by Vicki Croke
So much about the panda has seemed so paradoxical that the animal appears the embodiment of yin and yang. Somehow the bear with a tenuous grasp on existence has lived longer than humankind, the animal built to be a carnivore lives as an herbivore, and the solitary creature so adept at hiding from the world displays the most colorful of markings.
To Ruth Harkness, there was an appealing integrity in the panda's existence. “They had lived through a world with such changes as we have never seen, and they had remained themselves,” she wrote.
In their day-to-day lives pandas embrace solitude—except for a very few days when, driven by a reproductive urge, they mate, and in the months devoted to raising a cub. This giant panda was going about just such a solitary life, though her baby, a tiny intruder, would emerge soon enough. She had chosen her small territory carefully—it was dense with bamboo, had drinking water close at hand, and contained within its boundaries large and old rotting trees that would provide her a hollowedout trunk roomy enough to den in at the time of her labor—an event that would, as these births had for thousands of years, take place in secret and in solitude. This particular baby, though, wouldn't remain hidden for long.
LATE AT NIGHT, far outside the city, at the Spanish-style Columbia Country Club—about the only place where there was a prayer of catching a breeze in the interminable Shanghai heat—Ruth Harkness sat with Dan Reib and a lively gang of executives and pilots. The posh cocktail lounge was a popular summer watering hole, known for its open and shaded natural setting, its wide verandah built under the stars, and its cool swimming pool. On a night like this, the room would have been filled with well-dressed sophisticates. At the Harkness table, the conversation had just turned to expedition when a young pilot, James McCleskey, and his wife, Peggy, were invited to squeeze in. The raucous group hushed as Harkness in her deep, resonant voice unfolded the story of Bill's disastrous efforts to capture a live giant panda, and her own decision to carry his torch. She laid out her plans to head toward snowy Tibet.
It wasn't just the thought of those cold mountains on this hot dreamy night that bewitched Peggy McCleskey. There was also such radiance from this brave woman, her mission was so romantic, and she possessed such obvious strength, that Peggy, the mother of a newborn baby, surprised herself by asking to come aboard. As soon as the words left her lips, there was, as expected, a loud, overwhelming objection by the Shanghailanders gathered around the table. The men admonished McCleskey to stick to the safety of the city and not consider entering the country, where God knows what could happen.
No one needed reminding of the danger swirling throughout this country. In America and England, people were spellbound by the breathless dispatches. Here in Shanghai, there was no escaping such talk. The news of fighting between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and the danger it posed for foreigners, was so dire that it made men shrink from the thought of such travel, never mind women. Shanghai's papers that summer were full of bulletins on the whereabouts of the Reds. The stories were always conflicting and often, it seemed, exaggerated to the point of hysteria. The headlines told of cities under siege, harrowing escapes, and the generalissimo's victories: COLLAPSE OF REVOLT IN SOUTH-WEST: GEN. CHEN CHI-TANG ABANDONS CANTON AND FLEES TO HONG KONG: CITY UNDER MARTIAL LAW; Keeping the Reds on the Run. Especially hairraising were the ones about obscure, ordinary westerners caught in the turmoil, such as, MRS. OGDEN'S SOLITARY FLIGHT FROM BATANG [TIBET].
Panda country seemed especially vulnerable. Shanghailanders were fed a steady diet of accounts about Communists menacing villages near the border. Described as marauders and outlaws, the Reds and the trajectory of their movements were tracked closely in the papers. Thousands of Communist soldiers on the move in western China were said to have become nothing more than “roaming bandits.”
Like everyone else in Shanghai, Harkness had pored over the stories. But, unlike most, she relied on her own counsel. The only prospect that had her “scared to death” about the trip, she said, was the thought of what her permanently waved hair might look like up-country. For now, sipping a cocktail and taking a drag from her cigarette, she sat listening to these men. She couldn't help it—to her, most of the talk seemed like unadulterated foolishness.
