The Lady and the Panda (6 page)

Harkness stayed at the Palace, across Nanking Road from the pyramid-topped Cathay along the Bund.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

East really did meet West here, though it wasn't always an easy fit. In order to erect these Western skyscrapers—at ten to twenty stories high some of the tallest in Asia—earth, if not heaven, had to be moved. Concrete rafts were constructed to steady the structures in the shifting muck. Raised up from marshland and mudflats, Shanghai was the convergence not just of East and West but also of water and land, Occidental and Oriental, rich and poor. It was paper lanterns and neon lamps. It was civilized and barbaric. And anything was possible—poor men could become wealthy overnight. Chinese communism could be born in this enclave of Western capitalism. Shanghai was fluid and ever changing, a robust half-breed throbbing with its own hybrid vigor.

It was like nothing else in the world. In this notorious town, brine, fish, acrid factory smoke, ambition, sorrow, and hope all blended together
in a great gurgling and vivifying ooze. The place reeked of it, and the smell was noted by every writer who passed through. It was thick and heavy, according to one, mixing the scents of “open-air cooking, offal, pissoirs, the fumes of opium, and decaying food.” Shanghai possessed what the Chinese called
rinao,
a dizzying assault of the senses that could choke—or resuscitate—a person. At the moment of her arrival, Ruth Harkness wasn't so sure which it would be for her. It was a test of character—even the mighty generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, had said the city was “a furnace for the making of men.” And Harkness herself would soon feel that heat facing some of the toughest trials of her journey.

As the
Tancred
slowed and came to a stop, the heavy air draped itself over the passengers. At least Harkness could be grateful that she had tanned herself while out at sea precisely so she could forgo silk stockings on days like this. Swarming the railings, the passengers now squinted through this fevered, hazy blur for a closer look at the famous city.

Thousands stood along the water, carrying flowers, waving hats, and craning their necks to catch sight of a fiancée, a brother, a classmate. There were men in business suits, women in kimonos. Clamoring for work were half-starved coolies in blue, loose-cut trousers, Japanese cabdrivers in white. Missionaries jostled with millionaires. With Americans, Chinese, Russians, English, Japanese, French, and German Jewish refugees—fifty nationalities—it looked as though half the world's population had turned out carrying the entire world's expectations. Shanghai might have been known for its vice, but high hope was truly its chief commodity. Nowhere was that feeling more raw than down on the waterfront where the waiting crowds sweltered.

Pressed among the colorful and expectant crowd that day, fresh from his debacle in Chengdu, was the gaunt and sallow Floyd Tangier Smith, with his beautiful half-Scottish, half-Japanese wife, Elizabeth. Known as “Ajax” to his friends, and “Buster” to his family, Smith was a man with more than his share of expectation. The tall, bespectacled banker-turnedadventurer, now fifty-four, had still not landed his one big fortune. He wasn't averse to accepting handouts from his family back in the States, however abashedly. For Smith, there was always tomorrow. Over the
years, his letters home had been filled with optimism about his next big break and future expeditions that would surely bring “honest to goodness money.” While he had been hoping to find just that the year before with the Bill Harkness partnership, that enterprise, like many of Smith's previous ones, hadn't panned out.

Now, as sweat trickled down the backs of those standing by at the waterfront, the hunter patiently lay in wait for the one person who could get the expedition's finances back on track, who might even, if everything went just so, change his fortunes for good.

It took a small international caravan—Smith, his wife, and several coolies, with a few Russians thrown in—to transport Harkness and her belongings to the hotel. They squeezed through the crowd, navigating the fantastic chaos of the Shanghai streets. There were rickshaws, automobiles, buses, trams, wheelbarrows, bicycles, and carriages; streetside market stalls were piled high with melons and onions; children shouted themselves hoarse, hawking English-language newspapers such as the
Shanghai Times.

Harkness's group negotiated the short but tumultuous length of the waterfront up to the calm of an American favorite, the Palace Hotel. The conservative old Palace, white with red trim, was handsome and more than respectable, though its day as the best hotel in the ever-changing Shanghai had come and gone. The Palace was now dwarfed in stature and style by others, particularly its neighbor across Nanking Road, that luxurious wonder, the twenty-story, air-conditioned Cathay. Inside the Palace's gleaming mahogany-paneled lobby, as was painfully obvious on this day, the modern marvel of air-conditioning had not been installed. It didn't matter. Harkness was on a budget, and at twelve dollars a night, the little hotel that had been good enough for Bill during his long stay in Shanghai was good enough for her.

From the moment she settled in to Bill's old digs, the introductions and invitations poured in, and she wrote home immediately, frantic for the satin evening slip she had forgotten to pack.

Within days, a fleet of pilots from the China National Aviation Corporation, or CNAC, which was a partnership between the Chinese government and Pan Am, began to court her. There was a Frenchman in hot pursuit, a German Jew, and a “darling” young pilot in his twenties who buzzed around, taking her out often. Speaking of her youngest suitor, she joked to friends that she'd “like a son to be like him.” Among her many new pals was an American newspaper reporter named Victor Keane, a fun-loving graduate of her own alma mater, the University of Colorado. The two fell in tight with each other, and the hard-drinking, wisecracking Vic showed her the town.

Certainly there was plenty to see. The first word under the “nightlife” section of one mid-thirties guide to Shanghai was “WHOOPEE!” And if the reader required more of an explanation, it was provided: “High hats and low necks; long tails and short knickers; inebriates and slumming puritans… When the sun goes in and the lights come out Shanghai becomes another city.”

