The Lady and the Panda (13 page)

The “upstairs/downstairs” protocol separating whites from Chinese was one more rule for Harkness to break. She repeatedly had Young to her cabin, and trotted down into the Chinese area whenever she pleased. Young gave her Chinese-language lessons, plotted strategy for the expedition, and spent hours conversing with her. “People are very curious as to what I am doing, and I am saying not a word about panda, and being a rather bad liar, I suppose that there is an air of mystery about it all— but it's a hell of a lot of fun anyway,” she said. She wanted to maintain a low profile, “slipping upcountry” as quietly as possible, because she feared that publicity might ruin her plans.

Nonetheless, the lives of the Chinese passengers were an irresistible draw. “It is unbelievable how they live and travel,” she wrote. Crammed into small compartments, they were able to cook and eat and sleep, to nurse children, to smoke pipes, and to chat as though they had all the space in the world.

Harkness marveled too at what seemed to her the natural and enviable Chinese serenity. The confinement, the noise, the lack of privacy,
would have made westerners short-tempered. Instead, she noted, here in the center of the commotion, in the cubicle next to Young's, an elderly Chinese man “with a long beard of seven hairs, cross legged with his eyes closed in contemplation (Buddhist with everything from cooking to childbirth going on around him) and you knew that his mind was not in his body—on the deck babies being nursed, men weeweeing over the rail and a few smoking opium.” Harkness thought to herself that if there really were such a thing as a soul, his was traveling far from the cacophony about them. “I knew to look at him that he was not of this world,” she wrote.

As she journeyed up the most famous river in China, Harkness began to discard her Western ways. Her American clothes were long gone, left behind in Shanghai, in favor of an Eastern-accented expedition wardrobe her Shanghai tailor had fashioned for her—loose-cut, boxy jackets and matching trousers made out of the durable blue cloth the coolies wore. She would rebuff most social invitations from foreigners during a layover in Hankou, saying she didn't have anything to wear. The truth was that she just didn't want to dilute her expedition time with nonAsians. She hoped that now that she was on her own, she might “forget all things Western and absorb things Chinese.”

Not wanting to miss a moment of it, she would often spend the night up on deck wrapped in her silk-stuffed sleeping bag, watching the stars in the black sky, and waking to the morning sun.

All along the waterway, she would rush from the boat at every stop in little river towns to scout what seemed to her, with each passing
li,
or third of a mile, more and more the real China. She found dusty streets lined with treasure-filled stores. “Shop after shop, open to the street, full of the most beautiful paper-thin bowls of unbelievable color, square plates with magnificent dragons, patient artists painting feathery bamboo on teapots and cups, and all for just nothing in our money,” she wrote. Always, throngs of curious people trailed her every step. Without fail, she discovered, her smile was always returned.

She passed through the more-than-hundred-mile stretch that contained
the great gorges of the Yangtze, where rough cliffs rose straight up from the water for a thousand feet. She could sit for hours as the boat chugged through these breathtaking channels—the very same that eighth-century poet Li Po had described as the countless folds of hills— and watch the changing panorama of jagged cliffs set in deep shadow, veiled in clouds and mist, or awash in the amber of the setting sun.

Along the way, there were flimsy, crooked little peasant huts that seemed no bigger or more secure, she said, than swallows' nests perched precariously on the little ledges of rock. She passed terraced fields of rich green for mile upon mile, flooded rice paddies, old women balancing painfully on bound feet as they pulled along tethered geese or pigs or goats. Cows carried baskets of coal. It seemed as if every inch of soil that could be tilled was. One of the panda hunters, Dean Sage, had noted that the people here managed to farm on the kinds of cliffs that would make goats “think twice before climbing.”

One day at dusk Harkness looked out from the deck to the shore. To her, it was always a magic time, for she said, “as evening falls, there is a strange feeling of nostalgia for something unknown.” In the deepening darkness along the banks she spotted “a reed hut, in the distance.” It “blended with earth, sky and water, with only a point of yellow light showing through the flimsy structure and a wisp of smoke to make you know that it was home—to someone.” The little light kindled a longing. Here, in the half-light where the impossible takes place and day meets night, the dwelling place of one family became as elemental as the earth and sky and water around it. Harkness wrote: “China gets to you, my dear.”

