White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I was timidly willing to go. I knew that Chao-er’s tavern near the Drum Tower was a place where men slaves stole half hours when they were supposed to be running errands, and where some of the more daring women slaves also went on sacrifice days to pass the time while their mistresses worshipped at the Cypress Grove Temple or the Great Lama Temple or the Temple of Confucius, all nearby.

  “Won’t you come with us, Old Bow?”

  “Later. Go on.”

  With silly Bean I ran into the lane, holding up the trouser legs of my uniform, along packed ruts in the drifted dust, past the cooper Chang’s, to a gate on which was painted a rooster perched on a shoemaker’s last—for, as I knew, Chao-er hid his tavern behind the pretense of being a mender of worn cloth shoes.

  The moment I pulled shut, behind me, the large door of the high-roofed room in the main courtyard, I knew I had found some sort of home. A large dark room, full of slaves, heavy low beams, an acrid smell of charcoal smoke and pipesmoke and wine slops, a crude billiard table and a crap table, loud shouts and hearty laughs, cards and white hands slapping down; a feeling, at last, of a raucous corner of an Arizona compound in twilight, after work, after food, after a hot day. I knew no one, and no one knew me, but groups drew me to them. I moved in a species of whirling dance from one clump to another. Three yellow girls and an older yellow woman were serving drinks to the whites, and I saw a slave pat one of the yellow girls on her buttocks; she flipped a finger under the white man’s chin. An arm hugged me, a deep voice growled in my ear. I spun away. I heard, amid laughter, the word “slanthead”—our secret name of contempt for the yellows. A taste of spirits from a stranger’s rice-ware cup; I spat it out on the floor, because it made me think of the vinegar on the ship. Peanuts were cracking like a chorus of crickets. Old Bow came in; he stood alone by the central iron brazier a few minutes, with a down look, and then went back out to the Flying Commode.

  I recognized some of the Drum Tower Boys, and once as I passed their circle I thought I heard the name Nose spoken. I leaned against a doorjamb near the men and listened.

  “Which Nose is that?” (Quite a few slaves had that name; the yellows thought our prominent Caucasian noses a splendid joke.)

  “I mean Wu’s. The new man a few months ago. You know the one I mean?”

  “I know him.”

  “Been beaten with the heavier bamboo.”

  “Truth? Ayah!”

  “He did a mad-ride. His Big Venerable caught him on a mad-ride.”

  I had heard of these “mad-rides.” Sometimes when slaves rode their master’s carriage horses or mules bareback out to water them at one of the ponds within the Tartar wall north of the Imperial City, and back, they would gallop the horses fiercely through the city streets to show their own courageous bad blood.

  “That Nose—he’s all right. He’s purely ugly.”

  “Small Wolf and him—did you hear about those two in a fight over at Yang’s tea water?”

  “Which Wolf? You mean Shih’s Wolf?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “Ayah. That newcomer fight him? He’s a bad one! Just bareknuckle? On a board? How did they fight?”

  “He’s going to get cut,” a new voice said. “This Nose, he’ll get sliced. Wolf has a fish knife.”

  “No, no, no! Those two are soulmates now. Wolf loves a forward man.”

  I leaned against the jamb listening to this, my heart pounding. I wanted Nose to fight Wolf; I hoped Nose would be captain of all the tavern boys. I was thrilled by his badness. I had a moment of being tempted to swish my childish hips out to these roughs and tell them that Nose was from my village, and that I had a hot heart, too. I was giddy on the fumes and shouts in the tavern…. But I sucked my lip and moved on.

  A slave in a shabby castoff Tartar greatcoat lined with fleece, with a cloth wound round his head and under his chin, stood in the door and shouted, “Ch’ien, Wei, Wang, Sun, Hsü, Shen, Lin, Feng—all out!”

  I knew that this meant that my mistress, among others, was about to leave the temple; this man had evidently been a lookout. Bean and several other slaves hurried with me back to the sedan chairs and carriages. I wrapped myself in the wolfskin. Old Bow looked half dead with cold.

  At the Tavern

  The giddiness persisted, and my mistress praised me twice that day for being a willing girl.