At about seven in the evening, Harkness would find herself sitting in a low wicker chair on the great verandah of the Race Club, sipping gimlets and chatting up a whole new smart set. The club was a lush, green twelve-acre oasis in the heart of Shanghai, and as night closed in and the sky darkened, Harkness could watch the surrounding city begin to blaze with light, its candy-colored neon signs snapping to life with luminous threads of violet, magenta, and fuchsia braided into Chinese characters.

At the Chinese clubs, local gangsters danced the rumba to Russian orchestras. Chinese rich boys with jet-black hair, brilliantined to a lacquer finish, squired modern Chinese girls in stiletto heels and highnecked brocade silk sheaths slit up to the hips. Revelers could try a Polish mazurka or the Parisian Apache, the carioca, the tango. Crooners and torch singers bawled American jazz through the night.

Harkness and Keane would commence with drinks in the afternoon, sometimes finding themselves having “closed up Shanghai at six the
next morning.” Cocktail hour, it was said, ended in Shanghai “anytime between 2
A.M.
until Breakfast,” and then for most it was off to Delmonico's, in the Chinese territory, for a plate of scrambled eggs just before dawn. Exhausted partygoers then would head back to their hotels, where the early-morning vacuums would have already started humming.

Harkness couldn't have asked for a better guide than Vic Keane. He was the picture of the suave, good-natured American in Shanghai. He lived amicably away from his wife, while in a large, handsome apartment he kept a beautiful and possessive White Russian mistress, whom Harkness described as “a really entrancing creature who speaks practically no English, but enough I gather to make his life fairly miserable.” When he had to make trips out of town, his wife not only took over the reporting job for him but also assumed guardianship of the mistress, who was “as helpless as a kitten.”

Shanghai was a place of serious debauchery and vicious crime.

Because Western nations had carved it up into three distinct sections—the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese area—there were ample cracks in the system, allowing crime to fester. A lax moral atmosphere, multiple jurisdictions, and incredible wealth combined to make Shanghai “an outlaw's haven.” And the riches were truly enormous. Six million dollars a month was paid out in protection money in the opium-distribution rackets alone.

Curious about the notorious drug, Harkness found someone who could take her deeper into the hidden side of Shanghai for a better look. In her letters home, she described him only as a Norwegian newspaperman, hard at work on an exposé of opium use in the city. He may very well have been Henry Hellssen, “Denmark's globetrotting journalist,” who was in and out of Shanghai during that period. The two explored the dark, narrow streets of Chapei, the old Chinese City, which was rarely seen by westerners, who found it repugnant and frightening. The few who did venture this way were likely to be addicted to “the pipe” themselves.

In the Chinese parts of Shanghai, Harkness saw beauty and a vibrant history. “All of China, eating, sleeping, living, and loving there as they
have for thousands of years—all in the dirty, and airless streets,” she wrote. Harkness pressed on, game to infiltrate even the most wretched dens. With her newspaper chum as guide, she made her way into a filthy, ramshackle building, where the air was redolent, Harkness said, with the sweet and sickening scent of opium. The westerners stayed to observe a Chinese man and woman as they lay on couches smoking long pipes filled with the drug.

Through such wanderings, she was discovering that there were two Shanghais, and that it was the Chinese one that beckoned to her.

THE WESTERN-RULED SHANGHAI that Harkness saw in 1936 had been in the making for centuries, but it really got into gear over a British trade imbalance that built throughout the 1800s. English merchants were buying up silk and tea from China but selling little or nothing in return. The self-reliant Chinese didn't want anything, and were pleased with the way trade was going—their goods heading out, silver flowing in. The Brits eventually came up with a commodity that they could sell—cheap opium from India and Persia. Once only the drug of the wealthy in China, it could now be sold inexpensively for a mass market. And the populous country made for one hell of a mass market. In the 1830s, enough opium poured in to keep twelve million inhabitants smoking. Not wanting their citizens addicted to the drug, Chinese officials attempted to keep it out.

The livid opium merchants were able to press the British government into putting its guns in the service of their cause, with an outcome that was entirely predictable. With no comparable army or navy, China lost the 1839–1842 Opium War. In victory, the British crafted an incredible agreement, the Nanjing Treaty, which granted them unrestricted trade, as well as land rights in five major ports. Quickly, the United States, France, and other countries demanded their own table settings for the feeding frenzy.

It was all a shock to China. Traditionally, the country had been able to maintain an exalted position nearly on reputation alone. Its strength
was in moral, not military, standing. In dealings with fellow Asian countries, China, with its ancient civilization and Confucian canon of honor and ethics, had always been treated with respect. It called itself
Zhongguo,
the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world, ruled by the Son of Heaven. And indeed, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Koreans all seemed to agree, incorporating the best elements of Chinese culture into their own.

The inherent dissonance between China and the Western world would have terrible consequences. The Chinese viewed foreign relations not as a commercial opportunity but as a cultural endeavor. Selfsufficient and revered, China was accustomed to courtly and rigid formalities. All strangers were barbarians and were expected when approaching the emperor to humble themselves by bending down and performing the “kowtow.” The country's high-ranking, well-educated envoys and emissaries would never debase themselves by undertaking issues of trade and money. To the crass, tough, and greedy westerners, it all added up to an unlocked storeroom.

Now the culture that had invented both paper and printing was being handed documents containing insulting demands. The country that had produced the first compass and gunpowder was at the mercy of bullying foreign fleets, which used these inventions against it. Worse, under the new rules of extraterritoriality, foreign nations had the unlikely right to abide by their own laws in certain designated places, such as the busiest and most lucrative ports in the nation. “We are being carved into pieces like a melon!” was a common cry. The occupiers developed a sense of entitlement and superiority that Harkness found offensive.