“I wonder when, and sometimes if, I will ever get back to America,” she told Perkie, not with dread but with some mystical affirmation. Death and eternity, and the thought of belonging, were on her mind, not in the least because she now had possession of Bill's ashes. Young had taken them from the bronze urn and transferred them to a more portable cardboard container, which he placed inside their steel cash box. “I have told Quentin,” she wrote to Perkins, “if any thing happens upcountry to
me that I want to be put away there.” She was quite clear about her wishes. Should she die while out on expedition, her body—and no doubt her soul—would stay forever in China.

IN YICHANG, HUNDREDS
of miles west of Shanghai, Harkness and Young transferred to the
Mei Ling,
which would ferry them into the great cliff city of Chongqing, then known as Chungking. The 150-mile portion of the Yangtze they were approaching was notoriously dangerous, a stretch that Sage said “boils a tortuous course through a deep, cañon-like channel, which it has cut in a rugged, mountainous country.”

As usual, though, Harkness was only feeling more and more secure, no matter what they confronted. Part of it had to do with Quentin Young. On board the boats, or wandering ashore, she was obtaining a most promising preview of his field persona. “It will not be a matter of surprise to me if Quentin is some day one of the men with the power and thoughtful intelligence to help in the shaping of his country's destiny,” she wrote.

Her opinion was shared by an important group. Everywhere, dogs, pigs, cats, even roosters would sidle up to Young looking for attention. The mascot aboard the
Whangpu,
for instance, a little calico cat, would seek him out, crawling up onto his shoulders, rubbing against his ears and playing with his hair. “He seems to have a rare and strange attraction for any animal,” she wrote. “There are some people—not many— who understand animals and are almost able to talk to them in some silent fashion.”

She decided during the river trip to turn over all the expedition's finances to him. This way he would not have to ask her for money each time the coolies were to be paid, or when the bill was due at an inn. He would carry the cash, doling it out as needed. It was an enormous gesture of trust—and an interesting one. Up-country with Quentin Young, who by any Western standard of the day would have been expected to be her subordinate, she did nothing but treat him with respect, viewing him as a full and equal partner.

She came to another conclusion too, a point of honor for Young: even if she could not bring a live giant panda out, it was essential for him to accomplish his goal. He had taken this expedition on for very little money so that he would have the chance to shoot a panda and present it to the Nanking Museum. She perceived it as a matter of nationalistic pride to him. With natural history museums in the United States displaying stuffed giant pandas, China, obviously, should have its share too.

Harkness insisted on one proviso: the panda hunting had to follow the trapping, not because of any hierarchy, but she just couldn't bear to take part in killing an animal.

She never could have fit in on a traditional expedition like that of the Dean Sage party, which had skinned its trophy in only an hour, indulging in a grilled giant panda “sirloin steak” the next night for supper.

Young was managing everything like a seasoned professional and with a style all his own. Arriving at the forbidding cliffs of the fivehundred-year-old city of Chongqing on October 11, they had stayed on board overnight to reorganize. As they headed out late the next afternoon, they were surrounded by a mob of desperately poor coolies. Aggressively jostling one another, they fought for the work of transporting the expedition's equipment up the frightfully vertical pathways cut into stone and leading from the shore to the high city. With mounting combativeness, the men shouted angrily, closing in around Young and Harkness. Young had a revolver with which he could easily have threatened the group. Instead, standing so tall over them, he made a joke. Though Harkness could not comprehend the words, she did understand when the faces of the angry men turned into grins. With the situation defused, they and their luggage were bundled and carted upward, along the steep and narrow footpaths. Harkness and Young rode in plush sedan chairs, set on poles and carried aloft by coolies, up the precarious route.