The newspaper dispatches may very well have been sensational. But there was no getting around it: Harkness's great adventure was playing out against the backdrop of what Pearl S. Buck called “the most dreadful upheaval of our age.”
The trouble had been coming on for a long time. To a certain extent, the roots of it could be traced to the turn of the century, when uprisings and rebellions had begun to boil up with some force. At that time, there was poverty, unrest, and also a growing anger over the injustices of the westerners who were looting the country's resources. In 1900, the year Ruth McCombs Harkness was born, the antiforeign Boxer movement exploded with unexpected ferocity, in widespread, panic-inducing attacks on Western missionaries that killed about two hundred in all. The adherents of the cause, peasants who initially called themselves “Harmonious Fists” but were dubbed Boxers by the foreign press, practiced ritual boxing, a kind of martial art they believed endowed them with special powers. Though they were eventually suppressed, the strains of a lingering nationalism continued to gather strength.
Whether of the reformist or revolutionary variety, much of the discontent was directed against the Manchu leaders of the Qing Dynasty. The Manchus, who had been in power for centuries, were foreigners themselves—not ethnic Chinese like the vast majority in the country but nomads from the northeast. In fact, the long queues Chinese men wore their hair braided into were a symbol of their subjugation to the Manchus. In the eyes of the Chinese, this dynasty was making no effort to protect the country from foreign bullying, if indeed it was capable of doing so. For in the early part of the twentieth century, the few shreds of the once glorious Qing were held together, improbably enough, by a frail old woman and a little toddler—the ineffective empress dowager and the boy emperor, Pu Yi. The court tried in its last gasps to institute government reforms. But it was far too late. The virtual end of dynastic rule in China came in 1911, as several revolutionary forces, many aligned with the more modern-thinking, Western-educated Sun Yat-sen, rose up.
But even that movement imploded within five years, failing, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, “to fill the void left by what it swept away.”
Without a unified government, the country reeled. For one long, chaotic, and turbulent decade, brutal tuchuns, or warlords, ruled, held in check by no government. Warfare fanned across the provinces, and poverty crushed the peasant. Seventy to eighty percent of the Chinese people were illiterate and had no sanitation, running water, or electricity. As a leaderless China stumbled back in time, the rest of the world surged forward, modernized, and then, scenting the unmistakable odor of distress, took advantage of this vast and vulnerable nation.
Inside the country, two rival Chinese powers emerged in the 1920s. Initially yoked together, counseled and encouraged equally by the meddling Russian Bolsheviks, they would ultimately be locked in a long, savage battle. They were the Communist Party with its headstrong, idealistic soldiers such as Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, and the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang, first under Sun Yat-sen, and then, quickly, his charismatic and straight-spined military aide, Chiang Kai-shek.
Throughout the 1920s, strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations against foreign powers brought to the surface hidden hatreds. In Nanking, Nationalist soldiers rampaged through the city, terrorizing the white community, which at the time included Pearl S. Buck, and killed six foreigners, including a university vice president.
In 1927, a pivotal year of brutality and betrayal, the uneasy alliance of the Communists and the Kuomintang ruptured, and in 1928 Chiang made Nanking the seat of his own government. Better funded and better organized than the Communists, and with the blessing of Western powers, Chiang proclaimed himself president of a unified China. The generalissimo, as he was dubbed by the government in 1
932, may have run a corrupt, repressive government, but he was perceived by the West as standing against the godless Communists, and was friendly to big business to boot. Making Chiang even more attractive to Americans and Europeans would be his marriage—celebrated in the ballroom of Shanghai's Majestic Hotel—to a rich Christian girl, educated at Wellesley College and part of an enormously influential family, which was referred to as the Soong Dynasty. By 1930, Madame Chiang had even persuaded her husband to convert to Christianity.
Whatever his religious leanings, Chiang's hatred for the Communists burned so hot that he would concentrate his soldiery against them, ignoring the belligerent, land-grabbing moves of the Japanese, who seized Manchuria in 1931. To critics, he explained the choice by saying that the Japanese were a disease of the skin, but Communists—who had targeted the enemies of the suffering masses, the landlords and tax collectors—were a disease of the heart. The Communists saw tiny little Japan not as a disease at all but as a predator positioning itself to swallow China whole.