  That night I lay a long time on the edge of sleep, whirling in my mind from group to group in the smoky tavern. Bow had lit a brief fire of chips in the oven under my brick bed, but I felt the warmth ebb quickly out of the hard surface. Gull was breathing her deep-sleep draughts, broken by sighs that seemed to vent all the misery her ample daytime cheerfulness masked.

  Suddenly I was sitting straight up, shivering. I had heard in my ear once again the deep male growl—the sharp sand of a man’s ill-shaved face against my cheek, a metal-band arm around my waist—from which I had spun away with a high laugh at the tavern. Now the words of that growl had come really through to me, I suppose, for the first time.

  The voice had said, “Come over here some night, girl! When big master snores. We could play a game, eh?”

  I was so excited I wakened Gull. I knew that some nights she had not come to our bedroom at all, and On Stilts and Cock were often absent, too. Shaking her, leaning over her, I whispered in her ear, begging her to tell me how to sneak out at night.

  “You cold, child?” she asked in a mumble, still three quarters asleep.

  But I shook her until her head was clear, and I asked her again to tell me how to run out.

  “Big Venerable Shen will kill you,” she said. “If you run out, he’ll kill you.”

  I teased her to tell me. She pretended to fall back asleep, but I would not let her be, and I pleaded, and finally she told me what to do—quite gladly, I thought—and she said, “Getting used to the city, eh?” She dropped off in her sigh-rocked sleep, then.

  I delayed three nights, lacing up my courage and waiting for a clouded sky.

  In the end it seemed easy. We finished cleaning up, stretching out our work until the Shens had retired. After Bean had locked all three of the street gates with large beams held in place by crude bronze locks, and had gone to bed and fallen at once into his pathetic dog-sleep, with much smacking of dewlaps and running in his dreams, Gull filched the lock keys from his miserable box of belongings at the head of his bed mat, right beside his ear, and, going out with me, she showed me how to unlock and lift out the beam of one of the side gates. We returned to our room. I waited an hour in darkness. I heard a timekeeper’s gong in the empty city streets: first quarter of the night. I cloaked myself and wrapped rags around my feet, and I let myself out the gate and pulled it shut. It did not matter to me—or to the other slaves who sneaked out, it seemed—that robbers could then have walked right into the mansion grounds.

  The night was not as dark as I had hoped it would be. I ran across the deserted city, slinking along close to the walls, and I felt an alarming pressure of fear and ecstasy in the part of my throat where shouts get their impetus. The punishment for slaves being caught in the street after the Drum Tower’s curfew was thirty strokes of the lighter bamboo on the bare back, even in winter, in a public place; and sometimes exposure in a cangue for a full day. Perhaps the master would kill me. My feet flew. My head cleared in the cold air. I saw no one….

  I leaned back against the door of the tavern hall, panting. The place seemed the same, yet not. Sounds—for safety at night—were subdued. Even the cracking of peanuts came in whispers. I was sharply let down. For a moment I was not at all sure whether I was child or woman.

  A tall yellow man in a plain dun gown with an odd triangular mantis face on a stem neck, and thin shoulders, and an astonishing bump of belly like a slight-boned woman’s pregnancy, came toward me, and I thought I was in trouble and I wanted to run home. But he was humble, stooping, soft-
voiced, and he held his fists together in the yellows’ gesture of appeasement, and he offered to bundle up my cloak and foot rags and place them on a shelf where I could find them later. He bowed to me and, with a look of one desperately eager to please, he remarked that I was “a new one.” Who was my master?

  I would not answer; my master was a potential killer, and I shook with fear in the presence of a yellow man who put on meekness and tried to spy out my owner’s name.

  The man said he was Chao-er, the cobbler, ha-ha. And he backed away.

  Then I saw Nose, and I knew that the tavern was going to be home again, after all, but I did not go toward him. He was gambling over bamboo dominoes. Divination! What was his fate? What was poor mine? I moved with a cat’s caution around the edges of the room.

  Shih’s Wolf, on a stool, had a yellow woman, whose slit gown of sky-blue silk showed half her thigh, sitting on his lap, and his hands swooped and fluttered around the girl’s body as if they were swallows on the wing for a meal at dusk.

