The Lady and the Panda (7 page)

The funny thing was that much of the snobbery was affected. People became whatever they wanted in Shanghai. In this city, it was impolite to ask about someone's past because it was assumed there
was
something to hide. As in American gold-rush towns of the 1800s, what counted here was drive and ambition, not family connections. For most, Shanghai was a temporary stop—and the more temporary, the better. The point of coming here, according to one newspaper, was “to make
money and get out.” Yet many foreigners stayed, decade upon decade, joking that they couldn't go home because they wouldn't know how to get along without five servants anymore.

IT WAS TOO EARLY
in her trip for Harkness to have developed a routine. In the drenching, one-hundred-degree heat of that summer in Shanghai, she sometimes found herself holed up in her hotel room, sitting naked on her bed, banging out letters home on her portable typewriter.

Some days she would pinch pennies and have the thirty-cent lunch served at the YMCA. For low-key socializing, she'd go to dinner with Elizabeth Smith at a favorite little sukiyaki restaurant in Japantown. Within a small, screened private room, they would sit on cushions before a low table and enjoy fried prawns and seaweed. They drank hot sake from tiny blue bowls and watched as the food was cooked right before them.

The dress-designer-turned-explorer also discovered the most talented tailor in the world here in Shanghai. “ZIANG TAI: Any Kinds of Ladies Tailor and Skin, Etc” read his business card. Ziang would conjure perfect dresses with matching jackets from the sketches that Harkness drew for him. Each would cost the equivalent of two American dollars. Playing the part of the oblivious socialite, Harkness would write, “There is really nothing like the stimulus of a new dress to brighten the atmosphere.”

There were days when she would take an aimless ride in a rickshaw, immersing herself in the choreographed commotion of the streets, where banners in bold Chinese characters waved down through shafts of sunlight, advertising sales, silks, mah-jongg sets, live birds, ivory. She found Shanghai to be “a great sprawling rambling” place filled with beautiful faces.

How preposterous, she wrote home, that westerners say the Chinese all look alike. The people she saw on Bubbling Well Road were as different from one another as the pedestrians on Fifth Avenue in New York. And in those faces she rarely, if ever, detected anxiety. She came to believe
that the poorest Chinese peasant had something most Americans, even the richest—perhaps particularly the richest—never knew: inner peace.

Harkness saw there were two Shanghais, and it was the Eastern version she was drawn toward.
ALFRED T. PALMER/COURTESY JULIA PALMER GENNERT

Just down the street from her hotel, she could shop on the ultracosmopolitan Nanking Road. Every luxury item in the world was carried here. There were goldsmiths, silversmiths, silk emporiums, and shops carrying
sandalwood carvings. Several blocks west of the Bund, the waterfront promenade, were the top Chinese department stores, Sincere and Wing On, in whose food sections one could “buy ‘thousand-year-old eggs,’ dried grasshoppers, Russian caviar, Camembert cheese, and Hormel's soups.”

In order to negotiate her way, Harkness began to pick up the bastard language known as pidgin English, a trading tongue that mixed English, Chinese, Indian, and Portuguese and followed the pronunciation, idiom, and grammar of Chinese. Pidgin English solved one problem, that of basic communication, while creating another, making Chinese speakers seem simpleminded. According to the guidebooks, “Catchee one piece rickshaw” meant “get a rickshaw.” “Talkee my” was “Let me know.” “Chop chop” meant “quickly.” “How muchee?” was “How much is that?”

In all of her rambles, Harkness was never afraid, although some crimes, such as armed robbery, were so commonplace that Ralph Shaw, a British journalist in Shanghai, reported that they weren't worth coverage. Kidnappings too were so frequent that most wealthy Chinese employed bodyguards—often big, strapping Russians—for protection. There were “more gangsters in Shanghai than Chicago ever saw in the heyday of Capone,” Shaw claimed.

The headlines in the city's papers screamed of suicides and gruesome crimes, and while Harkness was in town, there were plenty. Within days of her arrival, an American military officer leaped to his death from her hotel. A Chinese man's head was found near the Moon Palace Hotel. And the headless, nude body of a Chinese woman was discovered chopped up and stuffed into a leather suitcase near the Shanghai Rowing Club.

Drugs, gambling, prostitution. Chinese gangsters in pinstriped suits carrying tommy guns. Triad bosses displaying long, opium-stained nails and wearing silk brocade gowns. International con men who found refuge in the city that didn't require a passport. Shanghai was a hideout for criminals of all countries. In this wild town, the top bad guys were colorful celebrities, with schemes that could exist only in Shanghai. Huang Jinrong, or “Pockmarked Huang,” not only ran the biggest racket going—the notorious Green Gang—he was also a high-ranking Chinese
detective with the French police. He and his associate Du Yuesheng, or “Big-Eared Du,” wielded power equally with municipal officials, gangster kings, and more. With their henchmen they were guns for hire in the massive political upheavals that would change China forever. When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government wanted to teach a lesson to organized labor or Communists, Huang's bone breakers were called in.

Along with crime, there were ample doses of vice. Shanghai boasted the longest bar in existence. And by 1930, it possessed more prostitutes per capita than any other city in the world. Here, the most depraved people from all walks of life came to satisfy their urges. One particularly twisted warlord from Shandong Province, a six-foot-seven maniac with a shaved skull, loved to sweep into Shanghai surrounded by soldiers numbering in the thousands. Fond of decapitating enemies and posting their heads on telegraph poles, Chang Tsung-chang played as hard as he butchered. He was said to keep forty-two concubines, and he once sodomized a teenage boy during a dinner party as all the guests and singsong girls looked on.

