White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The couple left in a rented carriage.

  Later, when the other slaves had retired to our miserable bedroom, I went back to the Pear Blossom Rest to wait for Big Madame. All around me were the yellow woman’s treasures. On her dressing table I straightened, with a growing agitation, the uproar of scent vials, paste pots, boxes of fingernail guards, jars of pomatum, pincushions in the shape of fat tigers, bowls of rouge, dishes of powder, mortars of unguents, cakes of washes, canisters of elephant dung, and small plates and spatulas for mixing and attaching all the touches of yellow-skin illusion. Then, trembling, I began an aimless rummaging on her shelves and in her drawers—put my coarse white hands on bone and coco-stick fans, on silk butterfly knots, on laced breast-and-belly aprons of the sort she used for modesty during intercourse, on silk shawls and none-so-pretties, cauls and veils, tippets and liripipes and lap robes. I was in a kind of rage. I threw open the inlaid doors of her two great armoires, and suddenly I tore my clothes off to my bare slave body as it had traveled across the ocean in Big Number One’s vomit-stinking slave ship, and I dressed myself in one after another of this horrible Shen woman’s Shantungs, satins, pongees, habutais, tricots, lutestrings, sarsenets, damasks, paduasoys, alamodes, calamancoes, ducapes, poplins, soofeys, charkhanas, atchabanas, allapeenos…. In each transformation I paraded back and forth before Nose’s imagined eyes: he lay sprawled on the bed in an otter gown smelling to the borders of the province of smoky scent….

  Big Madame shook my shoulder. I started up in alarm. I saw that I had been sleeping on the floor curled up around the warmth of the mistress’s brass handwarmer, in which charcoals were dying away. I jumped to my feet and with a flood of relief saw that before I had dropped off to sleep I had got back into my slave uniform, and that all was put away, all the inlaid doors were shut.

  She babbled about the incursion into the Forbidden City. Her eyes gave back the lantern glints that they had imbibed in the Hall of Supreme Harmony all evening. She was truly happy, and her heart was uncomfortably hot. She embraced me when she was nearly naked.

  “White Lotus, my child,” she excitedly said, “our Big Venerable was given the honor of drinking a bowl of wine face to face with the Second Grand Secretary and the President of the Board of Punishments. He stood less than an arrow’s flight from the Dragon Countenance. You would have been proud of him!”—and she seemed to be granting me a right to such an unlikely pride.

  Soon this selfsame drinker appeared, in a long pearl-silk sleeping gown, with his hair down, and he was rather abrupt. “Send the girl away,” he said. He evidently wanted to enter the Pear Blossom Rest and exercise his rights. A certain imperiousness had rubbed off on him during the evening: he looked to me like a gopher who had lost his mind and thought he was a mountain lion. Fighting giggles, I ran out.

  A Small, Dark Room

  I lived for stolen hours, half hours, quarter hours, in the reeking tavern near the Drum Tower, for it seemed that the double-planked door of Chao-er’s courtyard was strong enough to hold off the baleful, slave-nipping evil spirits with which every object in the yellow man’s world appeared to be animated. Even the yellows who passed through that door seemed to shed, as they entered, these devils, elves, witch breaths. Lanky Chao-er, with his round gluttony affixed to his abdomen like a kitten clinging to a thin tree trunk, was a softhearted man, eager to please even us. He wanted especially to be thought a brave jack by our ruffians, Shih’s Wolf, Ch’en’s Fish Bait, and yes, Wu’s Nose. How the checker stones cracked on the board when this sentimental man captured an opponent’s piece! His wife’s function was to test whether coins were counterfeit by clinking them against true metal; beyond that she was nothing. The three yellow “foxes” in the tavern slept with white men for money—how could they be dangerous? Other yellows, worthless men and girls, joined the slaves from time to time; one Yü-li for instance, a slight, short, witty man, a professor of ritual swordplay, who kept saying that he loved to watch our men box and our women shell and eat peanuts, that he loved our innocent childish hearts and the way we moved. We wondered what he was really after.

