By Elizabeth Kastor
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 31, 1992; Page C01

She was, in her way, the ultimate baby boomer. The biological clock ticking away. The high-tech fertility tests. The videotaped births. The drive to achieve.

Ling-Ling. Ling-Ling. Was it the pressure that did you in?

Again and again, her most private panda moments splayed across the newspaper pages and television screens. The pregnancies that turned out to be nothing more than hormonal glitches. Maybe she didn't even like Hsing-Hsing. Did anyone think to ask if sparks flew? Did anyone even ask her if she wanted a baby? No, we all assumed she was the Ultimate Mom, thwarted by nature. She wouldn't have left her kids behind and gone to Acapulco for Christmas vacation!

But perhaps she was more of an independent sort, a loner, a career-panda pressured by society and zookeepers to conform. Maybe she would have been happy with nieces and nephews.

Now we'll never know. She died suddenly yesterday, at age 23.

Over the years, Ling-Ling became more than just an Ailuropoda melanoleuca (they're not really bears). She was the screen upon which a baby-crazed generation projected its reproductive anxieties. Maybe the two needed some time away from each other. Maybe she should take a lover. (They brought in a panda from London, but no go.)

Wait a minute -- you say she was just a panda, not a yuppie? You say this was all instinct operating, not some complex emotional life? You say we anthropomorphized Ling-Ling, denied her her pandahood?

But whenever we look at animals we always see them as creatures both utterly alien and eerily like ourselves. Their differentness intrigues us, but their familiarity lets us love them. We stand in the monkey house and marvel at the way they play like our children, hug like our parents. After giving birth to her fifth cub in 1989, a doomed, premature speck of life that was rushed off to the needles and antibiotics of the vets, Ling-Ling searched for the baby and then cradled her apples. It was so human, and yet there she was -- a panda.

So you had to care for her, and Hsing-Hsing too. And you had to take out-of-town visitors to see them. And you kept going back, even if the panda house always seemed to be closed, due to the pandas' periodic need for some privacy.

For in a city where genuine cuteness is a rare commodity, Ling-Ling was one of the few things that passed for local color. She was a mascot, a furry soap opera, a vehicle for double-entendres, a living, breathing security object. She was, of course, also part of a plan to save the vanishing giant pandas, but stand in the panda house and any talk of species preservation was drowned out with an endless series of "awws!" when she or her longtime companion turned toward the crowd.

Now there will be only Hsing-Hsing (who must have suffered from performance anxiety of a sort none of us can imagine, but that's another story). There had been talk of sending him off to meet another panda on a sort of zoological blind date. But he's aging too. Perhaps it's time to say it was not meant to be, to hum a few bars of "As Times Goes By" and let the big guy grow old in peace.