by Jamie Rix
“Exciting news!” tweeted the grandala bird.
Ping pricked up his ears at the mention of excitement.
“I have just overheard the tall ranger talking about a panda exchange program.”
Wolagong Nature Reserve was looked after by a team of friendly rangers. The tall ranger was the one in charge, not because he was tall, but because he had more buttons on his jacket than any of the others.
“Oh,” said Ping, who had never heard of a panda exchange program before. “Is that exciting?”
“Well, I think it is,” said Hui. “I overheard the rangers discussing it last night. Admittedly, I was a little far away, but from what I could make out, they are planning to send one lucky panda from Wolagong Nature Reserve to London Zoo in England.”
“On vacation?” Ping said. “I love vacations!”
“I suppose it is a sort of vacation,” replied Hui. “It will certainly be different. London’s not like Wolagong at all.”
“That’s my kind of town,” declared Ping. “How do I get there?”
“That’s simple,” Hui replied. “We just have to make sure that the rangers choose you!”
Ping’s heart sank. Now that he thought about it, he was sure they’d choose Gao. Gao posed for more photographs than any other panda in the nature reserve. Like Ping, he was still a cub, but he had the cute factor. It didn’t seem fair to Ping that one cub should be cuter than another. He wanted to be cute too. But it was Gao who had the long eyelashes, chubby cheeks, and a way of looking up at the camera with his big black-and-white eyes that made grown-up visitors turn to jelly and lose their grasp of the English language.
“Oh, Wilma, hurnney, doncha jurst lurrrve that cutesy ikkle-wikkle cubby-wubby!” they cried. It made Ping sick.
But he refused to be deterred.
“So let’s assume it’s between me and Gao,” he said. “How do I give myself the edge over the pretty poser? How do I convince the rangers to pick me?”
“There’s more to life than being pretty,” said Hui. “Once, when I was flying past a school assembly in New Orleans, I heard the most beautiful sound drifting out of a window. It was a little girl playing the violin. That was when I learned that being talented was far more important.”
“So you think I should learn to play a musical instrument?”
“Possibly,” said the bird.
“Have you ever heard of an instrument called a piano?” asked the cub. “Do you think we could make one of those?”
“Pianos are rather large,” said Hui practically. “If you’re going to learn an instrument, it’ll have to be one that we can make out of bamboo.”
They sat in silence for the next ten minutes while they tried to think of one, but their combined minds drew a blank.
“How are you at dancing?” asked Hui. “I think we should forget music and explore the possibility that dancing might give you the edge.”
“Dancing’s a bit energetic for pandas,” admitted Ping. “Unless I could dance sitting down.”
Hui shook his head.
“I could recite some poetry.”
“Do you know any?”
“Not really, but I could write some.” Ping stood up and placed his paw across his chest in a strikingly theatrical pose.
“There’s nothing I like more
Than a stick of old bamboo.
It gets the juices flowing
More than chewing on a shoe.”
He looked to Hui for approval.
“What else can you do?” asked the wise bird.
They spent the next hour trying to identify talents Ping possessed that might capture the imagination of the people who ran London Zoo. Would they choose a panda who could scratch his own back, or fold bamboo leaves into interesting shapes, or one that could wash his own toes by walking through a river? Maybe they would favor a whistling panda, or a cloud-counting panda, or a clever panda that knew sixty-three words for bamboo.
Eventually, Ping and Hui had to give in and admit that they did not know the first thing about London Zoo or what would appeal to the people in charge.
“They’ll go for the pretty one, won’t they,” said Ping with a sigh of resignation. “We might as well give up now. They’ll choose Gao, I know they will.”
Suddenly, Hui jumped into the air and flapped his wings in a flurry of excitement.
“I’ve got it!” he cried. “A letter! A letter!”
“Which one?” asked Ping. “I know lots of them. A? B? M? T? U? V?”
“No. You write them a letter.”
“Me? Write a letter? To whom?”
“The pandas who live at London Zoo. You write to them and ask them what life is like there. And when they write back and tell you, you’ll know what it is you have to do to become the perfect panda for the exchange.”
It was a glorious plan and one that Ping could not keep to himself for a moment longer. He ran to his mother, Mao Mao, and blurted it out. He even begged her to help him compose the letter, but to his surprise, she refused.
“Help,” she explained, “is the thief of self-knowledge.”
Ping scratched his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“A dragonfly tastes sweeter to a frog when snaffled by its own tongue.”
“Why can’t you ever speak normally?” he squeaked. “Will you help me write the letter or not?”
“It is better to travel alone, Ping, for only then will you know when you have arrived.”
Ping gave up.
“So you won’t help me?” he said.
“No,” she said, smiling. “Sometimes it is kinder to be cruel, Ping. It’s best you help yourself.”
CHAPTER THREE
F
or three days Ping struggled to write his letter. His task was made all the more difficult by his sister hanging around behind him, trying to read what he was writing. It was very off-putting to hear her constantly chewing bamboo in his ear.
“Go away!” he shouted at her. “I can’t hear myself think.”
“I can stand here if I want to,” An said. “It’s a free world and I’m a protected species, so there’s not much you can do about it, I’m afraid.”
