Meeting Mexico's last panda and postponing the final goodbye
In Mexico City's Chapultepec Zoo, the most beloved pandas in the world are taxidermied and on display, like memories frozen in time.
It’s the first week of school, but I’ve been thinking about an end-of-school trip I took a few years ago when my kids were young.
This was in 2018, when the boys were 11 and 7, and we celebrated Julian’s completion of elementary school with our first family travel adventure that required a passport. We went to Mexico City, where we chased the shade of those plant-lined streets and posed for pictures in front of the murals and monuments. The kids were learning Spanish in school, so we practiced at the candy store, the ice cream stop, and the taco truck.
RELATED: Mexico City invites culinary exploration like no other
One of the places we wandered was the Chapultepec Zoo, a free zoo in the middle of the city’s most notable park, where the last living panda in Mexico lives.
That might not seem like a big deal, but let me tell you about this panda.
I first heard about her from a friend of mine who grew up in Mexico City in the 1980s. She was giving me tips on what to do. “You must go see the pandas,” she said. There were two pandas in the zoo at that time, and their parents – or maybe their grandparents, she couldn’t remember – were stuffed and on display at the zoo.
These pandas were so loved that they were taxidermied and were still on display all these years after their death?
That’s how the boys and I found ourselves in the park, looking for the stuffed pandas.
When we found them, and I felt that familiar clench in my throat. The sight of these bears, who had been beloved by so many that they were preserved in this way, is one of those travel memories that I just can’t shake.
One of the stuffed pandas we saw was Tohui, born in 1981, who was the real rock star in this panda story because she was the first panda born outside China to live to adulthood.
Her parents, Ying Ying and Pe Pe, who are also on display, were given to Mexico by the Chinese government in 1975 as part of the country’s new panda diplomacy, which started in 1972 with the Nixon visit to China to curry favor from countries around the world through the distribution of these coveted megafauna.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Invisible Thread to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.