerned, since he was the biggest question mark. She would assess him entirely on her own—from what she herself saw and heard.

  Once lubricated with a few cocktails, he could be quite expansive. “He has been here for twenty-five years or more,” Harkness said, “and the tales are wonderful. The Panchen Lama of Tibet, the animals he has collected, the racehorses he has owned, gold in the high mountains, Chinese civil war and bandits.” Smith was a practiced storyteller who in previous trips to the States had told reporters many of the same chestnuts—how he had been the only white man for scores of miles in “barbaric” regions; that he had lived for weeks on cornmeal and game, how he had been snowbound for months on end in below-zero temperatures.