The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  On her first day in Chengdu the explorer arose with nothing but empty hours stretching before her. In the wake of having lost Quentin Young, as well as having had to exit Shanghai without equipment or plans, she had been unable to secure any arrangements at all. It was a miracle that she had made it this far. She would have to put together a team from here, and plot her course. There was no urgency, since Harkness, who knew that panda young were probably born toward the end of September, was after a baby again.

  Besides, the idleness was rather seductive. She and Cavaliere quickly fell into an easy pattern of companionship, developing the cozy rhythms of a couple. Kay would come home midday from work for lunch and a glass of wine. Dozily, he would then sit out in the courtyard for a spell, “sun helmet in hand, blue eyes twinkling, or perhaps squinting in the pale autumn sunshine.” After a bit, he would make a big show of his departure, saying dejectedly, “Well, dear girl, I must go to work.” Harkness enjoyed the daily ritual. He would sigh deeply for good measure, then flash his engaging smile to reveal it was all an act.

  In the afternoon Harkness might leaf through stale copies of Esquire or other American magazines that could be found lying around the house, or she would slip back to bed for a nap. Often, she would wander about Chengdu, sometimes shopping.

  She and Kay passed the evenings having long dinners, then sitting together in the living room. They might read by lamplight, or Cavaliere, who loved to fiddle with his radio, would tune in the news of the world. There was also the Victrola and the library of opera recordings that could, with the flick of a switch, turn the Chinese pavilion into a hissing and crackling Teatro Alla Scala.

  “I find myself sunk in a beautiful lethargy here,” Harkness wrote home. The tranquil time was uncharacteristic for both her and Cavaliere, yet they embraced it. A contented Kay suggested that should she not find her panda this season, the American adventuress might like to ride out the winter here with him, trying again the following year. She said she thought she would.

  She had her very best evening dress here at the pavilion, and for her thirty-seventh birthday, on September 21, Cavaliere uncorked a bottle of sparkling burgundy. As if to underscore how different this trip would be from the last, though, Harkness reported home that “it didn't sparkle.”

  Perhaps it was this reminder of the passage of time that prompted her to shake off the indolence. In part too, it was sparked by a reunion with her cook, Wang Whai Hsin. He had been so kind and loyal to her that despite all the reasons against it, she decided to launch the expedition with him alone. He was neither a hunter nor an explorer, and they had very little language in common. Still, by muddling through together, he could serve as interpreter, and by their mutual trust, they would direct the campaign. Her first expedition had been modest; this would be far smaller—just Harkness and Wang, hiring porters and hunters as needed. The paucity of her expedition gear—it would be whatever she could scrape together from the previous year's leftovers—had one benefit: they wouldn't require as many hired hands.

  Under the heading of essential items in a Harkness expedition, though, would come something others might consider a rather low priority—the wardrobe. Wang understood his boss only too well, immediately securing her a sophisticated, Shanghai-trained tailor. Harkness so indulged herself in the task of designing, sketching, and modifying her new apparel that some days she would have to lie down for naps in between fittings.

  “I have two new Chinese costumes you'll like,” she wrote to Perkie, “the sort of house lounging things that I love in the evening. One Chinese coat is regulation with embroidery—pale blue and one is a very old one, a black purple very heavy with gold and silk embroidery.” For about forty-five cents each, she also had two pairs of silk pants sewn—one red and one purple. She ordered up a sheepskin coat lined with cotton; Chinese cotton shirts; and, most outrageous, a yak-hair coat lined in green silk, “a camp tea gown thing,” she called it, for the cold nights she would be spending in the mountains.

  The next step was to survey the stored gear. It was a fright. Many items were ruined and unusable. Two old coats, one army-issue, the other sheepskin, were writhing with worms; boots were moldy; a half block of cheese had grown a thick fur coat. Much worse than that was the troubling fact that critical pieces were missing. Her tent, silk-stuffed sleeping bag, wool socks, wool shirts, and raincoat, to name just a few, had simply vanished. “The devil of it is,” she wrote home, “that all the evidence turns toward Jack Young.” Ching Yu and others on staff swore that when he came through on a trip through the area, Jack had helped himself to her stash. She resisted believing it, but, damningly, in among her stored things she discovered a notebook of Jack's that must have fallen out of his pocket.

  For Cavaliere, there was no hesitation. He trusted the word of his top servant. Incensed, he said he would never allow Jack Young to stay with him again. Harkness felt tremendously unhappy about the whole affair, not so much about the goods themselves, but she hated deceit, especially from someone she was so fond of.

  There was too much work to be done now anyway to stew. She set about cleaning guns, something she never imagined herself doing. Mulling over how haphazard this trip was compared with the last, she thought her chances for getting another panda were just as favorable.

