The Lady and the Panda (34 page)

The days without nourishment had taken their toll on the baby, who
was then near death. “It's a wonder she survived at all,” Harkness said. Distraught, Harkness scrambled to get some warm formula into the panda but was rebuffed again and again. “Diana was a sickly child when I got her,” Harkness said. “I tried every way to make her eat. I tried putting furs around the bottle, but she just simply refused to touch it.” The struggle with the traumatized animal would go on for more than fortyeight anxious hours. Then there was a break. “I was ready to give up hope when on the third day Diana finally showed signs that she was interested in life.”

The baby panda Diana, who would become known as Mei-Mei.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

Once the baby was taking the milk, Harkness packed up, mustered the troops, and got to Chengdu as quickly as possible.

By December 31, her months of deprivation were over. In the big city, she indulged in every gratification she could. “I reveled in the luxury of a hot bath, coffee, and buttered toast for breakfast, and a clean dress instead of dirty, ragged trousers,” she said. Bringing fifty rare pheasants, which required three separate porters, back to the city, she celebrated with friends. There was an extravagant, elegant dinner party in which guests wore formal dinner clothes and gathered around a gleaming table set with white linen, polished silver, delicate wine goblets, and decorated with pink camellias. This new panda would be fêted in high style just as Su-Lin had been.

At one point, Associated Press correspondent James A. Mills stopped by to snap pictures. He caught Harkness and her crowd frolicking with the world's latest wonder. The weather was chilly enough for topcoats, but the revelers slipped them off for the session out on a wool blanket spread across the garden lawn. Mills's black-and-white shots would be a rarity—for in them, the American didn't play the society matron. Instead, he captured a happy, more natural Harkness, wearing a ribbedwool boatneck sweater, cuffed wide-leg pants, and dress shoes whose laces crisscrossed up past her bare ankles. Her hair was pulled back simply. There was a slight puffiness under her eyes—a hint, perhaps, of the long months of loneliness up-country. But nonetheless, without turban and fur coat, she appeared fresh and young. She looked directly into the camera and smiled.

The photographs showed Wang joining in the fun. Sitting on the blanket, wearing a cherished winter helmet with earflaps pulled down over his head, he cuddled the little panda against the great padding of his coat and pants.

For the public, everything would be smiles. No one would have to know about the complete melancholy Harkness had experienced over the months beforehand. Few would ever hear of the death of the nearly adult panda Yin. That was bleached out of the public telling, either by Harkness herself or by her friends in the press.
The China Journal
was
one of the few publications, perhaps the only one, to refer to the incident, and then only in the vaguest terms.

It appears that Yin must have already been dead by the time the Harkness expedition hightailed it out of Wassu-land and to Chengdu, for the American covered that journey as quickly as she had the year before with Quentin Young. She simply couldn't have kept that pace if the team had been burdened by the transportation problems a large panda would have presented. How Yin died was addressed only obliquely later in a letter from Harkness to the Beans in Brookfield. She was convinced, she said, that the animal had sustained internal injuries from the hunting dogs, and that she had never truly recovered from them in captivity. Whatever the details of Yin's end, it must have been devastating to Harkness. In her code of honor, the death of a panda in her care was a paramount sin.

HARKNESS HAD COME
to Hankou—“the bunghole of creation,” according to Joseph Stilwell—to obtain travel permits from the upper reaches of government. There was a long road between this city and the Brookfield Zoo, with much to overcome. Even when she got to Chicago, she knew there might be a very big problem to deal with. It was a male panda she had promised, and now it appeared she had another female. Later, this one too, like Su-Lin, would be revealed to be yang, not yin.

If she were able to book a plane to Hong Kong, she could grab a boat to Shanghai, then sail back to America. Things went better than expected. Officials in Hankou not only gave her the paperwork she needed, they secured her free transit aboard a passenger plane bound for Hong Kong, where she planned to meet up with Quentin Young.

At 8
A.M.
on Saturday, January 8, Harkness flew out of Hankou. Less than five hours later, “the queerest passenger ever to arrive in Hongkong by air landed” in a Eurasia plane, according to the
South China Morning Post.
The pair was a sensation.

Surrounded by eager reporters and photographers through the few hours before her boat sailed, the successful collector wouldn't have had
much of a chance to speak seriously with Young, who was now the father of a baby girl. They at least made arrangements to work together once again.

By Thursday, January 13, Harkness was in Shanghai, once again the object of a fresh yet familiar media frenzy, speaking with such newspaper pals as Woo Kyatang of the
China Press
from her room at the Palace.

Ruth Harkness and her baby panda emerge from the wilds in high style.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

Done up like a movie star in an elegant mandarin coat, which some thought brought out “the dark, sharp features of her American Indian ancestry,” she charmed them all with talk of the expedition. Understanding just what they were after, the old pro depicted the whole trek as “one grand thrill.”

The city was still under the threat of hostilities, though the Japanese ruled over only the Chinese section. The International Settlement itself was breathing again, with many of the big luxury ships resuming service, the nightclubs back open for business, and the Palace Hotel having replaced the plate glass in its front windows. Ernie Kaai's Swing Orchestra played the newly decorated Metropole Ballroom, known for its moving scenery. And the movies
The Good Earth
and
Lost Horizon
were beginning their runs here.