  This was Nose’s new friend, swilling a rancid brew the tavern served, made from millet and mixed with pigeon droppings to give it body.

  I was asked to join a party. An old man slave was in this hushed carousal, Fang’s Old Hammer, and he was foolishly drunk, but no matter how silly his words, the others showed him the gentleness and respect that was due the slave who would be soonest among us to die.

  I was served a bowl of unheated Shao-hsing, a mild wine, under a surly impudent look, by one of the three yellow “foxes,” as we called whores, whom I had seen on my first visit to Chao-er’s, this one thickset and short, with high-colored cheeks but an unwashed look, and black hair in oily seaweed strings, and a grease-spotted plain blue gown. I banged a coin Gull had given me onto her wooden tray. I learned in due course that she was Cassia Cloud, a girl indentured to the tavern-keeper for four years at a low rate because she had been caught slitting purses in the marketplace in Tungchow. This stocky girl was said to be forward, saucy, bitter, and boring.

  The yellow girl our people hated least was Peach Fragrance—a slave pointed her out to me, “over there sitting on what Wolf is proudest of”—for she was said to be open, freehanded, and kind, but deceitful.

  There were, besides, two other slanthead women: Chao-er’s wife, who was white-haired, with a face like an empty spoon, and his daughter Silver Phoenix, a timid, small, simpering girl. These two only cared about the tavern’s money, I was told.

  A slave urged me not to worry myself over cobbler Chao-er. That man was as soft as the down in one of our masters’ quilts.

  “If you tell that fellow he has a good heart,” another white said, “he’ll give you his house.”

  But, I thought, all the same, he’s one of them.

  I forced myself to drink the wine. It was cold. I had heard Venerable say one evening, “Wine is hot-souled. If you drink it cold, it will not evaporate from your body, and it will suck the vital warmth out of your organs.” But we whites could not abide hot wine.

  Nose’s gambling came to an end, and carrying my wine bowl I joined his circle, with some of the Drum Tower Boys, named Fish Bait, Cabbage, Quack, and Fortune, and their white girls. Nose did not bother to look at me. He had developed a hoarse way of speaking. He was in a fine close-bodied slave coat of red felt piped with black silk; even in winter his calves and feet were bare, at least indoors. He could not move without seeming to swagger.

  Various men told stories—bragged of fights, or sneered at their masters’ foibles, or laughed down scrapes with women. Nose was loud, boastful, and thick-tongued.

  I noticed that Wolf and Peach Fragrance went into one of several rooms across the courtyard, and later another slave named Card crossed to one of the rooms with the thickset waitress, Cassia Cloud.

  Someone said, “Card will be sorry.”

  Another man said, “Ayah, she’ll wrench it off him.”

  The crack of balls on the billiard table, the subdued dares of men shooting craps, the banging down of wine bowls….

  Nose boastfully recounted for his friends the execution of the great Mort Blain on the net boom of the East Garden; he did not mention the small part I had had in the hopeless mutiny. I could see that Nose already had a definite place among the toughs.

  Rather soon the slave Card and stumpy Cassia Cloud came back across the courtyard. She was hotly rebuking the man, and he backed off, trying to quiet her. The tirade was not about money; we could hear that money was not in question. She stormed off to the kitchens. Card joined our group, settling down with an ostentatious wrinkling of his nostrils, as if he had smelled a bad odor. No one spoke to him, even in jest, because, as we had used to say in Arizona, when the hunter comes down from the hills carrying pinyon nuts, no one asks him for news of his hunting.

