White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Heavenly Stream

  We lost count of the days. We rode through a calm that seemed like its opposite—a limitless rage. Kathy Blaw and I were cooking one morning when one of the yellow crewmen, who was stationed in a crow’s nest halfway up the foremast, gave out an exultant shout. Shaw ran to us and told us that land, mountains, Shantung, had been sighted. The news gave me a lift; perhaps our long bad dream was to end. But I noticed that Kathy Blaw, who had been silent and dejected ever since the thunderstorm had evaded us, received Shaw’s word with a face glummer than ever.

  That afternoon, when we had just begun to see, off to the left, dark summits peeking over the edge of the glass expanse, two women died and were dropped in the water, and while we cooks were stowing our pots, Kathy Blaw, who had watched the crude casting over of souls with tears pouring down her cheeks, suddenly let out a mournful gasping cry, and she ran to the rail and jumped in the sea, where yellow men threw our dead.

  I screamed, and a sailor shouted. We learned at once that while the yellow men thought that whites dead were worthless, they gave living whites an urgent value. To my amazement the tall, spiritless physician, who had had his ankle bitten by the Episcopalian woman, and who had been morosely limping around the deck ever since, now without hesitation kicked off the one shoe he was wearing and plunged over the side. The engines stopped, the ship swung into a wide turn. The physician, a strong swimmer, reached Kathy Blaw, who, apparently not knowing how to drown, was thrashing the water into an angry saliva, and he struck her a blow on the head which made her go limp. On the deck sailors were already swinging a long dory out on davits, and when the ship, engines backing, stopped near the pair in the water, the men hastily lowered the boat over the side, with a thumping splash, and four of them rowed to the doctor and lifted my naked unconscious friend and her rescuer out of the water and returned them to the ship.

  When Kathy Blaw came to herself, Big Number One, his face above his whiskers wrinkled like a walnut with fury, ordered her given twenty lashes and directed that she be chained to the mast until we dropped anchor.

  Kathy Blaw’s bath in the ocean had washed away her melancholy, and the rest of that day and all through the night we could hear her tireless tongue, cursing not only the yellows but her own white companions, too, for their passive acceptance of their plight.

  I shivered with loneliness on the shelf in the hold that night.

  Before we were taken above next day we heard the great anchor chain running out, the engines stopped, and there was a hammering on deck. Nothing happened for several hours. At last a hatch was opened and we were taken on deck, and there we found the shoulder-high palisades raised again, and over them we could see that the ship was lying at anchor in a broad bay off a flat land. Shaw told us we were waiting for high tide outside the sandbar at the mouth of the North River, which led to the East Garden’s home port of Tientsin, or Heavenly Stream, and in fact while we cooks were providing a meal the ship heaved its anchor and crossed over the bar.

  We moved along the curving river through a green deltaic plain: fields of sorghum and millet bounded by flood dikes, clumps of yellowy willows, and villages of houses with clay pile walls startlingly like the compound walls of my Arizona home. Junks and sampans floated under patched sails in the almost windless morning, and I thought at first the river must have had a thousand mouths, for similar sails dotted the entire landscape, constantly tacking and bellying. They were wind wells, Shaw said. Apart from the distant barking of village dogs there was no sound but the plashing of our bow waves on the banks of the river levees. When the meals were done, women’s and men’s, we were sent below.

  Early in the afternoon we heard much shouting; the engines died down; hawsers thumped and dragged on the deck overhead. All of us were taken above again from both holds, and we were massed within the pickets.

  The East Garden was tied in a row of ships alongside a commercial bund. On the open embankment we saw—my heart turned over at the sight—a number of white men running about in dirty faded blue cotton trousers, obeying orders given by two yellows in long white gowns. The whites grinned, waved to us, shouted what seemed to be jokes to each other in the yellow men’s tongue, and crackled with laughter like our hardened Jiggs. We saw that these slaves were not only uneaten; they were strong, brisk, rowdy, and tough.

  Beyond the bund were warehouses and shops solidly built of bricks, with tile roofs; and the cries of a city.