Everything wasn't normal, of course. Fireworks, for instance, would be banned for the upcoming Chinese New Year celebrations, and there was still an outrageous 11:30
P.M.
curfew. Fights broke out anywhere, with dance-hall girls sometimes refusing to oblige Japanese customers. Arguments all too easily erupted between Western and Japanese patrons.

The Japanese were beginning to assert their authority, censoring and shuttering some Chinese newspapers. A few telegraph offices were closed. And before the month was out, the papers would report that unknown terrorists had lobbed hand grenades out of car windows in both the International Settlement and Frenchtown.

EVEN IF THIS
was just a shadow of the old Shanghai, Harkness was the toast of it once again. To cope with the hectic schedule she had the help of Floyd James, and, as much would be made of it in the press, she hired an amah to care for the panda. Photographs of the woman, dressed in high-collar tunic and silk pants, bottle-feeding Diana appeared in the
Shanghai Times.

Harkness, like many mothers, found herself more relaxed the second time around. The
China Press
reported that she and James had jumped at every cry of Su-Lin's. But with Diana, who was three times the size SuLin had been on arrival, the paper said, “there is less anxiety. Su Lin was the first panda ever held in captivity, and there was no precedent as to the manner in which it should be fed and otherwise attended to. But with the bouncing Diana it is different.”

Harkness's celebrity only escalated as reviews of her book,
The Lady
and the Panda,
which was excerpted in
The Christian Science Monitor,
began pouring in from the States.

The travelogue's style was in keeping with the genre of the day—light and witty, vague on personal details. Yet Harkness couldn't fail to shine through—her story was a rollicking good read, often poetic, and always respectful of Chinese culture. Her affair with Young nearly lifted right up from between the lines in her descriptions of him.

With the publication, her glory was burnished at nearly every turn.
Time
magazine,
The New York Times,
the
New York World Telegram,
and countless others seemed besotted. “The book amply testifies the romantic courage of Mrs. Harkness—a city bred woman who ventured into a foreign wilderness with no preparation beyond the reading of adventure stories,”
Time
noted.
The New York Times Book Review
said the “story of achievement” had been told “with enthusiasm and charm,” “with disarming frankness” and “descriptive skill” and was “one of the sprightliest travel books of recent months.”

For better or worse, to most, the Ruth Harkness story centered on gender. The reviewer in the daily
New York Times
reported that
The Lady and the Panda
truly deflated some of the macho posturing of he-men explorers. “It beautifully debunks quite a lot of the big-game-and-a-bookto-come explorer's art.” And
The Christian Science Monitor
likened her bravery to “the insouciance of ladies who go bargain hunting.”

Yet some wondered why this woman couldn't be more like a man.
Time
grumbled that
The Lady and the Panda
was “a woman's book, full of distaff concern with clothes, medicines, the handsomeness of hunters.” Because she didn't write in the very male style of other explorers, one
New York Times
review accused her of verging on “baby talk in her account of Su Lin's troubles and travels on her way to America.”

What no one could miss, in any of the reviews, was Harkness's love for China and the Chinese.
The New York Times
said the “grace” of the Chinese people was prominent in the book. And its Sunday
Book Review
said that in China Harkness had “kept her eyes and heart wide open.”

WHILE A WINTER CHILL
settled on Shanghai, up in Harkness's hotel room life was quite cozy, with cocktails before a small fire. Yet, sipping a whiskey, smoking a cigarette, and looking out across the open waters of the Huangpu from her hotel at dusk, she wouldn't have been able to keep darker thoughts at bay. For her, twilight always brought reflection and longing, and now there was more reason than ever for a rush of intense, bittersweet feeling. What had she accomplished? Who was she? Where was her life going? Would she always be alone?

The upending of everything fit only too well with Buddhist teachings about the temporary nature of life: “So you should view all of the fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud; A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.” There was always a lesson to be learned, with life giving instruction each second of the day, but in the aftermath of this trip, Harkness would have to struggle for comprehension.

There were other, more practical matters to worry over too. She would have to deal with Brookfield now.

While the press was kicking up its heels over this panda, Harkness knew the zoo was not so pleased. In fact, it had retained the right to refuse a female panda. When she first wired them with the news, she made the situation clear, addressing the cable to Su-Lin and writing
HAPPY NEW YEAR SMALL SISTER NO HUSBAND
. “Su-Lin” had wired back,
CONGRATULATIONS HAPPY NEW YEAR DO TRY GET ME HUSBAND ALSO AM WELL AND HOPEFUL.

The
Chicago Times
had then published an open letter to Su-Lin saying, “You needn't start a hope chest, Su-Lin, and there's no use sewing those little things. It's a girl.… Sorry, Su-Lin, but it was the best we could do.” Harkness would just have to keep her fingers crossed and hope that by the time she and the new panda baby arrived in Chicago, riding a wave of fame, they would be welcome. But even as she enchanted Shanghai, the officers of the Chicago Zoological Society were meeting at the Palmer House, declaring that a male panda for Su-Lin
would be the top priority for the year. The
Chicago American
speculated that a male specimen would fetch anywhere from ten to fifteen thousand dollars.