The Lady and the Panda (33 page)

Since she couldn't go inside the cage with the panda, Harkness would clean the area with long fire tongs. “It's great sport,” Harkness said, “because she takes them in her paws and then we have a battle to see who'll keep them. She uses her paws exactly like hands and is she strong.”

Harkness soon felt that the cage was too small for the animal, so she decamped to a draftier portion of the castle, sacrificing her own comfort to that of the bear. The new, loftlike quarters were not only larger but had a dirt floor, which would be cozier for Yin than the stone one. Eventually, Harkness would give up the room entirely to the bear, fearing that building a fire for herself would make Yin too warm. So she moved in with Wang next door, where she could have heat but still be close enough to hear the comforting sounds of Yin munching bamboo through the night.

Through experimentation, Harkness discovered that the panda would accept a mixture of milk with thin cornmeal gruel. She was elated, even though she had to share her only bowl with the animal in order to feed her. “She has her milk from it,” Harkness wrote, and “at dinner I have soup in it and later I use it to brush my teeth.” Feeding time was as much fun as cleaning. As Harkness would attempt to pour the gruel through the bars of the cage, the panda would alternately place a paw and muzzle in the rapidly filling pan on the floor, and then try to bite at the bottle it was all coming out of.

WITH FEWER COMFORTS
, and the prospect of unending months of this life, Harkness made all kinds of plans and determinations in her head, while having no idea, really, how things would come out. If she failed to get a second panda, she figured she would leave Yin in Chengdu with Wang, then offer her services to the Chinese government, though what she could do, she wasn't sure. “It's a dream I've been dreaming ever since I've been here to do something for China,” she said. “I've been plotting and planning some way to help my beloved China!”

Cavaliere had begun sending her a little newsletter, compiled from radio reports and published by the missionaries. What she was hearing of the war between Japan and China horrified her. On November 11 Chinese troops had begun their retreat out of Shanghai and toward the capital of Nanking. But within no time, the government itself would be fleeing from that city to Hankou, which for eight months would become the capital of unoccupied China. Harkness was desperate for America to care, to help. But at home the mood was resolutely isolationist, with millions signing petitions to “Keep America Out of War.” She promised herself that at the very least, she would do what she could. Bagging pandas from China, she thought, would be senseless if China couldn't reap some reward from it. She would find a way for the animals—assuming she would get two—to aid the Chinese people. In the meantime, she had sent a war-relief contribution and received Chinese Liberty bonds in the mail. She hoped somehow to rally her fellow Americans to do the same.

If the panda or pandas were to be of any help, though, Harkness had to get them to civilization alive. Smith's fiasco with his two loomed like a nightmare, and the escalating war with Japan was threatening to block her way out. She had managed to fly a good distance of her trip in, but she figured the airline would not allow a large panda or two on board, so heading home through French Indochina was not an option. The Yangtze? She wondered if she could somehow swing that. But the thought of arriving in Chongqing and asking to be evacuated on a U.S.
gunboat with two giant pandas seemed far-fetched—she already felt like a renegade with American officials there. Though there was no easy solution, the effort of strategizing was helping to pull her out of her fog.

On the first day of December, she forced herself to lighten up, writing home once again. As local villagers peered in through her windows, nearly obliterating her light, she set herself up as close to her fire as she could get, placing her typewriter on a suitcase, and sitting on the floor. Try as she might to hide it, her first letter out carried the residue of her funk, and it frightened her friends back home. She mentioned the capture of Yin casually, as though they would have known about it somehow already. Harkness didn't seem to be thinking clearly.

Within weeks, even the false cheer she labored to exude was gone. And on an overcast, forlorn day she wrote home again. “This is getting to be a miserable lonely business.” Her letters were peppered once more with despair. “It is much harder to achieve contentment in the midst of solitude, with not a thing in the world to do,” she wrote. With the holidays approaching, she was writing, she told her friends, from a place where “there are no Sundays or Christmases.”

As gray as things were for Harkness, the image of the explorer was being treated to a Technicolor blast in the United States. Her story was emerging once again, this time in the color-saturated comics pages of American papers. The Quaker Oats company had paid Harkness two hundred dollars to feature her exploits in a splashy comic-strip advertisement. “A Great American Explorer tells what a Quaker Oats breakfast means to folks who lead lives of adventure,” it read in papers across the country. Seven panels, in bright red, yellow, blue, and green, portrayed a beautiful and sophisticated Ruth Harkness intent on capturing a panda.

Su-Lin was also front and center in books, articles, toys, and ads. Two American women produced a small fifty-cent children's book for Rand McNally called
Su-Lin.
Newspapers everywhere grabbed any excuse—“Su Lin Doesn't Mind Winter at All”—to report on the panda and run his photo.

