White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I hated her at once. Her cheeks were rouged, her flat broad nose was caked with powder, her lips were like small caterpillars lying together. She spoke to Gull in a rasping voice.

  Gull told me in our sweet Arizona accents that Big Madame had said I was a pretty child.

  I could imagine it! My crown bristled with a half-inch stubble of light-brown hair.

  Weak with fear, I sank to my knees, lowered my head, and softly said in the yellow language, as some sort of feeble plea that filled me with shame, “Big Madame!”

  The woman came down the steps toward me with a curious stump-leg walk, and at each stair I saw peek out from her lavender gown feet so small as to seem deformed. She put her damp hands on my cheeks and lifted my head. She spoke again.

  Gull, her face a chinaware image, said the Big Madame had named me White Lotus, and had called me her child, her new small child. But that, Gull added in firm Arizona tones, did not make me her child.

  At Big Venerable Shen’s

  For a long time I was stifled by confusions; I could not have said what was going on around me.

  In the courtyards, halls, side chambers, and verandas of the mansion, each of which had a name—Autumn Retreat, Peony Study, Pomegranate Court, Bamboo Terrace—everything was transacted in hushed tones, in an atmosphere of half-choked dignity and reserve.

  One area, however, had no sweet name: the slave yard. There flies swarmed around a moist slop of melon seeds and vegetable parings, a shabby rooster mounted a hen and then flapped the dust of the yard with his wings as he boasted, and in one corner stood an astonishing knee-high heap of empty peanut husks.

  My sleeping place was a frayed straw mat on an intransigent brick bed in a room I shared with Gull and all four of the Shens’ male slaves: the major-domo, Old Bow, a silent, surly white-haired man who was profoundly courteous to the master and mistress before their faces but bitter and complaining behind their backs; the gateboy, Bean, a cringing nonentity; and two “runners,” rowdy, stupid fellows, one very tall and thin, called On Stilts, the other a dirty, careless creature named Cock. Men and women slaves alike wore the Shens’ blue-and-green pajamalike uniforms.

  The Shens had a small son, eight years old, whom we were obliged to address as Ta Shao-yeh, Big Young Venerable; he treated the slaves as if we were mice or scorpions or lizards to stalk and torment. Vividly I remembered the swaggering rascal boys in the village at home in Arizona, skinning a measly gopher as if they were hunters who had been vouchsafed to shoot a powerful lion. Each such thought of home drove me to tears; each effort to silence my sobs gagged me so I thought I would faint.

  I was haunted by Big Madame’s hobbling walk and her queer, tiny, pointed feet. Gull explained, when I asked about them, that from childhood yellow women of the better classes had their feet bound, with the toes cruelly turned under, to make their feet small, for this was considered a mark of great beauty. Venerable called his wife’s feet his “golden water lilies.” My whole being ached at the thought of this torture every time the mistress peg-legged across my field of vision.

  She carried a trembling little goggle-eyed dog in her sleeve to keep her hands warm.

  I broke one of her painted vases, a gem of the T’ang dynasty, and rather than having me beaten, which I could have borne easily, she punished me, so that my heart felt empty as a gourd in my chest, simply by looking sadly at me, as if I were a brainless animal. Her eyes! Deep brown glittering pupils half hidden, seeming to lurk, under the epicanthic fold of skin that was the yellows’ sure mark: they reduced me to jelly.

  Venerable Shen moved about the mansion like a great cloud, edged and colored with the reverence that seemed to be due him. He was an official of the first class, a member of the College of Literature, which had had its one thousandth anniversary just the year before; its members were chosen from among those who had taken highest honors in the Triennial Examinations, and it supervised all new literature, instructed the Emperor, the Dragon Countenance, in the classics in the Hall of Literary Glory, composed prayers for ceremonies, gave honorific names to Imperial wives and concubines, and issued patents of nobility. Our master held the envied post of sub-curator of the Great Encyclopedia of Yung Lo, which consisted of twenty-three thousand volumes. Gull said, “He has the fragrance of books on him.” He was also, somewhat less gloriously, a functionary of the Board of the Imperial Horse Department, in charge of processions, and of cleaning up after processions. All this honor, which had not come to him without considerable outlay of the Shen family funds, understandably made him nervous; he constantly rolled two brass balls in his right hand and wore a mask of sagaciousness on his face.

