The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  Harkness's plan for a leisurely trip via Europe, India, Burma, and Yunnan was scrapped. Now she needed wings, for she couldn't waste a moment. Her pandas were ready to go, and Smith still had not gotten a single panda out despite all the press reports. She would speed for China, taking planes the whole way. She would fly from New York to San Francisco, board a trans-Pacific Clipper to Manila, then continue on to Hong Kong and Chengdu.

  Once aboard the ultramodern Pan Am Flying Clipper, high above the Pacific, she jotted a note to her friends. Even her spirits seemed to be taking flight. “Be good—you angels,” she wrote with the utter contentment that only the journey to the East could bring.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE BACK OF BEYOND

  IT WAS EARLY JUNE. Chengdu, though warm and humid, had not entered the worst of its summer heat. From behind the great walls of what had been until recently Cavaliere's estate, the air was filled with birdsong and “the music of the wind in the bamboos.” On the open terrace of one of the grand but crumbling pavilions, Ruth Harkness, still in pajamas at lunchtime, sat comfortably, sipping hot tea, as she composed her thoughts before a typewriter. A tame goose paraded around the lush, green grounds importantly, while miracle of miracles, a mischievous young panda, her belly taut from a recent feeding, was casually sprawled nearby.

  Harkness was like a satisfied cat luxuriating in a pool of sunlight. Once again immersed in the East, she felt good and strong and sure of herself. Though Quentin Young had left early the previous morning to go up-country, they had just spent several days together.

  She could take a sip of that good pale tea, then sit back, listening to the cadences of Chinese life buzzing in the busy city around her. “Outside the high walls are the never ending street cries,” she typed, “rickshaw bells, crying babies, street hawkers, calls and creaking wheel barrows.” From the theater across the street came occasional bursts from cymbals and drums. She was back in the ancient frontier city, savoring the world that she loved so much and craved so terribly when away from it. She reveled in “a certain peace” in this place of delicate Asian charm.

  China was still in great turmoil, though the worst of it hadn't reached this far west. The generalissimo had just taken the drastic step of blowing up the dikes of the Yellow River near the railroad junction at Chengchow in north-central China. The flooding did stall the Japanese, but at a huge cost, destroying four thousand villages, displacing two million people, and killing untold numbers of peasants.

  Harkness had arrived at the beginning of June. Quentin Young— whom she had not seen or spoken directly to in months—was waiting. He had promised her in a cable that he had a male and a female panda, and though the story was confused in various reports, it appears the little male died in an accident.

  There was a mountain for the two to hash out between them now that they were reunited, and experiencing an extended privacy for the first time since their romantic interlude in the fall of 1936. So much had changed, yet here they were with each other again.

  They made a comfortable camp of one of the old buildings at Cavaliere's, living more outside than in, eating wonderful meals that Wang cooked for them on a rear balcony. Together they cared for a baby panda. All of it reminiscent of the life they had shared in the wilds two years before.

  Now that Cavaliere was gone—apparently back to Italy as the drumbeats of political upheaval grew louder—there was a new administrator in residence. He was the “high and mighty officialdom type,” Harkness said, granting them only squatter's rights. It was better than staying with the missionaries, Harkness thought, so they denned in the abandoned buildings.

  The emotions that had swept over Harkness in the first expedition had either changed or matured. They were just as deep, but now she seemed fond of Young without the urgency of lust or love. Her letters home during this time carried a strong, centered tone—serene with a sensual trace of world-weariness. Harkness wasn't past her prime; she was settling into it. She certainly had not finished with romance. What she wanted, she told her friend Anne Pierce, was “the sort of companionship that every normal woman craves. I think what I really want more than anything else just now is to fall deeply in love and be married.” That companionship would not be with Quentin Young. It wasn't the difference in their races that would stop her—she had never played by society's rules. But she did possess a code of personal integrity that would have made it unlikely for her to carry on an affair with the handsome hunter. As a widow in the wilds of Tibet two years ago, she might have eagerly bedded a college boy who was tied to a youthful school courtship. A married man was another story.

