Talk about performance anxiety.
It would be enough, one might think, to ask Le Le and Ya Ya, the two giant pandas who arrived to a delirious welcome at the zoo here a few weeks ago, to defy the spotty history of panda pregnancies in America and do what is supposed to come naturally.
Should the pandas perform, they could also make history: only one giant panda cub has been born and survived in captivity in the US -- Hua Mei, a female born in 1999 at the San Diego Zoo -- and she was conceived through artificial insemination.
Memphis, however, has even bigger hopes for its panda pair: a giant lift for its civic self-image on the order of securing another sports franchise and an infusion of cash from tourists eager to see the bamboo-gobbling pandas cavort in between their famously frequent snoozes.
"We need them to be healthy and active, and do their thing by bringing in people," said Karl A. Schledwitz, a politically connected zoo board member who came up with the idea of luring pandas to Memphis in 1996. "It's very important."
How important? A University of Memphis economist -- hired by the zoo, of course -- estimated that the two pandas could be responsible for upward of US$1.3 billion in added spending at local hotels, restaurants and other attractions, US$400 million in extra income, 23,000 new jobs and US$87 million in tax revenue.
Emphasis on the "could."
Yet to judge from the throngs of eager oglers at the zoo on Wednesday despite a downpour, the panda payday may not be entirely pie-in-the-sky.
As Le Le and Ya Ya lolled, taking turns playing with their trainers in exchange for bamboo leaves and grain-meal-and-apple mush treats, Suzanne Martin, 43, had her 3-year-old daughter, Grace, and another girl in tow. It was the other way around, really: Grace and her friend dashed back and forth from the glass-walled, air-conditioned apartments where the pandas had sought refuge to the carousel with a Chinese theme to the gift shop packed with stuffed pandas.
"They both know they're adopted from China," Martin, a Memphis resident, said of the two girls, "and they keep saying, `The pandas come from China like us,' so we keep coming back." This was their third trip.
In truth, this city caught panda fever years before the animals arrived. The zoo's former director, Roger Knox, suggested somewhat hyperbolically in 2000 that obtaining pandas from China could be "on the same level as getting an NFL team."
Knox, who was in the throes of raising money for the panda project, knew how to push his audience's buttons. Getting a professional football team has proven beyond Memphis' grasp in two tries, and remains a sore point for a city whose only major sports team is the Grizzlies of the NBA, late of Vancouver -- an import of somewhat lesser note.
Schledwitz, a real estate developer and associate of James R. Sasser, the Democrat and former senator who was named ambassador to China in 1995, headed the panda procurement effort after learning something from his friend about the delicate international politics involved.
Only about 1,000 pandas are believed to be in the wild in China, and no more than 110 are in zoos and nature centers around the world. In the US, there are three pandas at the San Diego Zoo, two at the National Zoo in Washington and two at Zoo Atlanta. Sojourns abroad are limited to 10 years, after which the coveted animals are returned to China. Several Chinese ministries must endorse a proposed loan, and in the end China's State Council must approve it.
RSS