The Lady and the Panda (8 page)

As mismatched as they were, both Harkness and Smith were determined to capture a giant panda. And as they sized each other up over
those steamy summer nights, each thought the other was wholly incapable of accomplishing the task.

Despite Harkness and Smith's building wariness, the marathon sessions did not slow down. Smith couldn't afford to let Harkness go—he was trying to reel her in, and he had laid out what he thought was the most practical strategy, a scheme that he reasoned would appeal to a city sophisticate like Harkness. If she would simply bankroll his operation, not participate in it, the two of them could stay in Shanghai, letting his hunters do all the work.

Harkness was appalled. She began to feel she knew where the trouble in Bill's blighted expedition had lain. Here was Smith selling himself as an experienced resident collector—he knew the ropes, had the contacts, the infrastructure—yet he simply never produced. Poor Bill had made it out to the edge of panda country, only to be wrenched back because Smith had not managed to obtain permissions. Even now, at the time Ruth Harkness came into the picture, Smith was trying to revive his operation in Sichuan, still finding it impossible to secure those permits.

Through all Smith's reminiscences, she had been reading between the lines. The arc of his life story was a troubling one. Even though he had managed some important specimen hauls to places like the Field Museum in Chicago, he ultimately appeared either the unluckiest or most incompetent collector going. As she reviewed the mishaps of his long career, the portrait that emerged was of a man always ready with a justification, eager to point a finger, to play people off one another, to scam a little extra cash, and to skirt a code of ethics he claimed to live by.

Born in Japan in 1882 to missionary parents, Smith had gone west for college—attending four schools in four years before graduating from Bowdoin. His professional life began in banking and business on Wall Street, then continued in London, Bombay, and Shanghai. Here he wore suits and toiled over smudged figures on bank ledgers, all the while pining to join the ranks of young men from the West who raced through the city on their way to exotic adventure in the borderland with Tibet.

He went on expeditions when he could, but his big break eluded him
until he was nearly fifty, when the Field Museum sent him out to gather specimens of the still little-known fauna of western China. The assignment, initially conceived as a ten-year survey, was a windfall for Smith, who hungered to make a name for himself in the field.

From 1930 to 1932 he was able to live the life of a collector. During this period he provided the museum with seven thousand specimens, or “deaders” as he sometimes referred to them: mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish. It was a sizable catch, in keeping with that of similar expeditions. But the exhausting work certainly wasn't making him rich, and his desire for a panda began to burn early. Even though the Field Museum told him to forget about the animal in order to concentrate on other wildlife, a panda, he wrote to his sister on Long Island, would be the ultimate prize.

Smith hoped to accomplish the goal the way he did all his hunting— not so much by chasing animals himself as by setting up an elaborate network of camps—seven in this case—staffed by teams of local hunters. He maintained throughout his life that this was the only sensible approach to wildlife collection in China. It was part of the reason he never had the allure of some of his more charismatic contemporaries, who thrived on field life and enjoyed the actual hunting.

His long typed reports to the Field Museum over several years read like an encyclopedia of excuses. Nearly every single one informs his handlers of new, unexpected delays in progress, in shipping, in permits— blaming them on a running catalog of difficulties: rain, bandits, inept or treacherous hunters, political upheaval, “certain reactionary elements,” dissension among hunters, official obstruction, and betrayal.

He lost hundreds of specimens to marauding bandits. When his camp was burned, he also lost chemicals for specimen preservation. It was at a critical moment too, for shortly afterward, a coveted giant panda was shot by his men. The specimen moldered in a charcoal burner's hut for seven long months, emerging in very poor condition. Hundreds of beautiful bird trophies he reported collecting often vanished before he had the chance to ship them out to those who had commissioned them,
though, of course, he may have exaggerated the size and quality of his losses to his bosses.

Added to all that, his health often gummed up the works. Rotted teeth needed extracting. Intestines, heart, and nerves were shaky. There were battles against tuberculosis, headaches, and raging infections. He was as familiar with the hospitals of Shanghai as with the routes that led west.

