Two Pandas

Xien Won was a giant panda born with a normal, playful, good disposition in the Guiyang compound where she lived. Fresh, in fine spirits, she was positively delightful and cuddlesome, according to standard propaganda until—she wasn’t. Why was that? It was the place. She came more and more to scorn her condition. She grew bored with the monotonous gym set and routine, even gave up swinging on the swing. She came to despise the ooh-ing children and their ah-ing parents, and regularly faced about, turning her back to the crowd (to be rid of them, she thought). In these ways her disposition soured; she was out of humor, she lacked even momentary joy, and gradually her features more or less caught her sulky mood, and her face, though furred, seemed to glower.

           

She refused, of course, to couple with prospective mates, with whom, instead of love-and-hate, it was always hate. After a third and successful artificial insemination, she gave birth to a cub of her own to whom she was so indifferent that it had to be taken from her and put into incubation. She never missed it just as she had never kissed it. Her progressive withdrawal became deeper. She ended as a sullen ward, neither close to fellow creatures nor the staff, bonded to no one, anti-social and glum.

           

Her cousin, Chun Tai, was her opposite number. He lived in central China, in the wilds of the Bamboo Belt, a roly-poly panda child of the mountain fastness, filled with rambunctious play in his early adolescent years and, later, in continual thrall to testosterone, cuffing territorial intruders, gruff in the way that a high-charged nature shows. Then, gradually, he mellowed—or was it that he slowly but surely succumbed to the soft lovely landscape he melted in and enjoyed? He eased his heart toward romantic rivals, and he acted, himself, gentler and gentler toward his paramours.

            

He became a mild old creature of that place where he had no predators, no threat to his survival, buoyed by and used to the dripping landscape where he dwelt, fashioning his bedding each night with mute and focused concentration, never tiring of the plentiful savory shoots, sniffing the forest for keen or delicate sensation, nuzzling other pandas he might meet, being perfectly at home where he felt content, climbing the trees, roaming the woodland, a free sweet creature, happy in that benign wilderness of his life.

            

One day, in her compound, Xien Won crunched and spit a fortune cookie offered by a keeper. The strip of paper when unrolled, sticky and meaningless to her, read: “Your Good Nature will bring you Happiness.”

            

Moral: Always take easy wisdom the other way around.