  He called Big Madame “duck.” Gull told me that the yüan-yang, the Mandarin duck, was the yellows’ symbol of connubial bliss. This word “duck” he uttered without cracking his wise mask.

  The master and mistress both had the disconcerting habit of laughing when they heard anything unpleasant.

  There were tree geraniums and vivid varieties of chrysanthemums in the courtyards, and pomegranates were ripening; thrushes sang in cages in the side chambers. All the beauties around me, cultivated by the yellows with ritualistic self-consciousness, only made me the sadder.

  The days were like Arizona’s, hot and dry, but Gull told me just to wait, I would see Gobi dust storms and gray cold that would make me forget Arizona. Too bad, she said, that I had not been given a few years in one of the intermediate provinces to thicken my blood, as many of the slaves in the capital had been. Maybe I would be lucky and die of a lung ailment.

  Gull explained my name to me: the lotus was perfection rooted in mud and slime.

  When Gull took me into the city I fought off the whirling of my head at all the strange sounds: screeching hubs of barrows and carts, hawkers’ wailing songs, bells and gongs shaking the air from towers, firecrackers in temple courtyards, hammers on anvils—and slaves laughing, slaves wildly laughing. Wherever I went I heard the bitter laughter of slaves.

  The yellow man’s language made my tongue so gibbous I felt sick all day, but Gull taught me well, and I was eager to learn, because this was the only way I could talk with other whites, all of whom used their masters’ speech. Once I got the hang of the lilting tones I learned fast.

  Gull inquired in the market about my friends. Their names, like everything else on earth, were changed. Kathy Blaw was now Old Pearl—a bad name, Gull said, because the word for pearl was a homophone for pig. Gabriel was called Nose. Mayor Jencks was Lapdog—humiliating I

  At home a proverb had come into use, since the defeat in the Yellow War, which was ironic indeed now: “A free man’s name is never lost.”

  I asked Gull what she had learned about Kathy, or Old Pearl.

  A horrid master, Gull said. A carpenter, a morose man who lived alone. Old Pearl was his only slave. He gave her orders by means of furious gestures.

  What about the one called Nose?

  His master, Gull said, was Venerable Wu. She knew one of Wu’s slaves, Wu’s Moon Pot.

  What sort of master was he supposed to be?

  Gull shrugged—so-so.

  Had this Moon Pot said anything about the one called Nose?

  Yes, Gull answered, she had said the new slave was noisy, boastful, and wild, and she thought he would soon be a drunkard.

  Gabriel? Was Gull sure this was the man who was sold in the lot with me?

  He was the same one, Gull said.

  Eelskin Bows

  Time passed and my hair grew out. The mistress and master kept saying that I was a pretty child, that they wanted me to feel that I was part of the family. They said this to me often through Gull, and when I was far enough along in their speech they said it directly to me. “You are an agreeable little heathen, dear child,” the mistress said to me once. The word she used for “heathen” was strange to me, and I had Gull translate it later. By stages I was led to the p
oint of all this: the dutifulness, the submissiveness, the reverence for authority and for propriety and for tradition, that were at the heart of the yellows’ beliefs. If I was the Shens’ pretty child, I had the most profound duties toward them, even toward the whole hive of their ancestors, to whom incensed smoke constantly curled in the shrines in the Pomegranate Court. Venerable Shen was gentle in manner toward me, for, according to his beliefs, his wish for good treatment from his superiors required of him a corollary sweetness toward his inferiors.

  Nevertheless, one day he took me, with Old Bow, On Stilts, and Gull, and three rented camels, into the groves to the east of the city, where many of the capital gentry with their slaves were gathering firewood against the coming winter. There was a celebratory look about the bright colors of the various slave uniforms. Bow, who was too old for it, chopped and split, with On Stilts; and Gull and I, who were too frail for it, made up the split logs into cylindrical bales and loaded them on racks on the kneeling camels’ backs, while Venerable Shen stood and talked with other yellow slaveowners about—how smug they were!—their own vandalism: what a shame it was, they piously said, to cut down these ancient cypresses, these silver pines renowned in all the empire.