By the time Harkness came on the scene, the country was well into a period of great tumult, for it wasn't just the Nationalists against the Communists. Independent provincial leaders and private armies shifted their loyalties as they pleased, spawning discord and bloodshed, coups and uprisings. Students could gather in demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands, or commandeer trains. Where soldiers fought, the brutality was unspeakable, with tactics that included burying people alive or beheading them.
One of the most important events during this time was the legendary Long March of 1934–1935, through which Mao Zedong rose to power. Dodging the Nationalist Army in southeast China, he led some eighty thousand people on a trek that covered six thousand miles and concluded a year later with about nine thousand exhausted survivors. Unlike many of his urban rivals, Mao believed that political success would come in this agrarian society only through the support of the millions of rural people. He predicted that “in a very short time several hundred million peasants… will rise like a tornado or a tempest.”
Harkness knew the history, the politics, the dangers. But it wasn't enough to intimidate her.
“I was told that I was playing a million to one chance,” Harkness would say. “I knew it. I was told that Western China was no place for a lone, white woman—especially a woman with no experience in the business of exploring. I did not believe it. I was warned of the ever-present possibility of running into bandits in the interior of Szechwan and reminded that Bill had been compelled to run back. Well, I was willing to take a chance. In short, I had journeyed too far and gambled too heavily on my hopes to admit defeat before I started.”
CHAPTER FOUR
WEST TO CHENGDU
WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, Ruth Harkness stood alone on the deck of a “darling little river boat” cruising up the great Yangtze. The breeze against her skin was gentle in the mild fall evening. Taking a drag from her cigarette, she looked out at the lighted banks, crowded with coolies loading and unloading ships, singing out their rhythmic work chants— “Ah ho! Ah ho!”
At last headed for deepest China, she could not close her eyes and allow the evening to end. Soon Shanghai, the city so dominated by foreigners, would be behind her. According to the compass, the boat was moving west, but it was, Harkness knew, to a truer East.
It was September 27, 1936, the official launch date of the Ruth Harkness Asiatic Expedition. The steamer Whangpu, which would be her home for the next eleven days, was headed up the longest river in Asia, simply called by the Chinese Chang Jiang, the Long River—in the direction of its source in the Tibetan highlands. She would travel the sometimes turbulent, sometimes serene waterway that cut through the center of the country and was the very heart of the Middle Kingdom.
As was so often the case with her here, she was in a philosophical mood, her thoughts at the start of her great venture centering on the belief that something miraculous was happening to her. She would write home to her best friend, “dear, dear Perkie,” that during her time in Shanghai she had come to know herself as never before. She felt that “China can in some way sharpen and clarify a personality much as a good photographer retouches a cloudy film.” The transformation startled even her. “I sometimes wonder if this is the same person who once lived on 18th Street in New York and designed clothes,” she mused. “I doubt it.”
The expedition's start had been marked hours earlier by a party on the aft deck held by several Shanghai friends, including Gerry Russell and Elizabeth and Floyd Tangier Smith. But as they sipped highballs and offered polite conversation, this trio couldn't have felt much goodwill toward Harkness. The rest of the crowd toasted and teased her, spinning fantasies of her being lost forever in the wilds of Sichuan. She laughed right along with them. Just as she had when leaving New York months before, she kept her optimism to herself.