Darkness was falling by then, which meant they would arrive at the gates of Chongqing at just the right moment to experience its great wonder. Harkness, having been slowly carried step by step up a dim, ancient stone path, emerged at the top only to be overwhelmed by a fantastic vision—a riot of neon lights, signs, banners, and the crowded streets of a
busy, modern metropolis. It was a wild electric Broadway, she said, “here at the end of the world.”

Harkness loved the vivid intensity of Chinese urban life—including the scents that most foreigners dreaded. “The smells of a Chinese city are indescribable,” she wrote from Chongqing, “the incense, the food cooked on charcoal in the streets, just the burning charcoal itself in the dusk—and of course the odor, horrible at times, of the open sewage.”

Once they settled in, they encountered other, less pleasant, surprises. First, their accommodations were with, as Harkness delicately put it, “some goddam missionaries.” She grumbled, “How I hate the breed.” There was much about their lives and beliefs to rub her the wrong way, especially their attitude toward the Chinese. She saw so many poor Chinese, their children wretched with disease, running eyes, and open sores; their animals so ill, the sight of them turned her stomach—all kinds of problems that Western medicine could cure. Half the people in China at that time would never reach the age of thirty, and preventable diseases were to blame for three quarters of the deaths. “When I see missionaries here living in a style that rich people can't afford at home, in point of servants at least, with a home leave, expenses paid, and then to learn that they [give] no free medical service at all—it is not a pretty picture,” she said.

Then word came in of a rival panda-hunting party, way ahead of her own. Unbelievably, it was being led by Gerry Russell.

Rather than sailing to America, he had formed plans in secret, waved Harkness off on her boat, then grabbed a plane the next day to start his own expedition, beating her to Chengdu by weeks. He must have been making those arrangements for some time before his departure, sneaking behind Harkness's back.

“He is trying to best me at my own game,” she fumed. And considering his comfortable lead, he had a good chance at it. She would discover later that upon landing in Chengdu he had even gone straight to Dan Reib's friend Cavaliere with an old letter of introduction Harkness had secured at the time their expedition was to be a joint one. “I think it was a bit unsporting of him when he saw me off in Shanghai not to tell
me that he was flying here the next day to go after Panda too,” Harkness wrote home. It made her want to “wring his redheaded neck.”

Russell hadn't come all the way to China for nothing—with or without Ruth Harkness, he decided, he would head into the high country.

The more she thought about it, though, the less it got to her. “A little competition will make it more exciting,” she said. In her well-loaded arsenal, her top weapon was Quentin Young. “I have the much better chance of getting the beast because I have the best man in China for the purpose,” she reasoned.

Always generous in spirit, even to those who wronged her, Harkness conceded, “I can see Jerry's [
sic
] side to a certain extent.” He had come an awfully long way only to be turned back. It was the deceit of it all that would never sit well with her, though. She could not fathom how a “socalled gentleman's so-called sense of honor” could have allowed such dishonesty. What she didn't know was that the worst was yet to come.

WHEN IT CAME TIME
to leave Chongqing two days later, Harkness and Young did so in style. Reib had arranged a Standard Oil company car to ferry them two hundred miles over rough and rocky roads to Chengdu— a windfall in this tract where transportation was so hard to secure.

THE FIRST GLIMPSE
of Chengdu late the next day was staggering. Completely protected by formidable stone walls, forty feet high and just as thick, the great two-thousand-year-old city was an impenetrable fortress constructed against threatening barbarians. Entry was negotiated through massive gates positioned at the four points of the compass, to its Tibetan neighbors the four sacred directions. At the very frontier of Chinese civilization, it was a portal between ancient and modern worlds, serving as a staging area for wanderers, soldiers, and merchants.

To Harkness, Chengdu would for a time feel like the center of the world. She would be landing now in a home that couldn't exist anyplace else on earth. It was a sprawling walled estate, within the walled city, that
was part Chinese pavilion, part Italian villa. Behind the grand front gate trimmed in gold Mandarin characters were many tile-roofed buildings overlooking lush, landscaped courtyards. Once the residence of the provincial governor, it had enough bedrooms to accommodate one hundred guests comfortably. During Harkness's stay, several of them would be filled. And nearly every dinner would be an event.