Comment

With love, from San Diego

By Renee Haines (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-19 09:42

Are you feeling the love, China? Because my home state of California is sending plenty your way this week. It's the pandas that create a sudden urge to come see what they love about China.

Hundreds of netizens this week are filling the website of the San Diego Zoo in California with best wishes and high hopes for the future of two Giant Pandas named Su Lin and Zhen Zhen who were born at the zoo.

San Diegans sometimes like to call them Su and ZZ. They leave at the end of August for their new life at a Chinese panda preserve.

"Like human parents, we don't want to see our children go. But you are right, they are going on a great adventure and will find happiness in China," a netizen named Nancy from California wrote on the zoo website.

The fact that these Giant Pandas are headed to their permanent home in China is also persuading their fans to travel to China to see them.

"Will just have to take another trip to China next year to check up on both of them," wrote a netizen from Brooklyn, New York.

"My saving grace is that I will be able to see all the pandas in China when I go there," wrote a Canadian from Vancouver, British Columbia.

San Diegans and San Diego Zoo visitors love the pandas that are on loan, by law, from China. All Giant Pandas, even those born in the United States, must be returned after the age of three. But while they are in San Diego, either to breed or to be born there, they are the biggest stars at the zoo.

Long lines form every day of people wanting to take a peek at these endangered animals at play in their temporary zoo habitat. I used to stand in those long lines when I lived in San Diego. The first words I learned in Chinese before moving to Beijing last year were the names given Hua Mei and Mei Sheng, the first pandas born at the San Diego Zoo.

The two pandas are the older siblings of Su Lin, 5, and Zhen Zhen, 3. Hai Mei was sent to China in 2004, and her brother Mei Sheng was sent to China in 2007.

Because of the San Diego Zoo's "Panda Cam", fans from around the world have seen the Giant Pandas born in San Diego grow from tiny cubs by watching daily Internet video updates at www.sandiegozoo.org/pandacam. At any time, you can visit the website and watch the pandas eating, sleeping or playing, thanks to a video camera trained on the animals.

Now that I live in Beijing, I still can't resist "tuning in" every week or two. I have persuaded friends here to take an occasional peek, too.

Earlier this summer, Su and ZZ were switched from biscuits to bamboo bread to prepare them for their new diet in China, I learned. Want to see Su and ZZ? They are now probably en route to China, but you can click on the pandacam website to watch time-lapse videos of them at play from earlier weeks.

The pandas belong to China, but we love them like they are ours, too, because we have watched them grow.

"The pandas in China are as cherished as they are outside the country," one US netizen reassured her peers this week after an earlier visit to China to see Hua Mei and Mei Sheng, the older siblings of Su and ZZ.

Su and ZZ will join their older brother and sister at the Bifengxia Base of the Wolong Giant Panda Protection and Research Center in Sichuan province sometime during the final days of August. Thanks to the staff at the Chinese panda center, fans like me can visit www.panda.org.cn to continue checking up on our favorite pandas.

The goal of captive breeding programs is to study the endangered species and ultimately encourage their repopulation in the wilds of their native China. Already this week, San Diego Zoo website visitors were encouraging each other to donate money to the panda programs in China, where more than 1,500 pandas reportedly are living in the wild.

There will be another panda from the San Diego Zoo headed this way in just two more years. Now that Su and ZZ are being readied for their trip to China, we can still visit the pandacam website to watch their youngest sibling, one-year-old Yun Zi, at play, along with their parents Bai Yun and Gao Gao. So there are new fans, even though they know Yun Zi must leave some day, too.

Hence, the repeated use of the word "bittersweet" in this week's Internet messages bidding farewell to sisters Su and ZZ.

"I'm a wreck - but a somewhat happy wreck," one netizen wrote at the San Diego Zoo website this week, happy to know that the female pandas will soon be able "to be mamas" in China.

"Farewell, beauties, and take our love along," wrote a netizen from New York in a message.

"I'm happy to relay because when it comes to China, their Great Pandas and how fans around the world love them, too, it really does feel like we're family."