by Vicki Croke
When the tension inevitably reached a critical point, Harkness was asked to leave. In the face of the devastating banishment, on Saturday, May 3, 1947, she attempted suicide, falling unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills. While she spent the following day in bed, immobile, her belongings were packed for her, and on Monday, when she was on her feet, she moved out as ordered. Harkness ended up in the famously bohemian Chelsea Hotel in New York, a luxury she likely could not afford.
On Friday, July 18, 1947, just weeks after her suicide attempt, Harkness traveled alone to Pittsburgh. At almost midnight on this warm and humid evening, with thunderstorms rippling across the region, she checked in to the William Penn Hotel.
Trouble may have come as early as that very night, for all day Saturday the service maid was unable to enter the room. In alarm, she notified assistant manager James Greer. When by midnight Harkness had not responded to repeated telephone calls, Greer used his master key to enter her room.
The bedcovers had been pulled down, and Harkness's nightgown had been laid out. A half-empty bottle of wine stood on the dresser. Everything was quiet. Greer walked toward the bathroom, where, in a partially filled tub, her head above the water, lay the lifeless body of Ruth Harkness.
An emergency call was placed, and police officers and a coroner were summoned in Sunday's early darkness. They investigated the scene, noting that the deceased had been smoking in the bath. In the opinion of medical authorities, Harkness had been dead “a number of hours,” though the date and time of her death would be listed as the moment of discovery—12:20 A.M., July 20, 1947.
The officers searched her luggage, finding copies of The Lady and the Panda and the address of her next of kin, her sister, Harriet Fay, in Titusville.
Harkness's relative youth, coupled with the strange circumstances of her death, led authorities initially to suspect foul play, but the autopsy, performed by T. R. Helmbold of the Allegheny County morgue, reported “acute alcoholic gastro-enteritis” as the cause.
It is unclear just what happened in that anonymous room, where, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, “in the luxury of a hotel bathtubful of tepid water, death came obscurely…to a woman who had spent a life of high adventure.”
She was cremated on July 21, and her ashes were buried on July 24 at the Union Cemetery, which bordered the McCombs family property. The simple services, arranged by the Tracy Home of Funerals, cost $248. The family, who could not afford a headstone, paid the debt off in three installments.
QUENTIN YOUNG would not learn of Harkness's death until 1962. He was widowed and living in Indonesia at the time. The news, he would write to Harkness's sister years later, came as “a heavy loss” to him.
Unlike his resilient brother Jack, who would attain the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army, ending a long career with two Silver Stars and three Bronzes, and who could thrive no matter what came his way, Quentin Young was, according to his biographer, Michael Kiefer, “melancholy, a black hole of misfortune, sucking bad luck into the void from every corner of the universe.” The common Chinese expression chi ku, “to eat bitterness,” seems only too aptly to fit the aged adventurer.
After some exploring stints, Young had lived in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, where he, his wife, Diana, and their daughter, Jenny, survived the Japanese occupation. Over the coming years, he would sometimes say that he had worked as a spy. He and Diana, who soon added a son to their family, struggled through years of political turmoil. In 1960 Diana died of cancer, and six years later Young married a fellow employee at the bank in Indonesia, moving with her to Taiwan in 1968. There he began to work for RCA and became a Jehovah's Witness.
Ruth Harkness in Shanghai, 1937. Despite her continued sorrow in not being able to return to China later in life, she carried herself with panache. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO
Meanwhile, Jack retired in Missouri, having finished off his military career with stints in Korea and Vietnam. He had been so absorbed by his globe-hopping work that his daughters would claim they saw more of him in Movietone newsreels than they did at home. He remarried, and, belatedly, family members would discover that he had fathered a son, Jack junior, in Hong Kong.
Kiefer would write that the Young brothers “were forever secretive, glossing over details as they edited their words, mistrusting even each other, and I was never certain at what point the embellishments, if any, became indistinguishable from the truth—even in their own minds.”