  Kathy Blaw was still muttering like someone in a tirade beyond the earshot of the object of the anger.

  Under the constant bellowing of Shaw our thousand souls were sorted into groups—being graded, he explained, for sale, as prime men, prime women, boys and girls rated at two thirds of prime, and smaller children who counted as half prime.

  I was not, however, put into any of these main groups but was set aside, along with Kathy Blaw, Gabriel, Jiggs, Mayor Jencks, the two Baptist cooks, the Episcopalian woman who had bitten the doctor, and about thirty other slaves, in one corner of the palisaded area.

  Marked tags were hung around the necks of those in the graded groups. Then the dock slaves carried huge baskets up a wide gangplank that spanned the ship’s rail and the bund, and out of the baskets our crewmen took straight cotton pantaloons and long-sleeved tunics, all of the same medium size, and gave each of us a pair, and we clothed ourselves with a great deal of laughter—strange sound in our throats, expressive of our relief at having our nakedness covered at last, and our dismay at the awkward shapes of these tubed sacks; it was the fortunate middle-sized slave whom the coolie clothes fitted.

  All the groups but ours were taken ashore, hemmed about there by a troop of yellow men with guns, and they disappeared within a huge gray-bricked godown. Big Number One, the tall limping surgeon, and Shaw, in a crisp white robe, went with them.

  We few were left within the fencing on the deck of the East Garden.

  Four in One Hundred and Four

  The captain’s party returned to the vessel at dusk. Big Number One, flapping his goat whiskers about with wags of his obviously sotted head, was drenched in self-congratulations and some sort of yellow man’s liquor. Shaw told us that the prices had been good, and as to us—we were Big Number One’s own. It was now revealed to us that this Big Number One was not so big after all, for he was simply a yellow merchant’s hireling, and of every hundred and four prime units of slave flesh that he delivered intact to Heavenly Stream, he could claim only four as his own. Why had he chosen particularly us? Because, said Shaw, our Big Number One liked extremes—either slaves who fawned on him (Shaw bowed his head toward Mayor Jencks and the Baptist cooks), as some were wise enough to do, or fought him (Shaw swept his eyes to Gabriel, Jiggs, Kathy Blaw, and the Episcopalian lady with the keen teeth), as others had spirit enough to do. Craft and courage he valued, Shaw said, adding in a low voice that we mustn’t expect this of most yellows, who liked best of all whites who were—or had the wit to seem—stupid, tireless, craven, obsequious.

  Mayor Jencks asked Shaw: What would Big Number One do with us?

  He would take us to the Northern Capital, the linguist said, where the retail prices were best.

  For six days we worked at cleaning the ship, purifying it again and again with malt vinegar; the yellow sailors followed us with smoke pots whose fumes reached into every cranny till even the gigantic roaches, with their shells as hard as the housings of turtles, walked out and rolled over on their backs.

  Then one morning we were taken ashore, and we were formed once again into a coffle—the men were chained, the women were tied wrist to wrist with hemp rope—and we were herded away through the city streets.

  So we had crossed, as the winged migration of Shaw’s hand that day had forewarned, to the other side of the ocean and the earth, from the New World to the Old, from the domain of the losers to that of the winners. And now I must tell of the weird sensation we whites experienced as we mov
ed, coffled, through the yellows’ city—of slipping, of skidding back across sheets of time; a thrill like the half-hideous soaring of the pit of the stomach that a child feels when his end of the seesaw falls. To say that we found ourselves in another era is exact. Not that the yellows were “backward” by, let’s say, two centuries, as we had used to think before the war they won; indeed, we ourselves had been “backward” since the defeat—making clay pots, sowing seed by hand, training one youth to cobble and another to weave. It was simply that the yellows, as we saw them now in the streets of their own milieu, lived on another shore of time altogether, and we had moved onto it with them.

  Marching behind a large two-wheeled oxcart with an arched hood of reed matting, in which Big Number One and Shaw rode, we walked in three days the eighty miles to the capital of the yellow empire.