She did tune out all the joking at one point, though, stealing a moment to watch Young's own bon voyage party, which was under way nearby. She was seeing him in a very different context this evening—surrounded by his own smart set, westernized college kids, all looking athletic and sophisticated. In Shanghai, the trendsetting boys sometimes wore horn-rimmed glasses, and the girls might have their hair “permanently waved.” Among Young's clique, one figure stood out. Maybe it was her good looks, or the way she stood near Young, or the manner in which they spoke to each other that made Harkness immediately take note of this strikingly beautiful young woman in a bright red sweater. Her hair was sleek and dark, cut into a fashionable bob. She was the picture of modern Shanghai. Despite the amount of time Harkness and Young had spent together, he had divulged nothing about the wealthy and athletic Diana Chen. She and Young were secretly engaged. Even their families didn't know. Undoubtedly, Chen's powerful parents would have been astonished to discover that their daughter was not only betrothed to this adventurer but using her extra cash to help finance his college education. All of that would come out in time.
HARKNESS HOPED to use her interval on the river to acclimate herself to more homespun Chinese culture and to learn something of the language. Of course, she would also get to know Quentin Young better.
He was berthed belowdecks with hundreds of other Chinese passengers, while Harkness and six other foreign passengers had cabins above. “First class accommodations on this boat are marvellous but you should see first class Chinese, not to mention second, and my God steerage!” she wrote. Young, she reported, was “first class Chinese—a tiny bunk with no mattress (which he doesn't seem to mind).”
The two groups were to do everything—eat, drink, relax—in total isolation from each other. The North China Daily News recognized the split, printing only the names of the foreigners in the list of passengers it routinely published in the shipping pages.
The “upstairs/downstairs” protocol separating whites from Chinese was one more rule for Harkness to break. She repeatedly had Young to her cabin, and trotted down into the Chinese area whenever she pleased. Young gave her Chinese-language lessons, plotted strategy for the expedition, and spent hours conversing with her. “People are very curious as to what I am doing, and I am saying not a word about panda, and being a rather bad liar, I suppose that there is an air of mystery about it all— but it's a hell of a lot of fun anyway,” she said. She wanted to maintain a low profile, “slipping upcountry” as quietly as possible, because she feared that publicity might ruin her plans.
Nonetheless, the lives of the Chinese passengers were an irresistible draw. “It is unbelievable how they live and travel,” she wrote. Crammed into small compartments, they were able to cook and eat and sleep, to nurse children, to smoke pipes, and to chat as though they had all the space in the world.
Harkness marveled too at what seemed to her the natural and enviable Chinese serenity. The confinement, the noise, the lack of privacy, would have made westerners short-tempered. Instead, she noted, here in the center of the commotion, in the cubicle next to Young's, an elderly Chinese man “with a long bea
rd of seven hairs, cross legged with his eyes closed in contemplation (Buddhist with everything from cooking to childbirth going on around him) and you knew that his mind was not in his body—on the deck babies being nursed, men weeweeing over the rail and a few smoking opium.” Harkness thought to herself that if there really were such a thing as a soul, his was traveling far from the cacophony about them. “I knew to look at him that he was not of this world,” she wrote.
As she journeyed up the most famous river in China, Harkness began to discard her Western ways. Her American clothes were long gone, left behind in Shanghai, in favor of an Eastern-accented expedition wardrobe her Shanghai tailor had fashioned for her—loose-cut, boxy jackets and matching trousers made out of the durable blue cloth the coolies wore. She would rebuff most social invitations from foreigners during a layover in Hankou, saying she didn't have anything to wear. The truth was that she just didn't want to dilute her expedition time with nonAsians. She hoped that now that she was on her own, she might “forget all things Western and absorb things Chinese.”
Not wanting to miss a moment of it, she would often spend the night up on deck wrapped in her silk-stuffed sleeping bag, watching the stars in the black sky, and waking to the morning sun.
All along the waterway, she would rush from the boat at every stop in little river towns to scout what seemed to her, with each passing li, or third of a mile, more and more the real China. She found dusty streets lined with treasure-filled stores. “Shop after shop, open to the street, full of the most beautiful paper-thin bowls of unbelievable color, square plates with magnificent dragons, patient artists painting feathery bamboo on teapots and cups, and all for just nothing in our money,” she wrote. Always, throngs of curious people trailed her every step. Without fail, she discovered, her smile was always returned.