It appeared that whenever big events occurred in the field, Smith was absent. He was away “in quest of supplies” the time bandits burned down a major part of his operation. He was not with the men when that giant panda was shot. The worst debacle of the expedition occurred when a huge cache of specimens for the museum languished in-country, unbeknownst to Smith, because of a shipping mix-up. Smith felt terrible about the problem when he learned of it, coming to believe later that the repercussions were dire. Though the Field Museum had contracted him for a decadelong survey of Chinese animals, the project was abruptly curtailed. About a year and a half into the endeavor, Smith was told to have his work wrapped up in six months. The museum cited the financial strain of the Depression as the cause.

Smith was stunned. This should have been the period of high payoff for all the foundations he had laid. Now he was being suddenly recalled. It was unfair. He fretted that the shipping fiasco, which was not his fault, had prompted the museum to drop him.

Ultimately, Smith was able to continue his association with the museum, if on a less formal basis. He would be freelancing, which would allow the institution to choose his offerings à la carte rather than having to underwrite the entire tour. Who wouldn't stew? He was dumped off a secure payroll only to endure the sight of others, who were bankrolled by museums and academies or could finance their own way, launching lavish expeditions from Shanghai, which were covered by an adoring press.

In the words of one associate, Smith “lived precariously.” The haggard and luckless adventurer would forever be chasing after the next check, straining to maintain a high profile while an army of Ivy League
boys paraded through town. So, now, in the summer of 1936, Smith kept at Harkness, pushing the notion of running an expedition from Shanghai. He could not see that she was repelled by the arrangement he doggedly pursued. For her part, she was rather more astute about him. She saw that for Smith “fame and fortune” were “always just around the corner. The next trip will surely make him wealthy.” In fact, Smith, counting on Harkness's money, had already written to the Field Museum claiming he would be back in action very shortly.

Smith had faced one disappointment after another, according to his wife. And he would soon reach a breaking point. Harkness would later see clearly what she suspected then: Smith wasn't up to the task.

Despite all his experience and big talk, Smith would just be a liability. “I think Ajax is out,” she wrote home within a week of her arrival, on July 25. “He is anything but well, and as much of a dear as he is, is totally impractical in many ways, and I cannot afford to take chances of any kind.”

WITH THAT SETTLED
in her mind, Harkness moved forward. On a hot, rainy Sunday, just after dawn, she flew to the American embassy in Beijing, where the diplomatic corps was reluctantly in the process of shifting power over to Nanking, the old Ming capital, now the seat of government under Chiang Kai-shek. Harkness had hatched her own strategy, and teaming with Smith was just one of her husband's mistakes she planned not to repeat. The other was getting tangled in the legendary Chinese bureaucracy that had left Bill languishing in Shanghai for months on end. To conduct a scientific expedition into the Chinese interior, one had to appease many governmental agencies. It was a tedious, capricious, and time-consuming process. That just wasn't for Ruth Harkness.

From high in the air, on her first flight ever—“and how I adored it!” she reported—she looked down with wonder at the endless miles of lush farmland in “every conceivable shade of green velvet.” The whole country seemed to be a garden segmented into a thousand irregular shapes and sizes. She peered out the window, mulling over what she was about to do.

She had had a flash of insight into how to circumvent all the predictable problems. She would use the great wall of skepticism that always greeted her to her own advantage. Everyone kept reminding her that she was not a scientist, not a zoologist, just a dress designer. Fine, she thought. If I'm not a scientist, why should I apply for scientific permits? Why outline a collecting blueprint? If she got none of the benefits of a big, sanctioned expedition, why should she be saddled with its strictures?

She could think of it all quite philosophically, and see it through the prism of yin and yang: in weakness there is the seed of strength. From a position of powerlessness, Ruth Harkness drew power. She turned the dynamic she was presented with on its head. She would not rouse the dragons who guard forms in triplicate. She would tiptoe by them. She would go on record with the embassy about her destination, and she would even mention her silly little panda dream, but she would leave it at that. For Harkness, the fact that it meant breaking the rules wasn't a problem; it was more like an added benefit.

