The Lady and the Panda by Vicki Croke Read Free Book Online Page A

they had arrived at the house earlier she had glimpsed the warm colors of the sunset in rippled reflection below. Nothing, though, could have prepared her for what she was about to see. As she made her way out to the edge of the yard, she gasped. She simply could not at first comprehend what she saw before her.
    Above were moon and cloud, and the millions of stars of the night sky. Below, the sea had been transformed into its own glittering, dancing galaxy as hundreds of boats—flat-bottomed Chinese junks—crowded together to fish by torchlight.
    Boundaries vanished as sea and sky appeared in mirror image. She was now in the land of yin and yang, unity and separation. In this realm,opposites fit into each other, hold the seed of the other, become each other. It is where light and dark, male and female, heaven and earth, are reconciled.
    Ruth Harkness experienced a strange sensation that would never leave her—that here, on the other side of the world, she was “in some inexplicable way—home.”
    PAST OIL-SUPPLY DEPOTS, repair docks, dilapidated warehouses, and factories belching black smoke, the SS
Tancred
cut velvety furrows through the silted waters of the Huangpu River. Coming on the heels of the most sweeping vistas imaginable, the approach to Shanghai was dirty and ugly. Oppressively hot too, for this was one of the most miserable days the steamy port had to offer. Harkness couldn't help feeling let down. If Hong Kong had been celestial, Shanghai, “the Whore of the East,” was truly of the earth. Harkness would thus be surprised at how quickly she grew to love Shanghai, to embrace its very filth and to recognize the divine not just in the stars above, but in the ground below her feet.
    But at that moment, even as the ship took a sharp left turn with the bend of the waterway at Soochow Creek and the scene changed to opulence, she still had her doubts. Here, amid the architectural magnificence that marked the beginning of what Europeans and Americans would consider the city proper—the steel-and-concrete dynasty of the International Settlement—was the Shanghai of movies and novels.
    Harkness took in the handsome buildings that lined the shore. Possessing what had been described as a “distinctly skyward” inclination, each tried to outdo the next for stateliness and panache. There was the posh Shanghai Club, the domed Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, and the grandest structure of them all, the pyramid-capped Cathay Hotel. All the marble and granite, columns, bas-reliefs, flying buttresses, and tile mosaics made it resemble London or Paris or New York—an effect the Western businessmen were aiming for. But China wouldn't be submerged so easily, and fluttering incongruously in delicate motion before the massively built-up shore were the great poetic junks—hundredsof them, clustered like butterflies, their sails veined by seams, many of their prows decorated with alert eyes.

    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 togetherin a great gurgling and