White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I feel stifled. I break out of the center of the group. It is a beautiful day. The morning river fog has been burned away by a sun now high at our backs. The crowd around the reviewing ground is restive; we hear hoots, calls to action, nasty insults. The vendor of bean crullers is off to the left, selling his wares to some of these impatient yellows; he is apparently a local clown, for he leaps and dances about his portable kitchen, and I hear sallies of laughter from the yellows near him. I try to imagine a figure, my figure, standing on one leg beyond the memorial archway. Isn’t that form very small? Does it make any impression at all? On either side of the pretentious yamen I see, in the far distance, fringed green hills steaming in the warm sunlight.

  I turn now, and seeming to speak to the whole group I speak to Rock. “I’m ready. I think we had better start.”

  Rock says, relieved, “If you say so.”

  The knot of my companions seems to sigh as with one pair of taxed lungs.

  My heart is beating violently, but I feel able to do whatever I must do. Rock comes out of the group and says in a low voice, “It will be all right. The Governor is bluffing. They can’t stop us.”

  Ai, Rock! I hope you’re right.

  I turn away and step out quickly onto the reviewing ground.

  The Cruller That Fell

  Before I have taken ten steps the crowd of yellows falls suddenly silent, and the hush seems to come at me like some sort of net. I am caught in it. My steps become awkward; it is as if I had forgotten how to walk. I have to instruct myself to fashion each step. Bend knee, carry right foot forward, deposit it. Meshed in this attentive silence, I feel something distinctly sexual in the interest this male crowd gives me, and I walk badly.

  Yes, I have not gone ten more steps when the dog howls, the whistles, the mating hoots, the inactive-rapists’ snickers break out and engulf me. I am shocked and refreshed. I am white, young, and more or less forbidden. This gives me strength I had not counted on.

  Looking out at the reviewing ground from the side, I had not been aware of its expanse. I am having to walk a great distance, and every step thrusts me farther from my companions, yet I feel that they are in danger, not I. I enter my solitude as a refuge.

  The ground is dry, cracked, and dusty. I have flickering thoughts of the marching displays that have buffed this grassless earth, the games, the ceremonies for war dead, the lantern festivals, the dragon processions, the public beheadings. The yamen is ahead, this is the heart of the province. The footing is shabby precisely because the place has been, for so long, stately. I hold my head up; my walking is a little better now.

  The bleating of the lustful goats in the crowd, the sounds of invitation and mockery, are dying out, and I feel again that I am getting caught in a web of quiet.

  I do hear, off to my left, a minor commotion of squeals and laughter. I don’t want to turn my head to look. I have a feeling, but it is only a feeling, that the vendor of bean crullers is making fun of me, possibly mimicking my walk. Can this be? He is white!

  I am approaching the memorial gateway. Its shafts are of wood; it soars delicately up over three arches to a splendor of seven narrow little tiled roofs flung out at three levels and bedizened with tiny stone lions, cranes, and peacocks. Under the centermost roof a tablet proclaims: VIRTUOUS WISDOM—GENTLE HAND. The usual lying praise of some villainous warlord.

  Passing through the memorial arch I have to climb three stone steps, cross a platform, descend three steps. The blocks of stone are awry, the steps are worn.

  Ahead I have an uninterrupted view now of the yamen. I see that it is really a vast bunker which was built to be held by force against artillery.

  I feel weak. Facing this lumpish, cannon-proof building I feel the hopelessness of my position. How can I, just learning to walk, bring down those walls? What if Governor K’ung decides simply to hold his fort? What if he meets my attacks simply by staying inside? What if there is no reaction at all? My siege is broken before it starts!

  But I cannot retreat. I must decide how near to the imposing triple gate of the building I am to approach. I do not want the memorial arch too close at my back, but I should stand off at a distance which gives due notice of a sense of proportion.

  Is it an illusion that the yellow crowd is swelling, or at least pressing in from the two sides?

  The silence now hangs on the air like an unanswered question. It is broken only by flurries of laughter off to my left. Is that the vendor, making a good money-thing of this affair?

  I think I have gone far enough. I cannot pause and root around like an animal sniffing out its “safe” place. I must simply decide as I walk, and stop, and let the spot where I halt serve as my station.

  All right. Now. I stop.

  The silence is broken by a wave of next-to-silence, a murmur so quiet that it cannot be made up of words spoken to each other by the men in this concupiscent crowd. It is a mere catch at their throats.

  I cannot hesitate. I raise my left knee and stand on my right foot. I try to make myself as comfortable as I can, working my right foot to make sure that its sole is well founded and level and unbothered by any pebble or tiny ridge beneath. I consciously ease my arms, I bow my head.

  Finally I am alone, and I am a sleeping bird, to put the yellows to shame. My face shows nothing but white skin.

  I am very excited, very proud.