  When she wasn't sorting and packing, she was writing. She had been able to produce two books before she left the States, and with the help and encouragement of her agent, George Havell, she hoped to make a living as a writer. The two of them thought she might be able to earn money steadily as she traveled. So, she typed away, sending regular dispatches—travelogues, war reports, stories—back to New York. She had no idea what was publishable, or even if the letters were making their way out of the country, since she wasn't hearing back from anyone. To be a writer, supporting herself through labor that came so naturally to her, was something she desperately wanted. But as weeks passed without a response from Havell, she faced the uncertainty with humor. “I have gone on with the letters that George Havell said he thought he could publish,” she wrote to Perkie in Connecticut, “and I should so like to know if they are useable—otherwise I am wasting my genius and my very precious time (I slept all afternoon). High-ho my dear.”

  Time was precious. It was something she had raced against and even transcended in the past. Now, on her second expedition, out of sorts with life, she would feel tortured by it over the long, cold, lonely months ahead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HIGH-ALTITUDE HELL

  The Face of the autumn moon freezes.

  Old and homeless, will and force are spent.

  The drip of the chill dew breaks off my dream,

  The cold wind harshly combs my bones.

  On the mat, the print of a sickly contour:

  Writhing cares twist in my belly.

  Doubtful thoughts find nothing to lean on:

  I listen at the least stir, and am disappointed…

  —MENG CHIAO

  AMISERABLE, DRENCHING RAIN christened the launch of Ruth Harkness's second Asiatic expedition on October 9, 1937. She and Wang and at least a dozen porters trudged through mile upon mile of slick, oozing mud as they headed for the mountains. Conceding nothing to the weather, they soldiered on for hours. By the end of the day, reaching the first inn, Harkness was in a foul mood. The rustic little place, no different from the year before, was intolerable to her this time around. Particularly when in the nighttime darkness she made her way out to the toilet, a communal pit built over a pigsty. Through the maggot-covered slats of the floor, she looked down at the animals, which greedily consumed human waste, grunting at her with anticipation. The year before, the “terlets” had been funny; now they disgusted her. Back in her room, it didn't take her long to abandon efforts to type a letter home. Everything she put on the page was “so dam depressed” she tore it all up, and tucked in for the night.

  Waking to clear skies the next morning, she stiffened her resolve for the long march, which under dry
conditions turned out to be a much more pleasant endeavor. By that evening, in a better frame of mind, she reached fairly cheerful lodgings, where she could rest comfortably, indulging in a cup of hot tea mixed with wine. She unpacked the typewriter, and as she was tapping out a newsy letter home, the fact that she was truly on her own began to sink in. Pulling the page from the carriage to look it over, she added an impassioned note longhand, set off urgently across the top: “I miss Quentin terribly. I hadn't realized what priceless companionship it was.”

  She probably missed him even more when she and Wang were back in their familiar old ghost temple in Wenchuan.

  Many friends called upon her over the next several days, allowing her once again to laugh with people even when there was no shared language. It seemed that everywhere she went, she ran into old friends. She and Wang had already begun to attract their former employees as they traveled. One night, a familiar hunter appeared like some apparition out of the gentle rain, placing a handful of dark walnuts in Harkness's palms as a gesture of good faith. By the time they reached Chaopo Valley, she and Wang had reconnected with every comrade from the first expedition, and had enlisted more men as well.

  As a staging area for many panda seekers, where native hunters and trackers could be hired for about $3.50 a month, Wenchuan was an important stop. Here Harkness and Wang happily reunited with their old crew leader. Whang Tsai Hsin, a holy man who Harkness said measured “no bigger than a boy,” had led the expedition's sacrificial ceremony the previous year. Seeing him now, she was struck once again by his “beautiful calm and gentle face.”

  It was vital to be as clear as possible with all the men about the decisions Harkness had made. Through Wang, she informed them that she wanted not just one panda this year, but two: a male and female. She even had their names picked out: Yang for the male, and Yin for the female.

  In order to accomplish such a thing, she had made another crucial determination—that she would forgo hunting in the mountains herself, instead holing up in the old castle at the entrance to the kingdom of the giant panda, two days' journey from here. She would sit tight in a central location while as many as one hundred hunters radiated out and scoured the forests. Though tactically astute, this decision would wreak havoc on her personally. Abstaining from what had given her great pleasure last year—the hard marches and rough travel—she would instead force herself into the kind of isolation she always feared.

  Before leaving the cheery confines of Wenchuan, Harkness, with Wang's help, made joss for the coming journey. In the shadow of the great green mountains that rose up behind the old village, she bowed to all the gods, burned the paper money, and lighted candles. She summoned her dreams, sending prayers upward in the smoke of fragrant incense to mingle with the low-hanging mist.

  With that sacred duty done, on the morning of October 19, she and Wang and a group of porters began their short journey to Chaopo.

  NO HOMECOMING was ever so like an exile. Early in the afternoon of October 20, Harkness, sick with a stubborn flu that would last weeks, Wang, and the porters reached the grim walls of the castle. Though familiar, it remained imposing as ever with its high stone ramparts and bulky wooden top stories. Set against a stubbled, nearly barren slope, and crowded by other desolate hillsides, it was flanked by the ruins of two watchtowers. They scrambled up the steep, crumbling stone stairs, picking their way through deserted rooms filled with the neglected artifacts of the old monks who had long since fled. There were battered prayer wheels, boards used to print prayer strips, and thousands of the strips themselves. Though its days as a lamasery were long gone, the “ancient, spicy odor of incense” still lingered in the air. Inside, there was no escaping the wind that howled down the mountains, plowing through the gaps in the walls and racing in frigid streams through the rooms.