Once her mind was made up, things happened quickly in Beijing. The moment Harkness presented letters to the legation, she was ushered in to see Ambassador Nelson Trusler Johnson. The portly middleaged official knew a great deal about previous panda hunters, including Bill, whose exploits made up “a rather extensive file.” A good part of that sheaf of papers would, no doubt, have concerned her husband's propensity to disappear without a trace. But Ruth Harkness liked the ambassador. He had a reputation for being knowledgeable about the East, and most important, Harkness heard that he possessed a rare understanding and sympathy toward the Chinese.

Johnson advised her to travel to Nanking. There she could find out more about the turbulent conditions in Sichuan, and she could begin applying for scientific permits through the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Academia Sinica. Harkness kept mum. In a way, she would be following the Daoist edict of effortless or right action, which Johnson himself had displayed in calligraphy up on the wall of his office: WU WEI ERH WU PU WEI, Through not doing, all things are done.

If she needed a sign that she had made the proper decision, she got
it at the end of the interview. As the ambassador ushered her out, he couldn't resist a parting remark about catching a panda. “Now be sure to take plenty of salt to put on his tail,” Johnson said patronizingly, “and do let me know when you've got him.”

She must have smiled to herself as she stepped over the official threshold and out into the ancient streets of what was no longer being called Peking, or “northern capital,” but, under its changed status, Peiping, or “Northern Peace.” Sunlight and the dust blowing in from the Gobi formed a scrim through which Harkness felt she passed into another dimension. Again, just as in Hong Kong, there was an overwhelming sense of familiarity, a spiritual tug that she could not explain. “A sudden feeling swept over me that all this was not new in spite of the fact that I had never been in Peiping before,” Harkness wrote, “that I had seen those great walls that are fifty feet high, and sixty feet thick at the base, that I had known the dull red of the bricks, and the massive watch towers.” In the filtered light, the sounds of hawkers' cries, the tinkling of barbers' bells, the sight of camels burdened with produce, all seemed comfortingly familiar.

With the exception of one acquaintance, an American woman, Harkness avoided her countrymen. All the letters of introduction to fellow westerners remained unopened inside her purse. Instead, she hired a tall rickshaw driver named Gao for the fortnight she would be in the city, bristling at the Western custom of calling someone like him “boy.” She said he was for her “horse, guide, and mentor.” Through the arid hot city, she saw the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Confucius—ancient gnarled cedars, brilliant yellow enamel-tiled roofs. She met silversmiths and embroiderers and admired their exotic jewelry and silks. There were the dazzling greens, blues, and yellows of the huge glazed ceramic Nine Dragon Screen, its great twisting monsters frolicking in foamy surf. Gao even took her to meet his wife and family at home, serving her tea and moon cakes. It was all so beautiful. From the first shafts of morning sun until dusk, when “the shadows rise like purple ink drowning the Imperial City,” the trip had taken on the slowmoving and fateful feeling of a dream.

From Beijing, Harkness followed Johnson's instructions and flew to Nanking, but her visit was cut short because of illness. With a bad case of bronchitis developing, she nearly lost her hearing during the highaltitude plane ride. She abruptly returned to Shanghai, where surprises were waiting to explode like firecrackers in a barrel.

G
ERRY RUSSELL FINALLY ARRIVED
in late August, taking a room at the Palace Hotel across the hall from Harkness. Initially Harkness was overjoyed by his presence—“we are clicking beautifully,” she said. Their planning sessions jumped into high gear, with both constantly dashing across the hallway, throwing open each other's doors, and charging in— despite the fact that due to the heat, each was often in a state of near complete undress.

The weeks before his arrival had been tough for Harkness. A case of dysentery, complicated by colitis, had landed her in the same hospital where Bill had died. The illness was potentially fatal, and common to any area, like China, that used human feces as fertilizer. Doubled over with intestinal spasms, spiking a high fever, and suffering from dehydration, Harkness was told, she reported, “that an operation is the only thing that will fix me up.”