The Lady and the Panda (28 page)

Scene of utter devastation outside the Palace Hotel on Nanking Road on “Bloody Saturday,” August 14, 1937.
COURTESY
talesofoldchina.com

The explosions were deafening and deadly, shattering glass and smashing masonry. When the smoke lifted, “a scene of dreadful death was uncovered.” The pavement ran slick with blood. Severed limbs and heads lay among the shards of glass and rubble. In burned-out cars, charred occupants remained upright in their seats. The smell of blood and burning flesh mingled with the acrid bomb fumes. As the hundreds of dazed and dying came to, they writhed in pain on the debris-strewn street, filling the air with their sobs.

Minutes later, another two bombs exploded nearby in the French Concession outside the Great World Amusement Center, where Chinese refugees were packed tight to receive a handout of rice and tea. The devastation here was even worse. In a flash, the corpses of these desperate
people were piled high, the remnants of their once-precious boxes, bundles, and birdcages strewn all about them.

“Death from little bombs rained from the heavens in the International Settlement and French Concession … to bring a screaming hell to hundreds of Chinese and foreign civilians such as has not been seen nor scarcely imagined in this city,” James Hammond wrote in
The China Press.
“All told,” according to historian Stella Dong, “it was the worst civilian carnage in a single day anywhere in the world up to that moment.” The tally for what was quickly dubbed “Bloody Saturday” was 1,740 dead, 1,431 injured.

Friends and relatives across the Settlement were frantic to locate loved ones near the bomb scene. Harkness's gang must have been distraught—particularly Reib, whose orders had put her directly in harm's way. But Harkness was unhurt. In fact, she hadn't been anywhere near the hotel when the bombs fell. Ignoring Reib's dire instructions, she had gone off to have lunch in what was considered a more dangerous part of the city—the Japanese section. “I naturally disobeyed orders,” she would later write of her decision.

Unscathed physically, she was not spared the horrible sight of the disaster. She had returned to the hotel minutes after the attack, finding a picture beyond imagination. “I hope never to see anything like it again,” she said.

If Reib hadn't realized it before, by now he knew how little Harkness needed coddling. When friends from the States wrote to him, worried about her, he replied, “Do not worry about Ruth, as she is fully capable of looking out for herself and has very devoted friends scattered over the country that will assist her in every respect. Besides this, she is a most resourceful person, and as you well know fully capable of looking after herself, if need be.”

That night, Shanghai, the flashy nocturnal city, went dark. A lightsout curfew was instituted, with most restaurants, cinemas, and clubs closing and locking their doors.

The day, which had been rougher than anyone would have guessed, prompted an immediate race to reach safety. While hundreds of thousands
of Chinese continued to pour into the International Settlement, the foreigners began to flee from it. By Tuesday, the first wave of British women and children were evacuated to Hong Kong aboard the P&O
Rajputana.
On Wednesday hundreds more left, but by now no traffic along the river was believed safe. With heavy Japanese fire directed at Chinese planes overhead, British men-o'-war, instead of tugs, ferried the evacuees to the ship as a precaution. American women and children began their exodus aboard the SS
President McKinley,
bound for Manila. It carried away the heaviest load of passengers it had ever borne, with desperate refugees “stuffed into remaining nooks and crannies.” Thousands would be moved over the coming days. Harkness was not interested in joining the women being evacuated, though she did ride one of the tenders out to the
McKinley
to ensure that her mail bound for the States made it aboard.

Ever more determined to follow through with her expedition, she stayed in Shanghai, where the smell of death still lingered. The “incessant bombing, shelling, and the horrible chatter of machine guns and anti aircraft” did, she had to admit, “get under my skin a bit.” And, yes, Shanghai was “a pretty nerve wracking place to be in,” particularly because she found she had a knack for being out in the open along the Bund during big raids, but the words of a psychic in New York had bolstered her already strong conviction that she would be safe. “I know that this War will not be my finish. So with perfect confidence I can go to the Bund during the heaviest bombardment and know that it is not for me. A rather cozy feeling, although one does feel sorry for the other poor devils.”

In all the commotion of the next few days, she somehow managed to collar her young Chinese general again, learning that her trunk was locked up in the vaults of the Central Bank of China. By the time she decided that she wanted to get at it, though, she had lost track of him all over again. Doing without the ammunition was of little consequence to her, since she had never liked guns anyway. The problem was that there were other things more precious to the designer in the same trunk. “My beautiful new boots and pants are there too,” she lamented.

The China Journal
reported that Harkness continued to hope for a reunion with Quentin Young somehow in southern China. But weeks later she still would have no idea what had become of him.

She proceeded anyway—sans partner, team, or even supplies. She had a job to do.

And so it was on Saturday, August 21, that Harkness waved goodbye to Dan Reib and a burning and battered Shanghai. The launch of her second major campaign may have been even more preposterous than the first, for she left the city alone as a refugee, carrying with her only two small leather satchels and a typewriter.

Through the next desperate few months, Chinese forces would fight heroically at Shanghai in a death stand against the heavy Japanese artillery. The cost in casualties would be staggering, with roughly 250,000 Chinese troops killed or wounded, and more than half of Chiang's elite division annihilated. The horror would play out under the noses of those left in the International Settlement, including journalists who would transmit images and stories from it around the world.