  BOOK THREE

  The Chalk Circle

  A Loud, High Cackle

  I BLINKED at the strangeness of all that I saw. We whites from the East Garden, thirty-four of us in rags, walk-sore and scared to the bone, huddled together on a wooden platform in the farmers’ market of the Outer City. At our backs was the crenelated massif of the Tartar City wall, many times as high as the houses around us. Against the porcelain-blue sky we could see, atop a nearby gate in the wall, a rectangular, double-roofed tower of a suffocating grandeur: each of its faces had four rows of gunports, one above the other, high in the air, and on the wooden mantlets that shuttered these embrasures were painted, with a haughtiness that made me shiver, the mouths of cannons, as if to suggest that the yellows’ powers were so vast that mere representation would repel enemies. The Fox Tower, Shaw called it, seeing us look at it; that name deepened my fears. A string of moth-eaten camels, a trader’s caravan from Mongolia, stood a few yards from us; the stolid animals ruminated and stared with long-nosed, damp-nostriled contempt, it seemed, at our white skins. The market was crowded with two-wheeled carts of greens, melons, legumes, and fish; harsh cries echoed against the city wall, and schools of fish smells swam in the warm air, reminding me of the revolting slave ship’s hold. In the square before our platform a bad dream of many yellow faces milled and squirmed, and, beyond, buildings of brick with curved tiled roofs hemmed in the marketplace.

  Big Number One stood on the fore-apron of the platform hawking to the crowd the merits of each of his slaves in turn. Yellow men in ankle-length gowns, with flattish conical hats and braided queues, some carrying parasols to shade themselves from the sun, came forward, stepped up on the scaffold to inspect and prod, talked quietly with Big Number One, and bought or refused. One by one my companions were led away.

  I had a glimpse of Gabriel’s face for a moment as he was being sold, and the expression I saw was new to him—a look of incredulity. His face seemed a solid blank bruise of amazement.

  Memories of that astonished stare were to revisit me often, as time passed, reinforcing my utter disbelief that life could take such turns as it did.

  I was third from last to be put up for sale. Two yellow men came up when Big Number One had finished talking about me, and behind one of them, holding up his parasol, was a plump white woman in a slave uniform—a blue tunic with large circular emblems of identification, in red, on chest and back, and green trousers. The man without a slave pressed my arm to test its firmness and put a finger, which smelled of tobacco and had a long, clawlike fingernail, under my upper lip to examine my teeth. The back of his hand was glossy, like oilcloth. The more elegant man, who had crimson tassels and a large crimson button on his hat, and who wore a long gown of silk the color of the topless Peking sky, stood talking with Big Number One and with the slave woman. I heard a word that sounded like “Arizona,” and the white woman asked me softly in English, with our beautiful straight-out Arizona accent, how old I was. She had been an Arizonan!

  I fell on my knees and threw my arms around her thighs, and she bent down and raised me up and told me not to be frightened.

  I could not help blurting out to her a question: “Are they going to eat me?”

  She laughed at me, with a loud, high cackle, quite unlike her low speaking voice, just as I had heard Shaw cackle at Kathy Blaw when she had asked the same question our first day on the ship, and at once I mistrusted this slave woman; she must be, I thought, on the yellows’ side.

  I saw the man with glossy skin go down from the platform. The white woman’s owner conferred awhile with her, then slipped from within one of his wide sleeves a velvet bag, and from it withdrew a single shoe-shaped ingot of sycee silver, which he placed in Big Number One’s wrinkled hand. Then he turned away down the steps from the platform, and the white woman took me by the elbow and steered me in his footsteps. She said I was his.

  New Words

  Our master left us. He was going to his place of work, the woman said, though I could not imagine his doing men’s work—hoeing a field, building a wall, picking fruit in a grove—in a long silk gown with a folding fan in his hand.

  The woman led me toward my new home. We went into the inner capital, through the gate under the frightful Fox Tower. All around the gate were many white beggars—filthy, ragged, scabbed, and crippled.