  I was stumbling along with a bale of fragrant wood when suddenly I had a sensation of having been doing exactly this thing in exactly this place once before.

  Then I saw why. Near the path a familiar pair of shoulders, dappled with trembling tree shade, was swinging to chop in a seen-before way. It was Gabriel, now Nose, bare to the waist. I called toward his back in a brassy tone that I did not wholly feel; I had learned to imitate Gull’s two manners, which I took to be the accepted ones: ceremonious and noncommittal to the masters, and open, bluff, and a bit noisy to fellow slaves.

  At once Nose turned, and I almost dropped the kindling to put a hand to my mouth, for I was barely able to keep from laughing (because of astonishment and chagrin) at what I saw.

  Nose’s forelocks were braided into four small plaits tied up with silky eelskin; his eyes were bloodshot and distant.

  I had seen slaves in the market with their hair arranged in this bizarre way; Gull had said that those were the loud boys, the roughs.

  Nose, speaking in the yellow man’s language, asked me indifferently how I was. His voice was hoarse.

  I wanted to stop and talk to him about our Arizona village, about the East Garden, about difficult questions of obedience and rebellious feelings, but all I could blurt out was a question about Kathy Blaw, now called Pearl—seen her? The bundle of wood pulled painfully at my arms.

  He shook his head. The plaits shook, too. An irrepressible giggle at the sight of the wobbling of the eelskin bows came up like nausea in my throat, and I ran on with the firewood, and by the time I had reached the camels I thought my arms would break off, and I had a miserable heavy feeling in my chest, and I was on the edge of tears.

  I See the City

  Gull took me with her on errands to get me used to the city. The capital was a nest of cities: at its heart, the Forbidden City, containing the golden-roofed Imperial palaces, with crenelated purple walls and a moat; around that, the red-walled Imperial City, with headquarters of the Imperial boards, and Imperial temples, and Imperial pleasure grounds along the shores of three lakes, called, as if all continents met here, the North Sea, the Central Sea, and the South Sea; and surrounding that in turn, the Tartar City, with its massive walls and huge gate towers, the living space of the nobles, the warriors, and the rich; and finally, appended in a great rectangle to the south, with a lower wall of its own, the Outer City, where lesser yellows lived.

  One day Gull led me from the Shens’ mansion, which was in the southwestern part of the Tartar City, not far from the Examination Halls, up to the Imperial Granary Market, near the Gate of Unmixed Blessings.

  Everywhere in the streets whites were doing mortifying work: transporting yellows in ornate sedan chairs, carrying too heavy loads of charcoal or grain or bricks or tiles on shoulder poles, sprinkling down the capital’s dust with foul-smelling water from the nauseating open sewer ditches. To right and left we saw in our frailty the red, yellow, blue, green, and purple glazed tiles, sparkling in the sun, of the roofs of the rich and the powerful.

  I visualized as we walked that wonder-struck look on Nose’s face when he had been put up for sale by Big Number One. Why did Nose upset me so? Every time I thought of him, I thought of home; thoughts of home became thoughts of Nose. As we entered the crowded market I searched the faces of slaves, yearning to see him.

  As we came to the area where vegetable carts were hub to hub, a slave woman belonging to a farmer (for she wore plain blue jacket and trousers), with a basket slung from a halter over her shoulder, passed close to us, chanting shrill cries in the masters’ language and stopping now and then to chaffer out a sale. Not understanding her chants, I ducked over and looked in her basket: peanuts roasted in the shell.

  Gripped by a sudden craving, I begged Gull to buy me some, and she did, with coppers from the mistress’s market purse. As we jostled through the press of hucksters and slaves, I opened peanuts and munched them and drifted into a memory: of rushing after school into our compound and to our dark little kitchen, getting down from a shelf a Mason jar of peanut butter that my own mother had ground, and lavishing a broad blade’s load of it on a piece of the bread she baked herself; seeing out the window the sharp shadows of eaves on the dusty ground, the glistening skin of Sam Quill repairing the Carboots’ loom shed across the way, a compound cat named Cal Coolidge watching a peewee in the scraggly locust near the wall.

