The Lady and the Panda (11 page)

A dinner was arranged so that Harkness could meet Jack Young's
wife, Su-Lin. As a newlywed two years before, Su-Lin had accompanied Jack and Quentin on an arduous nine-month expedition from China into Tibet, where it had been her job to preserve botanical samples. She was from then on considered the first Chinese woman explorer, even though she was actually Chinese American.

Barely coming up to Harkness's shoulder, Su-Lin certainly did not look like a mountaineer. Pretty, with shoulder-length black hair parted on the left, she was clothed in the style that was all the rage in Shanghai—a long silk overdress, slit to the knees, exposing matching silk petticoats underneath. At the time Harkness met her, Su-Lin was working as a reporter for several publications in Shanghai, including
The China Journal
and the
North China Daily News.
Her name was always popping up in the society columns, and Emily Hahn, that hard-to-please party girl, would later pronounce her “glamorous.”

Harkness was thrilled that this pampered daughter of a New York nightclub owner had climbed to elevations of over fifteen thousand feet, tracked bears, and endured nights on her own in the field while Jack and Quentin were off hunting. Su-Lin told her she had long ago been diagnosed with a heart murmur and that her only previous camping experience had been in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

She had some admonishing advice for Harkness. The travel would be dirty and uncomfortable. In Tibet, Su-Lin had sometimes stayed in yak-hair tents, drinking yak-butter tea, warmed over a yak-dung fire. Everything she ate was suffused with stray strands of yak hair. The smell of it all was unfortunately unforgettable to her. Everything she did drew an audience—she could never bathe in a river or brush her teeth without attracting a crowd—and the curiosity would be magnified for Harkness. Besides that, fleas and lice infested the little ramshackle inns along the route.

That evening, as Jack and the others laughed and told stories, Quentin looked on shyly. Across the table, his sister-in-law was keeping an eye on him. He did not need to speak for her to guess what he was feeling. She saw what was passing between her young, virile brother-in-law and the free-spirited Harkness. A flirtation, however subtle, was simmering.
Once they were in the snowy wilds of Tibet, a love affair between Quentin Young and Ruth Harkness was, Su-Lin believed, “inevitable.”

HARKNESS SENSED
she was walking with destiny—her destiny, and it seemed to have been waiting here for her forever. Curled up in a big chair in her room at the Palace, she contemplated these matters endlessly. She could meditate “by the hour,” she said, “with a feeling of the universe … and that there was just one little door to which if I had the key would unlock the mystery…a strong, strong feeling. The whole atmosphere of the Orient—particularly China—is spiritual. You can almost feel it.”

She felt so perfectly aligned on the rails of her own fate that even when those who would be revealed as enemies leaned on her, they seemed to be pushing her further in the direction of her goal.

“I am looking for something,” she reported home. She was searching for “the Way,” she said, but not in a strict religious sense. “I have discovered this much at least—that as long as one is ‘earthbound’ by the desire for possessions (that aspect does not worry me) and also by people, one will never get anywhere. I am convinced that the human mind is capable of anything—absolutely anything.” But to achieve something, a person must, she said, “arrive at a definite spiritual basis of thought.”

Coming to China had been less a decision than a command. It was like a story that had already been partially written. Perhaps this country felt so much like home because she was being reborn here. As she struggled to express all that she was feeling, she could only laugh at herself. She wrote to Perkie, “You are probably saying the girl is either tight or tinged with the madness of the East.”

What she could say with absolute clarity was that it had all brought her a profound happiness. “China has given me a peace of mind that I never had before, and a calmness that is a great relief after the tumult of the last two years.” Following her bout of gloom over Smith, in a cycle she would often experience, she felt euphoric. “After mature thought and deliberation, and a journey half way round the world,” she wrote, “I have
come to the profound conclusion that this world of ours is the most fascinating of all possible places to be, and my God, Perkie it's full of wonderful people. I am so dam glad to be alive, and in China, and about to stalk a Panda, I could scream and yell and howl for joy in spite of the fact that I am clutching a thermometer in my mouth and the temperature seems to be 100. Dam bugs aren't out of my system yet.”

BESIDES THE LINGERING
effects of her illness, there were a few other annoyances dragging on Harkness's elation. Gerald Russell was one of them. Some of the old issues were resurfacing between them, plus he had started in on her about “dealing with the Chinese.” He distrusted the Young brothers. She sputtered about this in a letter home: “Jerry [
sic
] says, ‘It is possible that Jack wants Quentin with us to protect his future interests in Szechuan. Perhaps he himself wants, when the time is ripe, to be the first to secure a panda. Quentin, not dishonestly of course, will simply see that we have a nice trip but that we just never get the Panda. A procedure that would not to the Chinese mind perhaps represent dishonesty.’”

Russell may well have come under Smith's influence on this score. Not only was Smith suspicious of the Chinese in general, but he had a grudge against Jack Young in particular. Smith had accused him of stealing birds and business from him before. While complaining to the Field Museum earlier, he had made the preposterous claim that he had taught the youthful adventurer everything he knew about hunting.

As Russell raised his concerns, Harkness strongly disagreed. “My personal feeling is that Quentin loves this sort of thing for itself,” she said. In Quentin Young, she saw a youth in love with adventure.

But the problems with Russell gnawed at her for weeks.

On what would have been her second wedding anniversary, September 9, she had tea with Gerry. It was “a day of Chinese rain and dampness, lassitude, and wondering,” she said. The young Brit was a killjoy. “We are like two dogs always sniffing each other, and never making up our minds whether we like the smell or not,” she said.