  But…but what is that? What do I hear?

  The crowd is laughing. Laughter is spreading through the yellow crowd. Now the whole assemblage is roaring with laughter.

  The white skin of my face is suffused with a hot blush.

  I know that I must not look from side to side. I must stand still, my head bowed. The whole force of my posture is lost if I become dismayed.

  The laughter continues. I am, in spite of myself, so upset by it that I cannot feel its precise tone. Mocking? Good-natured? Cruel? Prankish? Relieved? Scornful?

  Can it be that some item of my clothing is disarranged? Is my gown torn behind? Are they laughing because there is such an incongruity between the walking girl for whom they felt a playful lust and this awkward, asexual, perching creature?

  I even think: Have I soiled myself in my extreme agitation?

  Then I wonder: Is it the vendor? Is he perching, too, but in an absurd way? Could it be possible that a white man would, for the sake of his own popularity or profit, make fun of a solemn protest on behalf of the white race? The vendor seemed so thrilled at the prospect of our demonstration, when he was selling us the crullers.

  No, they are laughing at my standing here as a sleeping bird at all, at the Sleeping-Bird Method. They are laughing at the very idea of a white protest.

  I cannot allow myself to think this. It must be less ugly than that. The vendor. Something awkward about me.

  As I fight against the thought that the crowd is scoffing at the essence of our struggle, the laughter dwindles and dies out.

  It is silent again, and I am alone and unsure of myself.

  We can’t be stopped. I have thought that, and Rock has said it. I say to myself that I still believe it, but this is a kind of incantation, or a prayer. At this moment I wish it, I try to push it into being by the sincerity of my thought.

  I am aware of the yamen before me. The Governor is in there. But wait! He has said that he would take every measure to prevent my doing this. Yet here I am. Nothing has happened from the direction of the yamen. Even with my head bowed I can watch the yamen gate. Gate guards have seen me, and some of them have been passing in and out, and word must have gone in to the Governor’s chambers about me. Nothing has happened.

  Could it be possible that the yellow crowd got word of the Governor’s threat to us—he had absolutely forbidden a perch—and that the laughter was at the Governor, at the impotence of authorities defied by a weak woman? This is just the sort of thing that young men would laugh at.<
br />
  I clutch at this. If this is so, we really cannot be stopped. I feel safe in this thought, I wrap myself in it.

  I hear another bounce of laughter off to the left. The vendor? I want to look over there and see what he is doing, but I cannot. Another laugh.

  All at once I am demoralized, as I think: The Sleeping-Bird Method has worn itself out. These yellows are right to laugh; this is laughable. I no longer believe in sleeping birds. I feel a deep absurdity in this act; it is just as absurd for a person to pretend that he is a bird as for whites to mimic yellows. The Method is a trick, and the yellows have begun to see through it. I remember an outcry of my own from long ago: Only the powerful are free. Perhaps Old Arm was right, who wanted violence, wanted to take open and honest steps toward revenge. Only the free can punish.

  There is a tone of bitterness in our movement. I do not mean the all too natural bitterness at the yellows for what they have done to us, but rather at our own other selves, within our closest ranks. We are bitter over childish rivalries, jealousies—of which the principals seem quite unaware. We are bitter that our movement, once a surge of action which flowed from thought and feeling, is turning into an institution; the mark of the Sleeping-Bird Movement is now its professional careerist—its advance man, its distributor of membership chits, its collector, its theoretic tactician.

  But doesn’t the essential bitterness stem from the frustration, and isn’t the frustration over our not partaking, in these months, of a satiating sense of revenge?

  I do not face a yellow crowd. Instead it flanks me to either side, and I am only aware of it in the corners of my mind; I cannot see what is causing the periodic chugs of laughter at my left.

  My full-face reproach is directed at a building. I cannot take revenge on a yamen.

  It is true that I am in theory addressing my protest to a single man, Excellency K’ung, but I do not feel him, and he is certainly insulated from me.

  I wish I could see him, and I wonder what has been reported to him about me.

  I watch the gate now with a clearer eye. The regular gate guards are still trotting in and out and conferring, but now others are emerging. Several men are carrying staves with what appear to be banners rolled up under oilskin coverings—I remember the sentencing flag held in the background at Nose’s trial; but there is an air of festivity here, and of military pomp, rather than of sinister judgment. There are as well numerous extra guards bearing rifles. They have not taken a formation but mill about at either side of the gate. Some of the policemen, who have been meandering about the reviewing ground, stop to talk; the effect is of a cluster of yellow schoolboys waiting outside the school gates for the handbell that will call them to recitation.

  There is a strong volley of laughter at my left, and now I see the various guards—the regulars, the banner-bearers, the riflemen, and the policemen—all turn their faces at once to whatever is happening, and all laugh. But I see by the faces this is not the mirth of simple enjoyment but rather is a laughter of embarrassment, a crowing at something grotesque.