Shanghai debauchery was legendary, but for the foreigners the city was not quite its lively self in the summer of 1936. Western residents traditionally decamped to cooler country places for the hot season, and the exodus was especially noticeable in this brutally steamy year. Harkness saw that “everyone who can afford to leaves Shanghai during July and August; they go to the hills, they go to Japan, they go North.” The deflated party scene, though, was of no consequence to her. Harkness had already begun losing interest in it all anyway. Something surprising was happening. As the hard-drinking dress designer became more and more intoxicated with China, she found herself indulging less and less in cocktails. She wanted to keep fit for the expedition, and she was starting to have a sense of how she could chart her own course. Deliriously, she wrote, “I think I am happier here than at any time since I left home.”

DURING THE MONTHS
in Shanghai, Floyd Tangier Smith behaved like an ardent suitor. He cleared the decks for Harkness, making himself available
to her at all hours, enjoying everything from prelunch drinks to meals and late-night talks. It made his wife, Elizabeth, “jealous as hell,” Harkness knew, to sit at home night after night while her husband was out with the woman who seemed to have attracted every married and unmarried man in Shanghai. “The talk usually started with previous expedition affairs, and ended always, no one knew quite how, with Buddhism, or Tibetan mysticism and adventure,” Harkness said.

Floyd Tangier Smith done up in traditional Chinese silk.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Sometimes tucked away in her hotel room, with the sounds of the river traffic wafting through the windows, the careful listener and the tireless yarner would sit sipping whiskey sodas and talk about China's
distant borderland. The darkly attractive widow had no trouble drawing out the homely, rawboned older man. He was all too eager to pontificate, even though he must have looked and felt awful—suffering as he was from sciatica and a recurring case of malaria. But nothing, it seemed, could keep him from these all-important talks with Harkness.

She was just as eager to have them, for it was time to get down to business. The first step—before organizing the expedition, applying for permits, or mapping out the journey—would be making a decision about partnerships. She had scores to settle, and Bill's ashes to collect. She wanted desperately to untangle the mystery of his death and his finances. All roads led to Floyd Tangier Smith, who in turn stood at the fork of another, the one leading out of Shanghai and into the wild. Harkness would have to tread carefully. She had to be tough-minded and pragmatic, particularly where Smith was concerned, since he was the biggest question mark. She would assess him entirely on her own—from what she herself saw and heard.

Once lubricated with a few cocktails, he could be quite expansive. “He has been here for twenty-five years or more,” Harkness said, “and the tales are wonderful. The Panchen Lama of Tibet, the animals he has collected, the racehorses he has owned, gold in the high mountains, Chinese civil war and bandits.” Smith was a practiced storyteller who in previous trips to the States had told reporters many of the same chestnuts—how he had been the only white man for scores of miles in “barbaric” regions; that he had lived for weeks on cornmeal and game, how he had been snowbound for months on end in below-zero temperatures.

For those first few days in Shanghai, Harkness savored the accounts. They were glimpses of the rough life of adventure she intended to have for herself, even while giving her cause to have doubts about this old China hand. For Smith never tried to disguise his contempt for the Chinese. “It was a long job teaching these hunters that there is a difference between a live animal and a dead one,” he wrote of the native workers in western China, “for they are primitive, stupid and deceitful, and they lie with the greatest of ease.”

Harkness, on the other hand, found the Chinese to be an amazingly honest people. Here, her hotel room remained unlocked and nothing, down to the “little pile of coppers” left on her dresser, was ever taken. “I divide the whites in two classes out here,” she would write, “those with the superior attitude toward the yellow races, and consequently hating them and being cordially hated in return, and those who like the Chinese, try to understand them, and in turn receive the same treatment with at times a great deal of service and unbelievable loyalty thrown in.”

Smith was also a product of his age and time. The notion of a woman in command of an expedition irked him, and his irritation occasionally surfaced in negotiations. But he needed her money, and in courting her as a financial partner, he must have labored to keep those views in check.

Harkness and Smith did find common ground in their interest in animals. Smith even loaned her a fairly tame large Indian civet. The size of a small dog, the exotic animal had the coat of a raccoon, complete with a magnificent striped tail. “Noctivorous,” Smith had said of him, and Harkness discovered that indeed “Szechwan” was like a typical Shanghai citizen, wanting to sleep all day and play all night.

Even on this front, though, the two were miles apart. Smith was the kind of animal lover who could unload the barrel of a rifle on a creature as easily as he could scratch its haunch. He wanted the glory of capturing a live panda, but nearly as good, he said, would be snagging one to “pickle.” Toward the unfortunates he collected and shipped out, he felt no sorrow. “Those who think that the animals chafe at their captivity do not realize that with a regular supply of food and freedom from the fear of attack, most of them are ‘in clover,’ and they know it,” he wrote.

Harkness was a sentimentalist through and through. She was forever rescuing stray kittens, falling in love with dogs, and even keeping a pet monkey in New York. In France, a live pigeon shoot she witnessed was “atrocious.” “I don't know how you feel about animals,” she once told a crowd, “but I develop a terrific inferiority complex when dogs look askance at me, and to have a cat sneer at me will depress me for days.”