Giant pandas were so irresistible that even the unlikeliest products
used them for promotion. A clothing company featured a giant panda holding a dress and carried the legend “Panda-ring to Your Desire for Cool Cute Wash Togs.” Calvert whiskey employed the likeness of a foxylooking giant panda to accompany the poem

Both Marshall Field's and Carson Pirie Scott & Company produced dueling plush-toy Su-Lins. There was a jointed thirteen-and-a-half-inch toy panda for $2.50 and a more conventional panda version of the teddy bear. By Christmastime, Su-Lin toys would be all the rage, clutched by some of the most famous chubby hands in North America, including those of the Dionne quintuplets in Ontario.

None of the profits for the toys were earmarked for Harkness, though she did make money selling her manuscripts. Harkness's agent wrote to her that her children's book had been accepted by the Literary Guild, and she would receive seven hundred dollars at publication. Adding in the money due her for
The Lady and the Panda,
she wrote with happy disbelief, “My books will have brought me $1,500.00 before being published.”

ASIDE FROM THE GRUEL
, “Yin baby” would accept nothing but bamboo, making the prospect of keeping her alive outside the bamboo zone seem impossible. Compounding the somber situation, some unsettling news arrived. Harkness heard over the bamboo telegraph that Smith was back in the field, hunting pandas. He might show up anywhere, even spoiling things with all those hunters she was employing. She had seen enough of his tricks to know that with him, anything could happen. He might just put as much energy into foiling her as he would into trapping.

In letters home she would refer to him for the first time as her “rival.” But Harkness was always game, and the new challenge revved her up. She gauged the competition, preparing to meet it head-on. Of Smith's sudden reemergence, she said, “That doesn't worry me, because if I can't do it successfully, he can't.”

Although Smith had not, in fact, made it back into the action by then, having spent the fall in England, Harkness had been very much on his mind. His indignation seemed to energize him as he partnered with the British Museum and the London Zoo. In order to cement his newly forged alliances, the American so proud of his patriotic ancestors filed an application for British citizenship.

With his latest associations, and the money from his sister, he planned to get right back into the field to bag “bigger and better Pandas.” He was even feeling upbeat enough to write magazine articles in England, taking credit for the capture of Su-Lin. “During my recent spell of four years in Western China,” he wrote, “I have succeeded in securing at my collecting headquarters a baby and an adult male and a female of the giant panda.… Only the baby is still in captivity.” And in another article: “It has been my great good fortune,” he said, “to have been the active agent in effecting the capture of the only three Giant Pandas that have ever been taken alive.” “The first specimen thus secured,” he went on, “the baby Panda recently sold in Chicago—it was not my privilege to take home myself.”

He happily laid out his thoughts on many aspects of panda hunting. He said the giant panda was lazy, comparing it in size to “a good-sized hog” and in personality to “a contented, well fed brood sow.” He bragged that he had perfected a system of foolproof lures for capturing giant pandas. He could not, unfortunately, share them with the readers, however, for they were “trade secrets” and his “sole property.” He also told this whole new audience about the hazards of facing bandits, and of the difficulties of dealing with what he described as astoundingly stupid native hunters.

THINGS BEGAN
to look up a bit for Yin. Strained vegetables were added to her gruel, and whenever Harkness approached the cage now with the basin and the bottle, the panda trotted over like a dog. Even better, in Harkness's mind, was the fact that Yin had flown into a rage one day. “She stormed around and swore at me in Chinese,” Harkness wrote. Not only did Harkness believe that the passion of the animal was a good sign, but in the throes of her fury, Yin thrashed, then ate some cornstalks that were in the cage. Harkness was so delighted that it didn't matter that the strong animal had also raked her thumb, causing it to blow up to twice its normal size. That Yin was eating something other than bamboo was solace enough. The development may have even been enough for a little celebration. In the cold castle, Harkness finally relented, taking a bath in a washbasin, scrubbing her hair for the first time in two months.

Despite the mood-lifting powers of a good shampoo, Harkness had had enough of her isolation. She began making plans to start back to Chengdu on Christmas Day.

Wang suggested that they cover ground by the dark of night to avoid curious crowds along the way. She thought it might be worth a try, but travel was treacherous enough as it was in sunlight; at night it would be hair-raising.

She still believed she would leave Yin with Wang in the city, going off to make herself useful in Hankou, while the hunters continued their work. She had received a clipping from the papers saying that passports were being invalidated, so leaving China was now even less of an option. Not that she had the money to sail to the United States and return anyway.

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.

R
UTH 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.