Soon enough, she would know for sure that Russell was not for her. The fact was that the more time she spent with Reib and Young, the more Russell suffered in comparison. With Reib, the world was an expansive, wondrous place; Russell, on the other hand, she said, “simply crushed every ounce of naturalness I had and depressed me to the Nth degree.” She had brought him on board to begin with only out of insecurity. Before she ever got to China, she had thought—foolishly, she realized now—that she “must have a man with me.” Russell had been to China, was willing to go, and had seemed so fond of Bill. But now her eyes were open. The trip wasn't a lark. It was no typical expedition with jobs for men to sign up for. It was a mission. She didn't want anything or anyone slowing the momentum or sullying the spirit of it all.

And there was so much threatening to pull it down. In addition to Russell, somehow Smith was still in the picture. He was a broken record, visiting her in her room, which by now was filled with expedition gear, steamer trunks, and maps, drinking whiskey sodas, and warning her darkly of the calamities that awaited her. Over and over, he pointed out that she knew nothing of the language, the people, the terrain. He told her that hunting a giant panda exclusively without gathering other wildlife was naïve and impractical. Smith, or “Zoology Jones,” as she would later refer to him in a book about her experiences, “wanted, of course, to continue the arrangement with me that he and Bill had,” Harkness wrote, “but in the first place I couldn't afford to finance another person, and I had the utmost confidence in Quentin. He knew the country, the language; I felt that I did not need a foreigner; in fact, I did not want another foreigner, for by that time I had seen enough of the attitude of most Westerners in China to heartily resent it.”

That little bit of attitude must have galled Smith, and Russell too. They would have had more than a few private words over it. But Harkness stood her ground. Her new, tougher stance meant Russell would be out also. Their differences had been making her miserable. And all efforts to hash things out with him had failed. By the second week of September, she had made up her mind.

“The VRYENGLISH GENTLEMAN is no longer with the Harkness
Asiatic Expedition,” she wrote home. Her dealings with Smith in particular had led her weeks before to steel herself. “I've decided that for a while at least that I am taking what I want, and not considering every body else.” She'd come to the conclusion that “one ought to be a bit hard boiled to get along.” Now she could be. She had the strength and the goods. “Sometimes it helps to have the whip hand that even a small amount of money gives one,” she said.

It didn't mean that Harkness intended to be overbearing or unprincipled. She felt that since she had underwritten Russell's travel to China, she was obliged now, in fairness, to hand him the money for his return ticket. She thought he loathed her for causing him to lose “a hell of a lot of face with his friends.” And when Russell dealt with the blow in the supremely British way of becoming even more polite, she took it as the most obvious sign possible that he was “just hating my guts.”

In the process of negotiating her course in Shanghai, she had, no doubt, made enemies. She had also picked up enough of the philosophical attitude she admired in the Chinese, so that all this wrangling did not distress her. Yes, she said, “Jerry [
sic
] I think behaved rather badly, and Ajax very much so, even trying to get money from me.… But it is all to the good, in a way, and all to be chalked up to experience, with out which life would be flat and dead.” Russell was about to provide even more excitement, though Harkness would not learn of it until she was far up the Yangtze.

SOMETHING ELSE
, of a very practical nature, was bothering Harkness— how would she and Young keep a captive four-hundred-pound bambooeating bear alive? Just how much of the specialized grass would it take? Once outside the area where bamboo thrived, what would they do? The scientific literature was of no help. Very little was known about pandas.

Late one night, restless with worry, she had an epiphany. It was something none of the old-hand experts had ever contrived. She wondered about finding a baby panda instead of an adult. It would solve all logistical problems—the animal would feed on formula, not bamboo, and
would be much easier to transport. It was preposterous enough to dream that she might find any panda, but a baby? “That was sheer, unadulterated madness,” she said. And yet it was a hunch. “A small voice, deep within me,” she said, “told me to prepare for that eventuality.” She got out of bed and by lamplight jotted down a note for herself: “Nursing bottles, nipples and dried milk,” she wrote, then turned out the light. It would be the most providential shopping list of her life.

AS HARKNESS SLEPT IN SHANGHAI
, far away in the Qionglai Shan, or mountains, of Sichuan, a pregnant giant panda was steadily consuming bamboo. Sitting upright, the great black-and-white bear, known as
beishung
to the Chinese, grabbed branches within easy reach of her big paws, which looked, with their wrist-bone-turned-thumb, like mittened hands. Placing the largest end in her mouth, she pulled the sprigs through her lips sideways, stripping the green leaves and discarding the denuded branches. It was the end of summer, still a lush time when she could eat her fill of the succulent foliage.

As she ate, the only sound in this quiet mountain home was the snapping of the bamboo, the rustling of the leaves. It looked like a placid life. But like all giant pandas, she was living on a knife edge.

She was a bear, after all, and built to eat meat. But like the rest of her kind, she was feeding almost exclusively on bamboo. This grass gives pandas so little nutrition that they must stuff themselves nearly round the clock to meet even a low threshold of energy. Certain animals, like cows, have systems that are designed to batter tough plant-cell walls and absorb plenty of nutrients. But not giant pandas. Some of their teeth evolved over time to crush plants better, but their stomachs remained steadfastly that of a carnivore.

It looked to one zoologist of the time as though pandas simply had “little interest in evolution.” These magnificent animals seemed so impractical, in what they eat, in the way they mate, and even in their flashy coloring. And yet whatever they've done has worked. They have roamed this planet far longer than man. It is the mystery of the giant pandas—
they have survived over millions of years even when other, seemingly more fit species have not.

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.