In 1974 Jack arranged for Quentin to move to the United States. Just before leaving Taiwan, Young began a correspondence with Ruth Harkness's surviving sister, Harriet McCombs Fay Anderson, that would continue for years. He told Anderson that he had lost almost everything— pictures, field notes, even the wedding ring Harkness had given him—so he asked for and received photographs and archival material Harkness's family had kept, for a book he said he was working on. From his home in St. Louis, his letters to Anderson were full of high hope that the book project would become a movie deal. In fact, he told Anderson he was moving to California in order to be closer to the production company. Ruth Harkness's sister was pulled into the dealings, selling the film and television rights to Harkness's book The Lady and the Panda for ten thousand dollars to the producer with whom Quentin Young was associated.
In December 1983—a crucial time for Quentin Young, as he had seen his dreams of a Hollywood biopic recede again and again—an article about Harkness's expedition appeared in Smithsonian magazine. Young complained in a letter to the editor that the story had diminished his role in the affair. He not only presented himself as the single most important person in the mission; he dismissed entirely Harkness's contribution. “In fact,” he wrote to the editor, “all that entourage and the Western woman were an encumbrance.” Reading the letter, Harkness's sister was stunned.
As time went on without Quentin Young's projects panning out, his blighted feelings about everything appear even to have poisoned his memories of Ruth Harkness. In his first letter to Anderson, in 1974, when he was looking for historical material from her, he had written, “Your sister was such a fine woman and I could never forget those limited days I spent with her in panda country.” Over the course of years of interviews with journalist Kiefer, starting in 1988, however, Quentin Young would portray Harkness in a much darker light.
The rising tide of Young's unhappiness soon swamped family members and even Kiefer, who through writing several articles and the 2002 book, Chasing the Panda, had developed a friendship with the elderly man. The two would be estranged before the work was published. Unwilling to discuss his past, Young has turned away journalists, including this author, and filmmakers who have contacted him. At this writing, Quentin Young is ninety years old and still living with his wife, Swan, in California.
His older brother, Jack, who continued to live his life with high energy and intrigue, worked on his memoirs until his death in St. Louis at the age of eighty-nine in 2000. At ninety-two, Su-Lin, Jack's first wife and the woman immortalized by Harkness's giant panda, now resides in California. Working for the Social Security Administration in New York and California, she raised three daughters on her own. When I met the still-exuberant and kind Su-Lin in 2001, it was, so many decades after the fact, quite clear why Ruth Harkness chose to name the panda after her.
DURING OUR EASTERN travels in 2002, it felt as though a curtain on Harkness's world had truly parted for our group. Milton was right, time is a thief. But like a crass and harried burglar, it often steals what doesn't matter, leaving behind what is most precious. That is what we discovered in China. For here we could still find what deeply moved one American explorer: the grand, sweeping beauty of the land, the spell of the magnificent giant panda, and, perhaps most of all, the warmth and wisdom of the Chinese people.
No smile ever went unreturned, Harkness had written of her interactions. And this was the truest signpost we would encounter. We may have been seeking old buildings, but it was always the smiling faces of these rural
people—who helped us find what we were looking for, or told us of their history—that lingered in our minds.
Down roads established in Harkness's time, now paved, if poorly so, it seemed we were four-wheeling through classical Chinese landscape paintings as we made our way to the Chaopo Valley where Harkness had found Su-Lin. On October 29, our SUVs were grinding and tearing, even sliding crashingly into one another, up rutted mud roads till they could go no farther. We emerged from the vehicles into the cool mountain air to begin a treacherous climb on foot, up a thousand-foot bluff that seemed to lead straight into the sky. The trail often had us panting and scrambling on all fours, up just the kind of slick, mossy vertical ground that Harkness had known so well. With little time before sunset, we paused, taking in the expansive view of the valley—the raging yellows, reds, and oranges of autumn below. It was here, before a magnificent old Chinese elm bearing characters that someone had artfully carved in the trunk, that Mary Lobisco unpacked a small ceramic container with the image of giant pandas on the top. Inside were the ashes and soil from Ruth Harkness's grave site in Titusville.