  Bill had been her one true love. He would figure in her thoughts, dreams, and writing for the rest of her life. When Harkness had slipped her wedding band into Young's hand that night in Chengdu, perhaps she had simply hoped to pass along a little of the amazing happiness she had experienced.

  Quentin Young's heart was another story. Whether it was their accommodation, his emotions, the fact that he had betrayed Diana Chen with this woman, or some craving in his own life, his feelings for Harkness remained impassioned and confused. Years later, he would speak about her with a jealous intensity. He still bristled when recounting an incident in which Harkness visited his parents with a male companion. He would never speak of her with emotional distance.

  When word came through that there might be another panda available from the hunters up in the mountains, Young began to indulge in the oscillating tender-then-remote routine that had by now become familiar. After days shared so closely with the spirited American widow, he rose in darkness, leaving before the sun came up, while she remained in the pavilion with Wang and the panda, who by now had been named Mei-Ling, in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

  Harkness had originally intended to stay in Chengdu only long enough to gather up the pair of pandas Young had secured. She thought she would be on her way home within a week or two. Now she would remain in the city at least until Young's return.

  Over their two previous expeditions, Ruth Harkness and Wang Whai Hsin had become quite comfortable caring for young pandas. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  In the meantime, she was never bored. There were still enough foreigners around for her to socialize from time to time. She attended a dinner party where she met Alexandra David-Neel, the stout French matron celebrated for her daring studies of the forbidden inner reaches of Tibet. She was there with her equally famous adopted Tibetan son. But Harkness did not care for the woman who had once dyed her hair and darkened her face to enter Tibet disguised as a beggar. “Did she rub my fur the wrong way!” Harkness wrote home.

  What occupied the bulk of her time was, of course, the panda. At fifty pounds, she was already an animal of the wilderness, a big girl, not a baby anymore. When Harkness would pick her up in play, the formidable little panda might, without warning, suddenly fight to be left alone. “Everything I owned was in ribbons,” Harkness said, “including the skin on my hands and arms.”

  It sliced up her emotions too, for she sensed that Mei-Ling had experienced some terrible trauma during capture. “This baby will always remember that she was hunted and will never I believe quite trust people.” She was a pistol, always “casting a tentative eye about,” Harkness said, “to see what she can get into.” What she got into, generally, was a walnut tree in the courtyard. The panda would shinny high up into the branches, leaving a nervous Harkness to pace down below, a cigarette her only comfort.

  “The vixen,” Harkness wrote, was always “raising hell.” “No matter where I put her she can manage to get out, and usually can succeed in half choking herself about it. She is a darling, but not the sweet gentle little lady that Su Lin, or Mei Mei was.” The robust animal also loved to spend the day in the upper branches of a small pear tree. Unable to tempt her down to the ground, Harkness, the ever-indulgent panda mother, would inch up the trunk to deliver food. “I dam [sic] near break my neck taking her lunches up to her,” she reported. Sometimes as night fell,
the panda wouldn't budge. Then Harkness would once again hoist herself up along the limbs to lug the animal down to safety. The effort whipped her, as well as her wardrobe. “My trousers are about to drop off of just plain exhaustion,” she said.

  On rainy days, the “little hellion” was kept indoors on a leash, which would only get her more ginned up. Then Harkness would capitulate and let her out. “I wish you could see the baby now,” she wrote home once. “Perfectly happy in the drizzling rain, sound asleep in the top of her pear tree; one hand limply hanging on to a branch and two silly little black legs just hanging in space.”

  Strolling around the grounds of the estate, Harkness could feel the passage of time. The lovely moon doors, ornate gateways, and rock gardens still held fast their accustomed grace, yet everything was so changed without Cavaliere. The houses, shaded by overgrown walnut trees, pomegranate shrubs, palms, and bamboo, were falling into decay and at times seemed sinister. It felt as though the very life of the pavilion had been siphoned out through the front gates as the doors had closed behind Kay for the last time. The atmosphere that had risen up in the old Italian's absence was strange and warring, with a dark spookiness that lingered in the nighttime shadows.