  Gull took some of my peanuts and loudly cracked them, and she laughed at my vacant look. “You’ve already got the peanut madness,” she said. It seemed that every slave in the capital had a wild craving for peanuts, which, like some hypnotic drug, induced, on being eaten, thoughts of faraway homes and almost unbearable yearnings.

  I remembered the peanut husks piled knee-deep in our slave yard at the Shens’.

  Another day, early in the morning, under orders from Venerable and papered with long-winded permits, Gull and I carried some heavy books of his from his mansion to his place of work at the Hall of Literary Glory, within the Forbidden City. Here was a queer fact: yellows, other than mandarins of the Imperial staff and eunuchs, could not enter the Forbidden City, yet any slaves bearing credentials could. The key to this riddle: we slaves must not have been regarded as fully human.

  Through Heaven Peace Gate and Earth Peace Gate we approached the fearsome Meridian Gate up a walled way. It was the hour of the entrance of mandarins of the Imperial staff—Venerable Shen was in the group of them waiting to enter ahead of us. Before, the Meridian Gate stood six elephants, facing each other in pairs, their trunks intertwined and their tusks meeting. A bell rang. The elephants released each other’s trunks, drew back, and knelt. The mandarins went through. We, and a handful of other slaves waiting to enter, were driven through the terrifying elephants’ gamut at a run by guards shouting and waving bamboo beating rods. Then the elephants arose and locked the way again. At the gate itself stood four yellow eunuchs at least seven feet tall, bearing enormous curved swords, and overhead on the gate tower I saw batteries of brass cannons peeping out between merlons of Manchurian cedar.

  Running into the awesome area within, feeling smaller and smaller as the weight of the books crushed my shoulder, I thought: our fearful Syndicate at home, whose power had overwhelmed our village, had used a handful of men in ordinary suits with pistols and swords. The yellow power was unimaginably greater.

  Yet how Gabriel had cringed that day in the patio at Palm Springs, his forehead chalky with California dust where he had bowed it to the ground—and how insolent he seemed here!

  After delivering the books we were shut in a dark room all day; we were allowed to leave the Forbidden City only at the evening parting of the elephants.

  Late one afternoon when Old B
ow was busy polishing the brass conch shells studding the Shens’ gates, and On Stilts, Cock, and Bean were all somehow engaged, Bow asked Gull and me to fetch the family’s tea water in place of two of the men. Carrying buckets on the ends of shoulder poles, we went eastward from our house to the so-called Jade Spring Courtyard of a yellow man named Yang, who, though rich, charged his townsmen coppers to draw from his well its sweet water, the least alkaline and puckery in all the Tartar City. Master Yang was a trading merchant, a familyless widower, Gull told me, away with caravans for long periods, and during his absences his well yard was a merrymaking place for men slaves, presided over by Yang’s Otter, who collected the round copper cash with square holes at their centers, for the water. We found about twenty uniformed slaves in the courtyard when we reached it, in clumps chatting, laughing, shelling peanuts, pitching their masters’ coppers to a wall. A boxing match was taking place off to one side, and men were shouting their bets.

  Upon our arrival the slaves gathered around Gull and me making bawdy jokes and proposals, and Gull broke into quick mock-furious rushes at some of them. She seemed half pleased, half angry. Young as I was, I could not help knowing that much of their play was directed at me. Out of the crowd our Mayor Jencks, Tung’s Lapdog now, stepped forward, dressed in a blue silk jacket and a black cloth hat, and he made a show of being familiar with me. He was rather grand, and he tried to condescend to me, yet I felt that I had an importance, bestowed on me by the ruttish slaves, to which he wanted to attach himself.

  The slaves’ remarks gave me strange feelings—my hands were too bony and narrow, my legs were crooked, my hair still stood out straight from my head.

  “Leave her alone,” Lapdog said in the yellow language, rubbing my shoulder as if it were a piece of polished hardwood.