Mary recited a short prayer, then returned Harkness's remains to the country she so loved, to the mountains where she had laid Bill to rest and where she herself had contemplated with deep joy the thought of spending eternity. It was the valley, she had always said, of “her complete happiness.” We knew it was the perfect spot—high up, serene, and exactly where Harkness had roamed so long ago.
Just miles away, appropriately, was China's most famous—and, at 785 square miles, largest—panda reserve, Wolong. The preserve is on the front lines in the battle to save the giant panda, at the center of worldwide efforts to ensure that there will always be a place for them.
There are still great problems in the fight to save giant pandas. Logging and human encroachment have gobbled up much of the animal's range. In Sichuan Province alone, between 1974 and 1989, panda habitat was reduced by 50 percent. Some of the threats are long-standing ones, having been around since Harkness's time: the animals are so popular, and displaying them so lucrative, that the motives and methods of those who do so must be closely monitored.
Today China is struggling to protect the giant panda and to preserve its home. While dozens of reserves in six mountain ranges have been established in western China, the world of the giant panda is fragmented. More restricted than that of any other bear, panda populations have become isolated from one another. Inbreeding in circumstances like this can lead to many physical problems, including an inability to fight disease.
Throughout the world, Harkness's gift can be seen in the care and concern given to the preservation of the giant panda. But here in this wild corner of China, which folds forever into Tibet, we saw what we hoped was her legacy in the flesh.
Our little group was able to see dozens of giant pandas here, and even to cuddle a young one, laying our hands gently on his wiry, deep-pile coat.
Scientists today say that Harkness's Su-Sen might very well have survived after her release in 1938 and could have lived long enough to reproduce, right here in the mountain range we were visiting. As we met one magnificent giant panda after another at Wolong, we hoped that a few were her descendants.
Even if we hadn't actually met them, we could content ourselves with a sweet dream—that somewhere in these green, fog-bound slopes before us, there might just live the great-great-grandchildren of one little panda whom Ruth Harkness had, against all odds, and in a moment of pure bliss, set free.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PERHAPS SURPRISINGLY, writing a book is a terrifically humbling experience—not least because an author of nonfiction arrives at the finish line on the strong shoulders of friends and strangers alike who have amply given of their time and expertise. The Lady and the Panda, it seems, has been particularly blessed by this kind generosity.
So much of the spirit and substance of this book can be traced to the kindness of two families.
Ruth Harkness's niece, Mary Lobisco, along with her husband, Vincent, and their daughter, Nicole, opened the family photo albums, archives, and history to me, and, of course, so much more. Mary, who is enviably intuitive and pragmatic, provided insights and sometimes even lodging as I traveled and conducted research. Always patient with inquiries and eager to do some sleuthing herself, Mary plunged into wild excursions to cities as different as Chicago and Chengdu for the cause.
Equally important was the contribution of the Perkins family, descendants of Ruth's best friend, Hazel Perkins. Robin Perkins Ugurlu, Hazel's globe-trotting granddaughter, was always on call, ready to roll up her sleeves or pack her bags, to do the dusty work of archival sifting, or to secure us entry to the world of exclusive clubs, such as the one at the Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai (in the name of inquiry). She has kept Ruth Harkness's story close to her heart her whole life, and I am touched by how much she shared with me. Robin's parents, Bruce and Alice Perkins, opened their astonishing collection of the correspondence between Ruth and her “dear friend Perkie,” which turned out to be the master key that unlocked so many of the mysteries of this complicated adventurer. Three generations of Perkinses now have remained loyal to Ruth Harkness, and her memory lives on with vividness and clarity because of them.
While this book has provided me with immeasurable gifts, highest among them has been the chance to know these deeply good people. The families of Ruth Harkness and Hazel Perkins embody the American ideals of honesty, integrity, kindness, strength, and spirit. I am honored to count them as friends, and hope this work at least in some small way reflects their virtues.