  I have an idea, which makes my heart beat hard. Since the Governor is shielded from my protest by the thick walls of the yamen, I will turn and face the crowd to the left.

  I will do this not simply to satisfy my curiosity about the vendor and the laughter, but rather to test what I have been thinking, for if the Sleeping-Bird Method is indeed spent, I will have no effect on the laughing spectators, whereas, if it still has meaning and power, I will be able to shame the crowd into silence and by a show of moral force prepare a stronger defense against whatever the stirrings at the gate portend.

  So I put my foot down, face left, and perch again.

  I see at once that the crowd has moved much closer than it was when I first walked out on the reviewing ground. There is the vendor. Yes, he is playing the part of a sleeping bird, facing the onlookers. His portable kitchen is a few paces to his right. He does not seem to me to be caricaturing my stance, and unless he is making faces or rolling his eyes he is not, so far as I can tell from behind, poking fun at our movement. In truth he seems in dead earnest.

  Then why have the watchers been laughing from time to time?

  They have now noticed me. I get a few halfhearted mock cheers and a spattering of laughter, but it is halfhearted. I feel a certain strength. Facing faces is far more rewarding than trying to shame a yamen. I now consider that I have come somehow to the rescue of the bean-cruller vendor.

  Suddenly a young yellow man breaks out of the crowd, runs out to the portable kitchen, snatches a cooked cruller from the spike over the brazier, turns to the crowd, stands on one leg, and eats a cruller, flourishing its remains in the air between bites.

  The barking of the laughers engulfs me. I feel the guffaws as gusts of cold wind against my cheeks and abdomen.

  The young man has ended his performance and runs back to the crowd.

  The vendor has stood in poise through this theft of his cruller and mockery of his stance; he has behaved like a veteran of our movement. But they have laughed at him. Why? Is it because his face is too familiar to them, they have paid him too often for his crullers, he is too everyday and well known to them to serve as a hero of reproach to their hoodlum ways? Or is it because of the mood of this backward province? Are we out of our depth here?

  Another young man runs out from the crowd. The crullers are all gone from the spike. This ruffian reaches down, opens the door of the canister, takes out a large lump of the vendor’s soybean dough, and plops it with a thump on the top of the container. Then he stands on one leg. He begins, with elaborate swinging of his arms and ducking of his head, to break off bits of the dough and stretch it and twist it to form the shapes of raw crullers. Now and then he loses his balance and has to hop a bit. He has seen the vendor mold the dough so often that he can caricature every movement. The crowd bellows. Finally he hobbles on one foot from the canister to the brazier, and with fastidiously pinched fingers he drops the flexible twists one by one into the boiling oil. Then he swaggers back to the crowd; he has had the biggest success of all the lampooners.

  The vendor has not moved a muscle. I misjudged him; I let myself think that he was using our cause for his own profit. Look at him! How steadfast he is!

  This is horrible. These young toughs of Four Rivers Province have chosen to ridicule the vendor—and me, and all whites—precisely at the point that matters most: a man’s means of making a living. And my turning has made no difference. My facing the crowd has not been a deterrent to the hooligans. I must do something. It is clear that the pranksters intend to let the crullers cook, to take them out and spike them, and then to eat them (standing on one leg), one by one. I must try to forestall this somehow. If I do not, we whites will all have suffered a dangerous loss of face—at a time when there are stirrings at the yamen gate.

  Yet I wait. Hai! What a comment on the life I have led—as a white! I wait until after the next move, I do not want to intervene while the crullers are cooking, for if I proved to be successful and turned the roughnecks back, the crullers would be overcooked. spoiled; food would be wasted. And so at great risk to our cause I wait for some nasty young yellow to come out and hook the crullers out and put them on the spike. Then I will try to do something.

  For a moment I wonder whether my resolve to “do something” is not mere bravado—a kind of inner noise I am making to drive away my own qualms, as if my qualms were nothing more than bothersome geese in a mud-walled yard. What can I accomplish against these young toughs? The Sleeping-Bird tactic does not impress them, they are shameless. They have gone over to counterrevolution: to ridicule. What have I learned in all this time that will do me some good now?

  I have learned to live with fear. Ayah! The sound of the yellow mobs running past the orphanage in the Northern Capital, hurrying cloth shoe soles making sounds of wheezing, as though of a city’s breathing in sickness and pain; the look on
the broken-out yellow face of Cassia Cloud, as she leaned across the table in the tavern, calling me chieh-chieh, older sister, and telling me vile, vile news; the thought of Dirty Hua at the crest of the hill when Dolphin launched his too daring kite; the beheadings—my eyes fastened, in order not to see the swords fall on white necks, upon the peonies brocaded into the curio dealer’s sea-gray gown in front of me….