  The adventurer and the cook staked out a corner of the castle high in the upper reaches: Harkness would have one large room, the least blighted, as her living quarters, and Wang the one adjacent. A small terrace overlooked the disintegrating wall and staircase below, allowing a view of the stark countryside. Containing a small, shrinelike enclosure in the corner, the balcony would make a perfect kitchen for Wang, who began unpacking his pot and frying pan, chopsticks and other utensils, producing much of it from underneath his coat. His little oven, complete with tiny door and rack, was made from a ten-gallon Standard Oil tin. In a niche high up in the little shrine, Harkness noted something protruding and questioned Wang. “Tiger bones, goodee joss, Master,” he replied.

  The ruined castle was Harkness's uncomfortable home during the cold months of 1937. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  Harkness rummaged through her bags for the several sets of oil sheets, which she began stringing across doorways and windows for some semblance of privacy and perhaps a bit of insulation. She would decorate as best she could with what little she had, tacking up the picture postcards of Su-Lin she had gotten from the Brookfield Zoo.

  As night fell, Harkness, sniffling, and blowing her raw, red nose, tried to make her camp cot snug with heavy wool blankets. She and Wang fought against the chill every way they could. A shallow plate in a little cookstove held one of the fires they kept going in the rooms, while Wang wore padded pants with several coats.

  It wasn't just the intensifying cold but the desolation that would seep into Harkness's veins over the coming months. She steadfastly warded off the inevitable for the first few weeks by setting tasks to keep herself busy. Some days Tibetan or Qiang villagers stopped by with their wares: rings, paintings of strange-looking gods, old prayer wheels caked in grime. Often they came to sell food. “A Jarung man would put his hand into his homespun robe and proudly produce a packet of wild honey wrapped in leaves,” she reported. Industrious local women, with children hauled in slings on their backs, would spin wool as they walked up to the castle—“A little basket of raw wool hung from their belts, and deftly they shredded and twisted it into yarn, which, with the flip of the wrist, wound itself on the spindle that hung dangling and swinging rhythmically.” They would bring vegetables, the likes of which Americans had never seen before. Harkness would always purchase something—stock for the larder, or a few gadgets, as she said, for friends back home.

  Sometimes people would hike in for medical attention, imploring the castle-bound explorer to do whatever she could with the few supplies in her medicine chest. Through it all, a surprising number came from a nearby circle of huts, too small to be called a village, just to look at her. “They come, lift up the curtain, which partially covers my door, talk, giggle, spit on the floor, blow their noses on the floor, snuffle in your ears, etc. etc. etc.,” she said. The people were achingly poor, and no doubt they appreciated Harkness's hospitality—“In our kitchen in the lamasery shrine there was always tea,” she wrote.

  Closer by was another neighbor, an aristocratic old man, the resident mandarin, or official, who lived in another section of the castle. He kept to himself, mostly, venturing out to sit in the sun on clear days, allowing a villager to pick lice from his hair. An opium addict, he would look to Harkness once in a while for money to keep himself supplied.

  Harkness spent time wandering the castle sorting through the thousands of prayer cards, or Tibetan tsakli, heaped about, collecting them to send to friends. Lying among the countless common versions bearing only written prayers were a few strikingly artful ones featuring Buddhas on lotus leaves, and beautiful painted gods she could not identify, all depicted in “tempera of exquisite color.” The thick, rough squares of sepia paper had fantastical scenes bordered in red on one side, with several lines of prayer handwritten on the back. There might be a serene, halfsmiling Buddha in flowing red robes, or, because Buddhism had mixed with the indigenous Bon religion in Tibet, there might be another god from a diverse cast of dramatic figures. Harkness loved these. A green god full of fury intrigued her the most. His hair was the color and shape of a flame, and his eyes—even the third one at the center of his forehead—flashed. In his rig
ht hand, a sword, itself ablaze, seemed poised to slash.

  Harkness collected beautiful tsakli, or Tibetan prayer cards, including this one with a painted Buddha. COURTESY LINDA ASH

  Unfortunately, with no real work to do, Harkness was soon bored. Sometimes she would just hang around, lazily watching Wang, who squatted before the stove by the hour, “his long blue gown tucked up under his knees, stirring some delicious mess with a pair of chopsticks.” The meals he turned out, she thought, were “nothing short of genius.” Since the team had not brought any preserved goods beyond dried milk, they would be living on the country. That meant eggs, bamboo shoots, chestnuts, black walnuts, squash, Chinese turnips, cabbage soup, pheasant, and a few times a week, chicken. Wang dried pieces of meat on a line strung across his room. And he cooked the ever-present cornmeal many different ways, sometimes into pancakes, occasionally as a dessert with eggs, walnut meats, and dried milk. Wang called native dishes “Chinee speakin' chow,” and Western selections “Englis' speakin' chow.”