  Someone plucked a muffled chord on a two-stringed instrument with a long pegged neck, like a guitar’s, and a round body faced with snakeskin. Suddenly the man was playing “The Way You Look Tonight.” I jumped to my feet, my heart pounding. My mind was full of rushing thoughts of a Halloween dance at the community center, back home, and then I thought of our gang’s disfiguring village windows, late that witches’ night, with pieces of soap, and being caught by one of our two village policemen, Officer Collard—and his earnest, heavy lecture on order and respect for property which made us children titter. And now, while the strummed music grew faster and faster, I became angry at Big Madame Shen’s maddening talk of the virtues and proprieties—respect for the authority of all who were older, more elevated, more learned; prudence, fastidiousness, and abhorrence of roughness and cruelty; reverence for the past and for great exemplars of wisdom and moral rectitude; never-swerving sweetness to others. Only a master or a mistress, one who possessed the souls of others, could mouth such precepts and turn them to such shameless uses. What double meanings our life had! What could save one could kill another; nourish one, poison another; comfort, pierce; embolden, set to panic flight. This outlaw night in the tavern was neither good nor bad; it teemed with doubtful, ambiguous glimpses, pictures of frailty and hopeless hope—which the galloping, twanging notes of the fiddle, now in a fierce rhythm, had somehow set spinning around the room. I wondered if I was drunk. The next thing I clearly knew was that the fiddler was playing one of the yellows’ “sprout songs,” at a slower pace, and Nose was going through a besotted pantomime. He made a fairly straight progress across the room: one heel out and up again, a hand swinging low, pinched fingers snapping open, the same foot arching high and its ball pushed rapidly down; then all with the other foot and hand. Yes, planting! Planting corn! Nose was dropping seeds in heel marks in the furrowed ground and covering them with swipes of his toes, as I had often seen him and others do at home. I was filled with a stabbing delight of an order I had never felt. In his bitter pain and maudlin drunkenness Nose was using his mute body to speak of home to me alone in all the world.

  The Emperor’s Reception

  I recovered some of my boldness. The mistress gave me a worn-out gown of pale-green silk with a repeated pattern of the formalized character fu, meaning “good fortune,” which after some patching I wore during off hours, and I walked in it as if balancing a bowl on my head; my body was straight and the pretty sheath clung to my moving hips—but to my disgust I realized I had begun to imitate the elegant hobbling walk of rich yellow ladies with bound feet. I stopped that. I caught up my hair in multiple braids, which I fastened with throwaway ends of satin bindings that a seamstress making undergowns for the mistress had strewn on the floor. I did the work commanded of me, and well enough, but I learned how to stretch it out, too, and how to dissimulate. Once in a temper in the kitchen I dropped and broke a platter with a willow so subtly painted on the china that its long locks actually seemed to stir in breezes under the glaze, and my mistress, who valued this piece, swooped on me, and I pretended horror at my “carelessness,” and feigned fear (which to some extent, indeed
, I felt), and my trumped-up contrition was enough to make me laugh.

  I found ways of getting around the town, and more than once to Chao-er’s; errands took time, after all.

  One afternoon Big Madame Shen rang for me and ordered me to bring her some buckets of hot water, and to help her bathe and dress for a reception that the Dragon Countenance Himself was to give that evening…. Her skin was a day-lily yellow, dotted with tiny goose pimples, and her breasts were soft. She sat in a teakwood tub and I bathed her, pouring dippers of water over her. It was my task, next, to stir into one of the buckets a great globe of elephant’s dung, bought at a fantastic price from the Annamese keepers of the palace-guarding elephants, and to strain off the water, and to wash my mistress’s hair with it. This was said to give black hair a brilliant gloss. I dried her and hung a satin undergown on her stubby nudity, and for an hour we dabbed, tugged, combed, patted, and smoothed, and when she was finally encased in a heavily embroidered court robe she was a middling sight. All through her dressing she nervously rehearsed the ritual kowtows and backings and bendings that she had been taught, in preparation for this event, during several visits to the Board of State Ceremonies.

  At the spirit screen, upon departure, she said she wanted Bow and Gull to come and look at her; they over-exclaimed. She told me to wait up to help her prepare for bed.

  The master smelled to the tips of the curving roofs with some smoky scent he was drenched in; he whirled around twice in front of his whites, enormously pleased with his appearance. He was so excited! Over a purple silk dress he wore a fur robe of sea-otter skin trimmed with ermine cuffs, and his Tartar hat had ermine ear flaps, and he had two waist-length chains around his neck, one of large amber beads, the other of red coral, from each of which was suspended a carved jade pendant. He was shod in new black-satin boots. What a jay!