Joined by her husband Jack Young and brother-in-law Quentin Young, Adelaide Su-Lin Chen Young ’33 was the first American woman explorer to enter the rugged Tibetan-Himalayan area. She was part of the expeditions that led to the arrival of the first giant pandas in the United States. Pampered and glamorous, American-born Chinese Adelaide Su-Lin Chen was an unlikely explorer. She was a small woman, beautiful and vivacious. She was a native of New York City, where her father, Ming Tai Chen, owned several restaurants and nightclubs, including the famed China Doll, a hot spot for big bands of the 1920s. Adelaide’s only outdoor experience was as a summer camp counselor in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She entered Wesleyan as a first-year student in 1930, but left in 1933 and returned to New York. There, she met Jack Theodore Young, an explorer and naturalist studying at a New York university. In 1934, they married and embarked on their honeymoon, a tenmonth, three-person expedition to China, where they were to collect bird and animal specimens and catalog plants for the American Museum of Natural History. “The expedition turned out to be much more difficult than my mother expected,” according to Jolly Young King, Adelaide’s middle daughter. “On the first day, it snowed. She hiked for ten months, enduring extreme weather conditions and high altitudes. It was physically strenuous, plus those areas were filled with outlaws and bandits. My father and uncle often went off on scouting expeditions, leaving my mother behind. She traveled alone with a local porter.” “There was a total lack of privacy, and loss of contact with family and friends was difficult to deal with. She talked about bathing in cold streams, eating the same thing day after day when rations were low, losing pack horses because of precarious climbs, learning how to shoot a rifle and pistol, always wearing a loud whistle so they could locate her if she needed help. And fleas –– lots of fleas,” Jolly continued. On that first and later expeditions, Jack, Adelaide, and Quentin Young explored territory in China, Tibet, and parts of India. Naturalists like George Schaller, author of The Last Panda, credit the Young family with opening exploration of territory where pandas are found and being key to the successful panda expeditions that followed.
As the sole woman in the company of men, Adelaide often slept with a loaded pistol under a makeshift pillow. She took shelter in Tibetan yurts and yak-hair tents, gathered her own food, cooked over a campfire, and drew a crowd wherever she went. She was the object of fascination and the subject of judgmental conversation. “People would watch her bathe,” according to Boston writer Vicki Croke. “She was viewed by the Chinese as an American and by Americans as Chinese. She was really between cultures, and it was liberating for her.” Early in the trip, Adelaide shot and killed a large bear. She quickly realized the bear had two cubs, and was upset about the killing for many years. Although mounted trophies were prized during the early twentieth century, Adelaide persuaded her husband and brother-in-law to bring creatures back alive, not dead, for museums and zoos. After the first ten-month expedition, Adelaide and Jack relocated to Shanghai but continued to travel and guide other explorers. Details of Adelaide’s excursions are included in Croke’s The Lady and the Panda, a 2005 biography of another female explorer, Ruth Harkness, who traveled with Quentin Young. Adelaide was working as a reporter for several publications in Shanghai, including the China Journal and North China Daily News, when she met Harkness. “After meeting my mother,” said Jolly, “Ruth Harkness decided she could survive an expedition if my mother did.” In 1936, when Harkness brought the first live giant panda to the United States, she named it Su-Lin, meaning “a little bit of something precious.” The Young family explorers brought several live pandas to the United States. In 1937, Harkness sold the panda named for Adelaide Su-Lin Young to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo where it lived for one year. The body now is mounted in the Chicago Field Museum. A panda born in 2005 at the San Diego Zoo also is named Su-Lin. When the Japanese-Chinese war broke in 1937, Adelaide’s younger sister, Gloria Chen, was a first-year student at Wesleyan. During the same time, Adelaide and her husband relocated several times in China
and worked for the Chinese government. As the World War II conflict invaded China, Adelaide evacuated to the United States. Newspaper clippings from December 1941 detail her dramatic escape from besieged Hong Kong with five-year-old-daughter Jacqueline, when they were carried airmail on the first plane to Chungking. After the Chinese Communist Party takeover in 1949, she spent several years in Taiwan but returned to the U.S. again in the late1950s. “We moved around a lot and were often separated from my father,” said Jolly. “My parents lived exciting lives, leading expeditions for the Roosevelt family and serving influential political figures. My father, Jack, was well decorated. He retired as a Colonel in the U.S. Army and as a General in the Nationalist Army. He served as a liaison officer of the Chinese government, a political liaison to Chiang Kai-shek, and in the CIA and U.S. Army Intelligence. Because he spent most of his career in intelligence, he didn’t speak much about his professional life and we are just now learning about his work.” When Adelaide died of natural causes in 2008 at the age of 96, the San Francisco Chronicle featured her as one of the year’s 100 Most Notable Deaths. Articles highlighting her achievements appeared in major newspapers in the U.S. and around the world including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Sun, and The London Times. Her legacy also is celebrated through an exhibit at the Memphis Zoo, The Explorer’s Walk, that credits Adelaide Su-Lin as one of three explorers who opened the East to the West: Marco Polo, Pere David and Su-Lin Young. Adelaide is survived by three daughters, Jackie, Jocelyn, and Jolly, who continue to research and share their mother’s exciting adventures. Adelaide’s family recently donated to Wesleyan’s library a copy of Chasing the Panda by Michael Keifer. Although several panda explorers are mentioned, the book essentially is about the Young family and includes several photographs of Adelaide Su-Lin. Photos courtesy of Young family.
Wesleyan Magazine Summer 2010