  The woman said her slave name was a yellow word that meant Gull. The masters called her Small Gull. Every white slave, she told me, was contemptuously called “small.” They spoke of us generically as “smalls.” They also called us, when they wanted to be more insulting, she said, “pigs,” “hogs,” “sows,” “piglets.”

  Gull said she was to teach me the yellows’ language. First I must learn my master’s name: Shen.

  The houses were low-lying and presented cold, forbidding faces, for there were no windows, only bare walls, fronting the streets. We walked along a broad avenue in which there were surprisingly few people. Gull said that twenty-seven years before, there had been a great plague of smallpox, which the yellows called Heaven-Flowers Sickness, as if one could keep a disease at arm’s length with flattery; the pox, unappeased by the pretty name, had seriously depleted the country’s labor force. This had been one of the main causes of the Yellow War, and this was why we “smalls” were so much in demand.

  I saw a pair of bare-chested white men between the shafts of a sedan chair of rosewood inlaid with ivory; in it the slaves were carrying at a trot a heavy yellow man, and their ribs stood out from their wasted bodies, and their eyes bulged. I began to cry.

  A vast herd of goats—an illusion of a thousand Big Number Ones—came charging at us along the street. Terrified, I ran to a gateway of a house and crouched against it, calling the name of Kathy Blaw.

  Gull laughed at me, but she also ran to me and hugged me to her fat body and said in our nice flat Arizona accents that time would help me get used to the yellows’ city.

  While we stood by the gate and let the flock pass, Gull threw her hands over her mouth, as if she had just remembered something of vital importance, and she shouted over the chorus of bleating that she must teach me the two most odious expressions in our owners’ language:

  Ta Lao-yeh, the honorific title due a master from his white slaves, meaning, roughly, Big Venerable. Ta T’ai-t’ai, for the mistress, or Big Madame.

  Gull said I must never, on pain of wicked punishment, speak to the man and woman who owned me without using these worshipful words. As whites were always “small,” so yellows were always “big.”

  The goats passed. They were herded by vicious-looking yellow-brown dogs.

  We walked on. I rehearsed the terms of respect. Then Gull said she would tell me the slaves’ basic law:

  No matter how frightened you are before a yellow person, no matter how angry, no matter even how happy, control your face and body; show no feeling; have a face as impassive as a figure painted on a china bowl.

  Perhaps I would like Gull, after all. She was fat and cheerful, and good to me. She told me she had been abducted from her Arizona village, near Prescott, in a raid
by the Sacramento Syndicate thirteen years before, not long after the defeat; that she had farmed eight years on an island off Kiangsi; that she had been shipped north and sold to our master five years before.

  Big Venerable. Big Madame. I found that I could easily remember every word Gull taught me.

  We came to an imposing gateway. This was our home, Gull said. Fierce stone lions flanked the approach; the male on the right was playing with a bronze ball, the lioness on the left fondled a cub. Over the entranceway, on a panel, gilt characters proclaimed (Gull told me): HARMONY IN ALL THE COURTYARDS. “Ha!” she barked, her only comment. A large double-leafed gate was flanked by two smaller doors, on one of which Gull rapped.

  A gatekeeper, a hangdog-looking slave in a uniform like Gull’s, opened the door. Gull said his name was Bean. He bowed to me in a sheepish way.

  Gull led me around a carved marble spirit screen, along a veranda, through a passage hall, across a large courtyard, and into the main reception hall. I perspired in my thin slave-ship rags. Lacquered pillars, beams decorated with herons and dragons!

  As we went Gull whispered that Big Madame would be waiting for us, and she would probably address me as her child, but that would not make me her child.

  Off the end of the large room was a moon terrace, raised by several steps. There stood a woman. Having memorized the phrase “Big Madame,” I was surprised at the tiny delicate thing our mistress turned out to be. She was dressed in a long straight gown of brilliant figured lavender, and her left hand rested on a waist-high lantern, on the horn faces of which were painted stylized hunting scenes.