Ping blocked out the sound of his sister’s voice by pressing his paws against his ears, but that made writing impossible. He needed his paws to hold the pen. So he tried holding the pen between his ear and his paw and leaning forward, but that didn’t work because not only could he not read what he had written, but he ended up with ink splattered all over his cheek.
“You are the most annoying sister a brother could ever have!” he exploded. “In fact, that’s what I’m going to call you from now on. An-noying.”
“Don’t you dare,” she warned him. But telling Ping not to do something was like waving a red rag in front of a bull.
“An-noying,” he sang. He kept on going until she burst into tears and ran away to tell Mommy. “An-noying, An-noying, An-noying, An-noying, An-noying, An-noying, An-noying, An-noying…”
Ping only stopped when his mother stamped her foot in front of him.
“What is going on?” she growled. “I was just sitting down to a lovely stick of bamboo when the peace and quiet was shattered by your sister’s sobbing.”
Ping explained how she had stopped him from writing his letter and for once, to his surprise, his mother took his side.
“Writing is the cornerstone of civilization, An. It is not for nothing that there is a duke inside every e-duke-ated panda!” she said mysteriously. “Now come along. Let’s go and suck on some bamboo and leave Ping to practice his writing.”
Ping found it difficult to know where to start and the letter was scrunched up and thrown away a hundred times while he searched for the perfect opening.
Now that had dignity. And once he had made a start, the words flowed.
Ping was true to his word. He gave the letter to Hui to send via Bird Mail, then sat around in the clearing with ants in his pants. For the next
three days, he was a bundle of nerves, imagining his letter flying over mountains, rivers, seas, and forests to reach the pandas in London Zoo. He imagined them opening it and gasping in excitement at their first contact with a real panda from China. And he imagined their reply to him gripped in the talons of an eagle, taking off over the penguin pool, and skimming through the clouds on its way back. But no matter how hard he imagined his reply arriving in the Wolagong Nature Reserve, it did not come.
His mother told him to be patient.
“Bamboo does not grow in a day,” she said gravely.
Ping was aware of that, but what did the growth of bamboo have to do with Ping going to London Zoo? Why did his mother always have to be so gloomy about everything? If she couldn’t be more supportive about his adventure, he would share his plans with his twin sister instead.
“When this letter comes back, I’m going to London!” he boasted to An. “Where I’ll be so famous that visitors will want to take my photograph all the time.”
“In your dreams,” she mocked. “London Zoo’s not going to ask for you when they could have me, are they?”
“You!” exclaimed Ping, stunned by the ludicrous notion that his boring sister might seriously challenge him for first place on the London list. “Why would anyone in their right mind take a panda called An-noying?”
“Because,” she said indignantly, “I am more beautiful than you; I am a better climber than you; I don’t smell like stagnant water; and my name is An!”
“I don’t smell like stagnant water,” protested Ping.
“No. You smell like running water,” she snickered, “running through a poo-pit full of dead monkey brains and six hundred bad eggs wriggling with maggots.”
“He who smelt it, dealt it,” he said childishly. “And for the record, I’m a much better climber than you.”
“Okay,” she said. “I accept your challenge!”
Then without waiting to say, “Ready, steady, go!” An pushed Ping out of the way with her stomach and ran toward the nearest tree, shouting, “Loser!” over her shoulder.
Picking himself up, Ping raced after her and started climbing. He caught up near the top of the tree, clambered over her back, and stretched out to reach the highest branch.
While they were sitting at the top of the tree, An took a moment to be serious.
“It’s probably for the best,” she said, “that the London pandas haven’t written back.”
“For you, maybe,” said Ping, “but not for me.”
“Yes, for me… I don’t want you to leave,” she said. “You’re my twin brother. You’re a part of me and if you go away, I’ll miss you.”
“It’s only for an adventure,” Ping said, giving his sister a hug. “I’ll come back.”
Nonetheless, it looked like An was going to get her wish. After three weeks of fruitless sky-watching, Ping finally gave up waiting. He sent his sister away, rejected all her attempts to play with him, and curled up in a shady corner of the clearing.
“What’s the matter?” asked his mother.
“I’m never going to leave this place,” he sighed. “Hui said he’d be back with my answer in a couple of days. It’s been weeks. Now I’m never going to find out what they’re like in London. And if I don’t know that, how am I ever going to impress the rangers?”
“A bird only learns to fly when it stops trying to fly,” his mother said calmly.
“How can that be?” said Ping. “Surely if a bird stops trying to fly, it crashes to the ground!”
“I mean you should relax,” she told him.
And sure enough, after five minutes of lying on his back, Ping had a brilliant idea. Flying! That was it. Of course. He could impress the rangers without the letter from London. A flying panda was guaranteed to stand out in a crowd. Who had ever seen a bear-bird before? He would be a star and London would beg him to visit. And if by some unfortunate misunderstanding he was still not picked for the panda exchange program, he could always fly himself to London.
I mean, how hard can it be to fly? he reasoned. Hui’s been doing it since he was a little chick and he’s tiny, whereas I am huge and my arms are massively strong. Once I get them flapping, I should be able to fly for miles, he thought.