Harkness was scrambling to settle her plans. She couldn't rely now on her tactical knowledge from the first expedition—with traffic limited up the Yangtze, she was forced to chart a wholly unfamiliar route. Aboard the coast-hugging French MM
Aramis
out on the China Sea, she wrote home to brief her friends on her seat-of-the-pants scheme. In the face of all the adversity, she put on some good cheer. “You'd better get out your maps children,” she wrote. “I've changed my course.…Iamonmyway to Hong Kong, Saigon in French Indo China (for a picnic) Yunnan-fu, Chungking, Chengtu and Pandas.”

While she had never complained during the days in war-torn Shanghai, she did now aboard the plush
Aramis,
with its stone-pillared pool and fancy kiddie playroom. “The coffee on this boat is vile and the cocktails are worse,” she groused. But there was a deeper and darker mood creeping over her, and it would not dissipate for quite some time.

A
FTER A BRIEF STOP
in Hong Kong, Harkness parted ways with the Marseilles-bound
Aramis
in Saigon. She would spend a few days here before making her way overland, heading north to Hanoi, then across the border into China. From Kunming, formerly Yunnanfu, the capital of Yunnan Province, she hoped to catch one of the unscheduled planes that sometimes touched down on their way to Chongqing and Chengdu.

Once at her hotel, she received a cable from Jack Young offering to join forces with her. Certainly there were many reasons to have said yes, chief among them the simple fact that she was so alone in this strange land. Yet she turned him down, her rationale being that she sensed they would not be successful together, and that she was not afraid to go it on her own.

Of course, she was rarely by herself for very long, as there were always people who wanted to spend time with her. She had several letters of introduction from Standard Oil friends to various contacts along her route. Right away in Saigon she hooked up with an interesting man who
was a radio engineer, a big-game hunter, and a little bit of a bad boy. Under his “tutelage,” she smoked opium, probably something of an antidote to all the carnage of Shanghai.

She was drawn also to visit a place that would add a shiver of mysticism to the wistfulness that was overtaking her: the otherworldly jungle temple complex of Angkor Wat, just a few hours by automobile from the city, in Cambodia. The great place had been abandoned, lost for centuries in a creeping mausoleum of jungle greenery until a Frenchman rediscovered it in the 1860s. It was a stunning find that captivated all who came near it, with its five great stone towers rising up above the tops of the palms in the dense forest. Spreading out from their bases, in a labyrinthine complex the size of Rome, was a tapestry of fantastic carvings, statues, temples, passages, stairways, and bridges—a delirium of delicate, intricate, endless patterns and pictures chiseled into the stone.

Harkness spent a day wandering the temples of Angkor Wat.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

As ancient as it was magical, with beginnings stretching a thousand years back; great stone Hindu and Buddhist temples, part of the Khmer kingdom, had taken centuries to complete. The site was overwhelming in beauty and scope. Here was the result of centuries of labor—and of neglect; of artistry, passion, and a moldering stagnation. The stone was known to come alive at sunset in orange and pink hues, and then as the shadows of the forest spread, spirals of bats would pour like funnels of smoke out of the darkening towers.

Harkness wandered about the temples snapping photos. As she pressed on toward the Tibetan border, images of Angkor Wat would continue to tint everything. She saw eternity in each dawn, the divine in every vista. The great scenes around her seemed to reflect the deep, unquenchable feelings stirring inside. Her return to the East. The great tragedy she had witnessed. Her lonely passage through an unfamiliar land. During the entire trip, she would be immersed in a deep spiritual reverie.

She returned to Saigon with her driver, leaving that very night for a trek of more than a thousand miles to Kunming, in a second-class compartment of a “funny little train” that, she said, “screams and snorts and hurtles along.” From her berth, she watched the terrain flash by. Described in glowing terms by Western travel writers as “an oasis of peace and beauty,” French Indochina was noted for its rubber plantations and its prosperity. But the passing scenes only made Harkness long for what she called “my China.” The country was pretty, Harkness mused, but it
was missing something for her. A “quality” she had no name for. She was bothered by the fact that the inhabitants did not rule their own land. “The white races certainly mess things up,” she said.

At night, as the train jolted through dense, pitch-black jungle, Harkness began to experience nightmares about Su-Lin. She would wake to the darkness and the swaying of the compartment, unable to rid herself of a horrible fear. The dreams were so insistent, coming every evening, that she began to despair, thinking they were a sign. Perhaps on the other side of the world, the innocent little animal was dying or already dead.

Her feelings of general foreboding and doom could only have been heightened when her train was wrecked by a nighttime mudslide in the pouring rain near the border town of Lao Kay, now Lao Cai. In the aftermath, Harkness sat hungry in her quiet compartment for nearly ten hours. She was tapping away on the portable typewriter when a Frenchman came by to deliver the good news—a local train from the north was about to arrive, and they would be able to transfer.

Harkness spent Saturday night in a local hotel, “a night which I shall never think of without remembering Somerset Maugham's ‘Rain,’ ” she said. The place was comfortable—she had a spacious if rather bare bedroom dominated by a mosquito-netted bed. “But the rain, rain, rain,” she wrote, came down in a wall of gray in the “swift tropic dusk.” It was as steady as it was heavy, shredding banana leaves with its force. Below her window trudged “a Tonkinese funeral wailing its way thru the rain to deposit its dead in a watery grave.”