  Harkness and Young became convinced the place was haunted by the ghost of a dead army general who had been buried there without his head. They were told that he roamed the gardens, walking the camelbacked bridges within these walls searching for it. None of the talk was quite enough to unnerve Harkness, who happily chose the chamber rumored to be the ghost's “nocturnal headquarters” as her own bedroom.

  THIS EXPEDITION was presumed to be one of reckoning. With yards of newsprint dedicated to their feud, and months of acrimony having raged between them, Harkness and Ajax met face-to-face one day in Chengdu.

  It was no showdown. Direct confrontation was not Smith's style, and Harkness, as usual, took the high road. Neither was in a fighting mood— she was feeling the full measure of herself; he was finally within striking distance of getting what he wanted. American newspapers had been reporting for months that Smith was on the verge of heading out of China with several pandas, but in reality, the goal was continually inching away from him. Without much luck, he was just then in the midst of trying desperately to charter a Douglas airplane.

  As soon as Harkness encountered the old collector, she saw how bad off he was. He was so broken down and pathetic, so near the grave, she was tempted to pity him. Suffering from tuberculosis, he confided in her that he was headed for the hospital to have a lung collapsed, a common therapy in which the diseased organ was shut down and given a chance to heal. But to Harkness, even with her hair-trigger compassion, his condition couldn't mitigate what he had been up to professionally. “I can't feel sorry for him,” she said with some certainty. What he was doing to pandas, the way he treated his captives, was “a disgrace to humanity. And so is he.”

  Pandas were dying in the gold-rush-like fever that capturing them had become. A legion of hunters using guns, snares, and vicious dogs were unleashed on the once-tranquil hills. “It's just a crime what that man has done,” Harkness wrote. “He sent agents to the mountains telling the natives that he wanted 20 pandas and they have gone hay wire.”

  Inevitably pandas meant to be captured alive were killed in the process. Some died on the way to Chengdu. Once delivered to Smith, who was working out of a compound in the city, even more succumbed in captivity. “He is simply collecting wholesale and letting them die,” she reported. She heard that on this trip alone six big pandas that had been delivered to him had died. “He keeps them in tiny dirty cages in hot sunshine; no shade, no freedom. Naturally they die.”

  Smith's response to the high mortality rate was to intensify the hunting in order to constantly replenish his stock. He had such a reputation for losing pandas that when The China Journal reported that he had a shipment of five pandas due in London, it cautioned, “if they survived.”

  It wasn't just Smith behaving this way. The missionary-zoo connection was in high gear. As the Bronx Zoo learned, it was much cheaper to send money to a missionary who could hire hunters to capture a panda than to launch an expedition of its own. It didn't matter that no one was on the scene to ensure ethical or moderate behavior. There were several men who could carry this out, but best known among them was Dr. David Crockett Graham at the West China Union University. Graham never killed a panda himself, but he would finish up his animal-export career having provided fifteen giant-panda hides and skeletons and four live pandas to the United States over thirteen years.

  Young had told Harkness that his impression from being up-country was that two valleys northwest of Chengdu seemed to have been hunted clean of giant pandas. The China Journal would report a few months later, based on accounts from travelers including Harkness, that the pandahunting situation was dire. “Other reports indicate that many pandas, old and young, brought alive to Cheng-tu by native hunters, have died there before they could be shipped out of the country; while many more skins of dead ones have been offered for sale in this city, showing that an intensive hunting of giant pandas is going on. A rare and not too plentiful animal at best, the giant panda can not long survive such persecution.” Sowerby said steps needed to be taken to protect the panda from what he called “wholesale commercial exploitation.” “The collecting and exporting of so many of these rare animals from China can hardly be justified on scientific grounds,” Sowerby continued, “especially when it is taken into consideration the number that have already died since being captured. We, therefore, appeal to the Chinese Government to intervene to save the giant panda from extermination before it is too late.” By April 1939, the government would, in fact, place a partial ban on panda hunting.

