National treasure

The Lady and the Panda: The True Adventures of the First American Explorer to Bring Back China's Most Exotic Animal
By Vicki Constantine Croke
Random House, 372 pp., illustrated, $25.95

She likes her space; he's got a temper you wouldn't suspect from his looks. Prison life doesn't agree with him. Sometimes he smacks her around, but her friends keep telling her there aren't a whole lot of good ones left. Some of them think it's funny that such an attractive young couple won't sleep together.

That's what we hear about with giant pandas, mostly -- sexual dysfunction. Their inability to breed in captivity, the soap-operatic complications in their relationships.

I'll bet you thought of that when you saw the word ''panda." Maybe you also thought about endangered wildlife. The panda's a mascot, after all, for a leading conservation group. It landed this PR gig because of the third thing most of us immediately think of, which is cuddliness. The panda is, to our symbol-making, trinket-consuming minds, a toy, a subspecies of teddy bear.

It wasn't always so. The giant panda had lived unknown to the West until 1869, when a French missionary in China came across a black-and-white hide. After that, pelts and carcasses began to trickle out of the uncharted Tibetan borderland, and with them arrived arguments about the classification of the creature. It's now considered a type of bear, the ursine party having won out over the raccoon advocates. But all of our popular panda images were, as it turns out, present just about from the moment the creature moved out of scientific obscurity and into the average Western mind. That moment occurred in 1936, when the first live panda left China for an American zoo.

The American mood between the world wars favored adventure. Newspapers and films and books were full of images impossible to relish in our post-colonial era: Roy Chapman Andrews lugging a thigh bone the size of a man out of the Gobi Desert, Frank Buck wrestling pythons in the jungle, Nanook and his family doing tricks for a white man's camera. It was the age of Tarzan and Teddy Roosevelt's Africa. It was the age when the prevailing trope was civilized man retrieving treasures from the half-conquered barbarian world. This is the territory of Vicki Constantine Croke's ''The Lady and the Panda": not the panda itself, and not, really, the wilds of China and Tibet, but the Western idea of adventure. Her arresting accomplishment is to capture the excitement of the true adventure story while dismantling the bigotry behind it.

Her narrative begins with the death of one panda-hunting adventurer and the advent of another. The first is a wealthy white man who blunders about China in search of a zoo specimen, and the glory that ought to go with it, until cancer takes him. The second is his wife, Ruth Harkness, who takes up his hunt. She wants to finish his quest, and her grief for her dead husband is a prominent strand in Croke's tapestry. What's more noticeable, though, is the contrast between this woman and her male rivals (including the husband who left her behind when he went hunting). She loves the people she meets in the East; the men are racists. She's hunting for something beyond the goal of the moment, something spiritual; the men want only cash and glory. She bonds with the pandas she catches, feeding them from baby bottles, giving up her own clothes to protect them, experimenting to find them a suitable diet. The men bind the animals tight or let them bake to death, caged in tropical heat.

Croke's gift for images makes Harkness's journey a sensual one; even the dangerous passages through ''plummeting gorges" and bamboo jungle are lushly evoked. Harkness's methods -- more humane, more intuitive, and more intelligent than those of the Great White Male hunters she competes with -- lead her to success. She's a celebrity, and the newspaper coverage emphasizes the cuteness of the animal she's brought back. The men on hand to proclaim its scientific importance are footnotes to the cuteness, then as now. Croke explains that this is an instinctive reaction: Pandas possess roughly the proportions of a human baby.

The human interest in panda sex started right away. Harkness, and everybody else, think the male cub she's caught is female because its penis is too small to be seen. Its gender is a financial matter: Zoos want breeding pairs. But the issue of conservation crops up right away, too. With Western hunters charging around the countryside killing and capturing pandas, the scarcity of the animal quickly becomes a crisis. Harkness is by this time back in the Chinese-Tibetan borderland, hunting a husband for the pseudo-female she's already delivered up. It is on this second journey that she awakes to the disturbing idea that she's helping to kill the animals she loves. Croke pointedly evokes the parallel sufferings of the Chinese, as the Western powers abandon them to Japanese aggression in 1937. The world of ''adventure" crumbles as the whole notion of civilization begins to look dubious.

Croke doesn't belabor the implications of her story -- a weaker writer might, I think, have been unable to resist explaining Harkness's alcoholism in terms of modern ideas and might have dwelt tediously on the way she soaked up a Daoist view of things. Most writers, I feel sure, would have forced Harkness into the mold of current feminist thinking, whereas Croke aims to paint a woman rather than a symbol. She's not always successful; sometimes she searches out the best possible motive for Harkness, while emphasizing the dishonesty and self-aggrandizement of her rivals. But these bouts of hero-worship don't ruin the powerfully complex character Croke has discovered in Ruth Harkness -- a dress designer, a socialite, a woman of startling accomplishments who confronted poverty, drink, doubt, and despair on a frontier both physical and spiritual.

Gordon Grice is the author of ''The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators" (Delta, 1999) and the forthcoming ''Rough Beasts: A Dictionary of Dangerous Animals" (Dial).