Fu Bao the Panda

Every morning, two middle-aged men went to work at a zoo inside Everland park.

One was named Song Young-gwan. The other was named Kang Cheol-won. Their job was looking after a panda.

On the face of it, that was an ordinary job. But then the whole of South Korea began calling the two men by another name: the panda grandpas.

The story begins on July 20, 2020.

That day, a mother panda named Ai Bao gave birth at the Everland zoo. The cub's father was named Le Bao. Both parents were pandas that had come over from China.

The cub was the first panda ever born naturally on Korean soil. It was named Fu Bao, which means lucky treasure. In Vietnam, people read the name in its Sino-Vietnamese form, Phúc Bảo.

It did not arrive at an ordinary time. The year 2020 was when the whole world shut its doors because of the pandemic. People stayed at home, schools closed, the streets emptied, and the daily news was almost all bad.

In the middle of all that, in South Korea, a panda cub was growing up.

People followed it on their screens, day after day, watching a tiny creature slowly grow bigger. In a year when everyone was worn out, it seemed the whole country needed exactly this kind of thing to look at: something getting better, not worse.

Its name helped too. Fu Bao means lucky treasure. In a year when luck was in short supply, an animal carrying exactly that name was growing up in Yongin.

The two keepers slowly became familiar faces along with it. It was the way those two middle-aged men cared for the bear, patient and gentle, that gave them the nickname panda grandpas, and it stuck for good. Later, a whole documentary told this story. It was called My Dearest Fu Bao, and in the film the two men are still the panda grandpas.

Visitors came to Everland's panda house in great crowds, many of them just to see one animal. That is a rare thing. Here was an amusement park with dozens of big rides and the longest wooden roller coaster in the country. Yet one of the longest lines was for a bear sitting and chewing bamboo.

But from the very beginning, everyone involved knew one thing.

Pandas are animals that China lends to other countries rather than gives away. Under the general agreement that covers those bears, a panda born abroad must return to China within four years of its birth.

Four years. That deadline was already written on paper before the cub was even born.

So on the very day Fu Bao came into the world at Zootopia, the Everland zoo, the day of parting was already set. Nobody hid it. The keepers knew. The park's management knew. And after a while, the people watching knew too. A whole country loved one animal while everyone kept in mind the date it would have to go back.

On April 3, 2024, Fu Bao left South Korea for the Shenshuping facility in China.

About 6,000 people came to the farewell ceremony.

Six thousand people. All there to see off one bear.

The day was rainy and cold. The two keepers read out a letter of thanks. Some people wept out loud. And all of them knew very well that the bear did not understand where it was going, or why so many people had come that day.

What matters in this story is not that it is sad.

It is this: everyone knew the day of parting in advance, and they loved the bear with all their hearts anyway.

The two keepers knew it better than anyone. From the first day they lifted the cub, they knew they were raising an animal they would one day have to give back. Still they got up early, still coaxed it to eat, still sat down on the ground so it could climb all over them, for nearly four years.

It is a kind of love that grown-ups often take a long time to learn, while children understand it at once. Some things we love do not belong to us, and that does not make the loving one bit smaller.

After that day, the two keepers still went to work every morning. The bear's parents stayed at Everland, where more pandas had been born as well.

On a day when the panda house at Everland is open, the person worth watching may be the one in a staff uniform behind the glass, not only the animal.

Quite possibly, that is someone caring for a bear they will one day have to see off, and doing it with great kindness.