Although Quentin Young chose not to be interviewed for this book, members of his family and his biographer, Michael Kiefer, author of Chasing the Panda, helped unstintingly. By any logic, Michael should be something of a rival, yet he has always offered information, advice, and friendship. I couldn't ask for a better or more principled colleague. And through his insightful book, I have come to know Quentin Young. Quentin Young's sister-in-law, Su-Lin Young, an explorer herself, and the woman for whom Ruth Harkness named America's first panda, graciously presented her memories of the book's main characters. Her daughter Jialing “Jolly” Young, who has carefully chronicled the family's storied past, particularly that of her dashing father, Jack Young, has provided me again and again with information and understanding, and more than that, a raucous friendship. In helping with this book, both she and her brother, Jack Young, Jr., have drawn me a modern portrait of the swashbuckling their father was famous for.
I am indebted to Linda Ash and the late Peggy McCleskey, who knew Ruth Harkness at very different stages of her life. Over the telephone and in many conversations, they offered stories about Harkness in heartstirring detail. Linda also—without hesitation—offered to share her store of mementos (including photos and Tibetan prayer cards) saved from her friendship with Harkness.
Dan Reib's daughter, Jane Pollock, kept me spellbound one evening with wonderful stories about her larger-than-life father. And Reib's grandson Edward Reib has been of enormous help with information and my first glimpse of a photograph of Harkness's great and steadfast friend.
I continue to feel happily stunned by the caliber of those willing to read this manuscript and lend their expertise: George Schaller, director of science, Wildlife Conservation Society, who is simply and unarguably the greatest naturalist of our time; Stella Dong, author of the wonderful, wise, and rollicking Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842– 1949; playwright Yin-Yin Zeng and her husband, Tony Saich, the Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and faculty chair of Asia Programs and the China Public Policy Program, Harvard University.
Thanks especially to my friend Sarah Queen, professor of Chinese history at Connecticut College, who not only read the final manuscript but helped shape it through many probing discussions over meals, around crying babies, and during hikes with dogs. It was only because of Sarah and her canny reading of a Chinese map that I was able to reach the old village of Wenchuan a
nd find Harkness's lost ghost temple. I will forever be grateful for her intellectual drive and her knack for asking simple questions that launched weeklong ruminations.
In this same regard, I thank two of my dearest friends, both talented writers and editors—Louise Kennedy and Jan Freeman. Despite being immersed in their own work and lives, they have unfailingly reported for duty as muses, witty scolds, experts, Scotch-sipping companions, and twenty-four-hour emergency copy doctors. During the polishing phase of this project Jan helped me find light at the end of some kinked and collapsed sentences. Every chapter bears the graceful touch of these punctuation-toting guardian angels.
Thanks, also, to Tess Johnson, an American resident of Shanghai who has written extensively about its history. Tess has more than a dash of Ruth Harkness's salty panache and was generous in lending books and spending an evening over an edifying, fun-filled dinner in the territory that was, in Harkness's time, the French Concession.
I am beholden to an army of kind and brilliant librarians at Cornell University, Harvard University (particularly Yenching and Widener), and the Shanghai municipal library. To Raymond Lum at Yenching, Armand Esai at the archives of the Field Museum in Chicago; Christel Schmidt and Janet W. McKee of the Library of Congress; Julia Innes, former archivist at the Brookfield Zoo; Steven Johnson at the Wildlife Conservation Society's library at the Bronx Zoo; the library staff at the American Museum of Natural History; and David Dressing and Erika Hosselkus of the Latin American Library at Tulane University.
I am grateful to A. J. Joyce, whose skilled computer searching revealed the pathway to the details of Harkness's last years. To documentary filmmaker Jessica Louchheim for both her charity and proficiency in helping with research in Washington, D.C. To Richard J. Reynolds III for sharing his illuminating correspondence with Gerald Russell from the 1960s. And to Devin Hollands for generously providing key Harkness family documents.