  Harkness, disgusted by what was happening, had to have been considering her own role in the mess. In the middle of it all, she faced a separate controversy. The mercurial Madame Chiang Kai-shek had gotten wind of Harkness's naming a panda after her and was feeling miffed instead of honored. “I hadn't been here a week, before a rumor came to me that Madame was much offended,” Harkness wrote. “A missionary here whom she knows received a long letter from her secretary on the subject, and asked him to communicate with me, which he did. I swear, Anne, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry or have hysterics.” What she did was rechristen Mei-Ling as O Lin. Within days, though, she changed her name once more to the more appropriate Su-Sen, or “little tomboy.”

  Rather than roll her eyes over the whole affair, though, Harkness felt sorry about the culture clash. “I can understand how she would feel,” Harkness reasoned, “just another crazy American, capitalizing on something from China; and China is so hurt. Her people are being butchered by the thousands and America doesn't even stop war supplies to Japan— the America that has professed such undying friendship for China.”

  The United States was, in fact, continuing to sell scrap to Japan, dragging its feet on any trade embargoes and basically standing by as the tiny island nation ripped through China. Yet it was clear that American sympathies, from top to bottom, were with China. Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had landed the coveted Time magazine cover as “Man and Wife of the Year” for 1937. Polls reflected that only 2 percent of the population was pro-Japan. And church groups, fired up by their missionaries and lay organizations, tried to bring aid to the suffering country. Ultimately, though, the only measure that would help the Chinese would have been American military involvement, which was not forthcoming.

  The Nationalist government in China wasn't doing much to help itself either. Chiang believed that no matter what devastation the Japanese inflicted, his great country could endure it—at least until the Western allies charged in to save them. And so he waited. It was a notion he clung to despite the continued pattern of Western lip service and impotence.

  In Chengdu, there was a new development. Young was back, with a magnificent, one-hundred-pound male giant panda in tow. To Harkness, the animal was as sweet as Rex—a harlequin Great
Dane from home.

  Su-Sen, on the other hand, continued to rampage around the walled compound. Wrestling her down from dangerous perches was frequently a two-person job, from which Young and Harkness would emerge skinned, bruised, or missing a hank of hair. One day, high in a tree, SuSen stepped on a branch that couldn't hold her. At the first sound of the cracking limb, Young leaped into action. “Quentin made one of the quickest moves I've ever seen and caught her as she fell,” Harkness reported. With him on an expedition, everything was taken care of.

  In the evenings, the two would sit together in the warm summer darkness “making and unmaking plans getting no nearer to anything.”

  As for the practical matter of how Harkness would get out of the country with two pandas, she wasn't sure. China was torn apart, with bridges and roads bombed out or intentionally flooded. Japan controlled most ports, railroads, and cities. Waves of fleeing refugees packed railway cars and thoroughfares. Air travel had become so difficult that even powerful men like Stilwell couldn't get a plane ticket. Seats had to be booked a month in advance, and even then nothing was certain.

  It was driving Ajax to distraction. Here he finally had his pandas, but he couldn't get his hands on a plane. Worse, the Chinese government was making noises about allowing him to leave with only two of the animals. Harkness wondered if she had stirred up government scrutiny herself with the Mei-Ling misstep.

  She and Young decided that with the big male they should try to go downriver as far as Hankou and catch a train from there. But then they realized they wouldn't be able to stake out enough space for a full-grown giant panda. With all the chaos of war, the trains would be jammed tight with refugees.

  In the purgatory of the pavilion, unable to establish a good plan, disturbed by Smith's antics, and perhaps experiencing some emotional strain with Quentin Young, Ruth Harkness had a lot to think over.