So that was the plan.
All he needed to do now was find a way to get airborne. Launching his heavy body into the air was going to be the difficult part. Luckily, though, Ping was a panda who always looked on the bright side and believed that no problem was too hard to solve with some clever thinking.
“A catapult!” he shouted suddenly. “A giant panda catapult!”
It had been Hui who’d told Ping what a catapult was. Hui had seen a boy using one once to knock cans off a log. Ping’s idea, therefore, was to build a large Y-shaped wooden frame out of bamboo and tie a vine across the gap, which would stretch when he leaned against it and then catapult him into the air when he took both feet off the ground at the same time.
And this was not the end of his brainstorm—because if he positioned his catapult on the edge of a very tall cliff, he would have further to fall before he hit the ground—and that would give him more time to master the technique of arm-flapping. The plan was nothing short of brilliant.
He built his catapult on the ridge known as Do Not Feed The Bears Ridge because it had a DO NOT FEED THE BEARS sign embedded in the grass on the summit. It took him almost a whole morning, and when he had finished, who should come nosing around but An.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Learning to fly,” replied Ping, casually leaning back against the stretchy vine.
An’s black-and-white face turned white as she peered over the edge of the cliff.
“That’s a long way down,” she squeaked. “Isn’t it a bit dangerous?”
“Of course it’s dangerous,” Ping told her. “If it wasn’t dangerous I wouldn’t get myself noticed, would I?”
“Then don’t do it,” begged An. “You’ll end up lying face down in the ravine, squashed as flat as a panda-pancake.”
“No can do,” he said, leaning back as far as he dared. “My mind’s made up.”
Then he lifted one foot off the ground and was just about to lift the other, when there was an urgent cry from the sky.
“Ping!”
The panda cub looked up and could not contain his excitement.
“Hui!” he yelled. “At last! You’re back!”
“Don’t lift your other foot!” shouted the exhausted grandala bird.
“But I’m just about to make history,” Ping replied. “Stick around and you’ll see a giant panda fly!”
“Well, you might want to wait a second,” urged Hui. “I’ve got a letter for you, Ping, all the way from London.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Hui flapped his wings like a hummingbird so that he could hover above Ping’s head and read the letter over his friend’s shoulder, while An jumped up and down behind her brother’s back trying to get a good view.
“Oh, please let me look!” she cried.
“No,” he replied. “I know you. You’ll only tell me not to go.”
“You don’t know what the letter says yet,” she insisted. “And why would I tell you not to go?”
“Because you’re not like me,” said Ping. “You and Mom love it here in Wolagong, living life in the slow lane, sucking on bamboo, and staring at the visitors. But I am an adventurer and this letter could be the beginning of my new life in London!”
He was so excited that he started to hiccup. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said, standing on his head to make the hiccups go away. “Sit down over there and I’ll let you see it when I’ve finished.”
An moved away, picked up a stick of half-chewed bamboo, and shoved it into her mouth while Ping waited for the hiccups to subside. Then he rolled himself the right way up again and smoothed out the piece of paper with a trembling paw.
Ping read the letter not once, not twice, but three times, and then fin
ally out loud so that An could share in his excitement. Jack was clearly a very important panda—queens did not consort with any old riff-raff. Ping was going to London!
“‘Bring an umbrella!’” he quoted to his twin sister. “Jack didn’t say, ‘If you come, bring an umbrella,’ but, ‘Bring an umbrella.’ It’s a done deal. I’m going to London Zoo!”
“But it’s not a done deal,” An pointed out; “not until the tall ranger says so.”
Ping knew that An was right. That was another annoying thing about her—she was always right. To stand a chance of going to England, he would have to convince the tall ranger that he, Ping, was the perfect candidate.
So he devoted the rest of the day to making himself look as English as possible—by knitting himself a sweater out of moss and picking out a sturdy helmet from a family of tortoises to fend off the cats and dogs when they started raining.
Then he took himself off into the forest to practice his bowing. If the tall ranger could only see what a model English gentleman Ping was, then hopefully he, and not Gao, would be chosen to fly to London.
Unfortunately, Ping did not know what a bow was. He practiced hard for several hours doing what he thought was a bow, but when he performed it the next morning in front of the tall ranger and a truckload of camera-happy visitors, they just looked on dumbstruck—as in front of them danced a mossy-sweatered, tortoise-hatted panda, waving its arms and legs, and shaking its head, before turning around and wiggling its bottom in the air in a manner so rude that frankly it would have shocked the Queen to the tip of her tiara. The tall ranger was convinced that Ping had some sort of fever and sent him to the veterinarian to rest.
His mother shook her head and said that she was not surprised.
“You’ve only got yourself to blame,” she shouted after him as he was driven off. “Pandas are not designed to dance, Ping. Pandas are to dance what elephants are to rollerskating.”
Ever since he could remember, Ping did not like going to the veterinarian. There was always something unpleasant involved. If the veterinarian wasn’t pressing down on Ping’s tongue with a popsicle stick, he was making him take horrible-tasting medicine.