The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  Once she had made up her mind about what to do, some of her anxiety lifted. “Nothing is quite as disturbing to me as uncertainty,” she wrote home, “not knowing the definite—I'm happier now than I've been in weeks, even tho' I have failed for the time being, because I've decided upon a definite course of action.” She had always felt that nothing in life worked out precisely the way it was planned but that something else always grew out of it. The point was to at least try, and then another, unexpected door would open.

  As it turned out, Harkness was right. On December 31, 1937, Hazel Perkins, in far-away wintry New England, received a telegram from Ruth Harkness, who was already in Chengdu. It read, exuberantly: HAPPY YEAR SMALL FEMALE.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ONE GRAND THRILL

  RUTH HARKNESS'S DAYS of isolation ended in a blaze of exploding flashbulbs and detonating rockets on January 6, 1938.

  Resplendent in a turban and leopard-trimmed fur coat, she was carrying a magnificent little baby panda in her arms when she appeared before the ecstatic press gathered at Hankou, the temporary capital, just as a Japanese air raid hit.

  A sortie of pursuit planes and heavy bombers pummeled the area around the airfield, killing about a dozen people, while antiaircraft fire dotted the sky with shell bursts.

  As Harkness emerged from the chaos with Diana, the thirteen-pound baby, headlines around the world beamed the news that Ruth Harkness had triumphed once again, ushering the rarest and most adorable of animals out of one of the remotest corners of the globe. The big wire services, United Press and the Associated Press, with electronic tentacles reaching into every newsroom in America, couldn't bat out the story fast enough.

  The bloodshed that gripped the city only made already hot copy sizzle for the newsmen who wrote of Harkness's success and of the cub who slept through all the action. PANDA IS BORED BY JAP AIR RAID, screamed one headline.

  As much fun as the reporters had with the incident, the attack was serious and deadly. The Japanese were swarming over much of China now, and their swaggering brutality was reaching its lowest depths at that very moment with the “Rape of Nanking.” Having won the battle of Shanghai, Japanese forces moved on to the nearby city. Beginning on December 13, 1937, and continuing over the course of about seven weeks, Japanese troops would rape and murder tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—in a tempest of savagery that would have in horror and scale few equals in history. Women died from repeated brutal sexual assaults and were sometimes disemboweled or nailed to walls. Prisoners were killed in horrifying ways—buried alive, decapitated, doused in gasoline and set on fire, or used for bayonet practice. About fifty thousand soldiers hacked their way by hand through the city's population, leaving piles of bodies stacked in the streets.

  For Harkness, the grim assault on China would cast a pall over her moment of victory. There was simply no pure joy allowed on this trip, from start to finish.

  Facing the press, though, she had a job to do, one that she always pulled off with aplomb. She would, over the course of several stops in China and the States, tell the story of her second expedition in the breeziest fashion. As best she could understand, she said, the discovery of the little panda had been a lucky surprise for the hunters. On December 18, when they were out scouring the forest, one of their dogs suddenly dashed into a thicket after what turned out to be a hidden adult panda. As the animal fled, a roly-poly baby was revealed barreling through the open nearby. The men easily caught the little creature, who refused food and water during the six-day trek back to Chaopo. The hunters reached the castle on the morning of Christmas Eve, waking Harkness up with the gift of the baby panda, who was much bigger than Su-Lin had been at capture.

  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.

  Harkness had craved companionship over the last months, and now with two weeks in Shanghai, she could get her fill. Even without Dan Reib, who left China for good that year, Harkness and Diana would do up the town. Sowerby showed the panda off to the gentlemen at the allmale Shanghai Club, trotting her out at the longest bar in the world, and Floyd James, who had just returned from seeing Su-Lin in the United States, brought the newest panda to the American Club, giving time to both the men's bar and the ladies' lounge.

  With all the clamoring interest over the animal, Harkness lived up to a promise she had made herself—she would put the captured panda to use in helping the Chinese people. A big fund-raiser, featuring a personal appearance by Diana, was arranged. Newspapers were saturated with the plans, running both stories and ads in the days lead
ing up to the event.

  Under the sponsorship of the Rotary Club, Diana would make her debut at the Sky Terrace of the Park Hotel. Admission for the event was one dollar, and since the hotel had offered the space for free, all the proceeds could go to the Refugee Children's Hospital. From 5 to 7 P.M., on a day when temperatures dipped below freezing, Harkness and Sowerby presented the panda before a crowd of eight hundred. Diana alternately sprawled on the dais and drank from a bottle. The audience was packed with children who oohed and ahhed over every move, as Sowerby filled them in on everything there was to know about pandas. It was all a great success, with front-page coverage and eight hundred dollars raised.

  With her pledge fulfilled, Harkness could now be on her way. This time her visit to Hankou had ensured that her getaway would be clean, and she happily allowed the China Press to run a large, detailed photograph of what it called “Diana's Passport.” Thinking of Smith's fiasco off Singapore, she had chosen a ship taking a more northerly route, booking herself on the Empress of Russia, due to depart on January 28, for Vancouver.

  At 5 P.M. on Friday, January 28, under heavy, slate-gray skies, Harkness, surrounded by Shanghai friends, was handed a huge bouquet of flowers, and then, with Diana snuggled down in a custom-made wicker basket, she left the customs jetty for the Empress of Russia. It went off without a hitch. Within minutes, she was safely aboard in her first-class cabin on the trans-Pacific luxury liner, which would weigh anchor in the morning.

  Out on the Huangpu, the ship afforded an expansive view of Shanghai as large snowflakes began to float down in silence, coating the streets of the city known for sin in a mantle of pure white. It was “Hsu hsueh,” the fortunate snow, an auspicious event coming as it did just before the start of the lunar new year. It would be good for the earth, and good for the soul of the country, which would be entering the Year of the Tiger the next month. For those who believed, this snow was good joss.