  We sat and talked, during one of these stolen hours on a certain afternoon, of the unusual severity of that winter in the capital. I asked a man, Tu’s Sheep, if there would ever be an end to the iron cold, and he just banged me on the shoulder blades and laughed. There was famine in the outlying country. Chao-er said that wild dogs—the great lean long-haired creatures of which I was so terrified, huang-kou, or “wonks,” as we called them—were running in packs in the frozen streets of the Tartar City, charging at chaise horses in broad daylight, and in the countryside these wonks were killing goats and chickens for a few minutes’ lapping of blood. An old yellow with pitted cheeks, unpeeling the whites of his eyes, spoke of the way the pox had run, just like these packs of dogs, at rich and poor alike during the great plague, and had cut them down by thousands.

  Wolf was there and, apparently stirred by the talk of wild wonks, he dared to change the subject and to speak, straight into Chao-er’s teeth, of a slave in Tsinan, in Shantung Province, who had burned his master’s house, and of several slaves on a ship entering Tsingtao who had knifed the yellow sailors on the lighter carrying them into the harbor, and of a slave called Rocky who had collected a band of whites in Honan Province to burn houses and kill yellows, and of the famous Hankow revolt. Wolf stood as he hissed these subversive accounts and subtly moved his hands and knees, as if he were boxing in the back of his mind—but his eyes were righteous and severe. Yes, that was it! The dissipated man spoke like a preacher. The tavern was crowded with hints of our white God, and although nothing was ever explicit or clear (if He came down, would He be Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, Baptist…?), we were nonetheless bathed there in something like hope. This hope we bolstered in every way we could. We drew lucky shapes in chalk on the floor. A cob of yellow maize tied to a rooster’s dried comb was hung on a hook on the door.

  My heart was thumping, and my mind fell, for some reason, on San Pedro of Chaco Rico in his little birdhouse shrine at home….

  Nose came in. He shook blown dust from his quilted outer gown, blew on his hands, and came straight toward me. Perhaps he saw the little porcelain patron of propagation crouching in my eyes. He gave me a deep look and with a sudden single yelp of exuberance he jerked his head toward the courtyard, and when he turned to go I rose and followed him.

  He led me across the courtyard into a small, dark room. He sat on a k’ang and drew me, standing, close to him and buried his head in my breast. When his face came up I could only see that his eyes, though bloodshot and touchy, bloodshot, bloodshot, had in them a flicker at least of his home self.

  “I remember you, Gabe,” I said, in English, in our lovely flat Arizona accents, with a stuttering rush of not knowing what to say or do, “I remember you one day in the clay pits…”—bare to the waist, stretching every fiber of his broad back as he worked. I meant to speak of the teasing way he had tossed bits of clay at Agatha and me, but—

  “No!” he said in the yellow’s language with an ugly grimace, and he made a gesture of throwing that memory across the floor of the dingy room.

  I was afraid to say anything else. It appeared that Nose did not want to talk—or to wait. I felt a peremptory tug at a cloth knot button in its loop at my throat, and as I stood still beside the brick bed, where Nose sat, the layers dropped one by one out of his fingers, which began to pay me the compliment of trembling: drab-colored padded winter gown, then the mistress’s old green silk dress, a yellowish undergown ribbed with red, and another, of plain and patched slave cloth, next to my childish skin. He pulled me down. He drew a grimy quilted gown over us. I had not the slightest thought of right or wrong; all that mattered was: at last I was in a warm dark place in a cold yellow world. I said in a voice that seemed not my own—and tried to laugh—that Agatha and I had always been crazy about his bare shoulders. He shuddered, I suppose with distaste at t
his stupid remark. I knew in my too young heart that Nose would not be mine to claim, that there would be no relationship, but with my cheek I could feel the pounding, for the moment at least, of urgency for me in the arteries in his throat.

  On Fire

  I believed next day that I was on fire with happiness, but it turned out to be a chest cold. I lay feverish on my unyielding mats for several days, with a cough that gripped me by the ankles and flung me like a whipthong against the wall. The master and mistress did not come into the slave quarters to see me; they sent word by Gull that they would have visited me but for the fear of carrying my contagion to Big Young Venerable, who was said to have delicate lungs in his body, which was in fact as rank and indestructible as a buzzard’s. I gathered, however, that the master, though distant, was deeply concerned. After all, he had gambled a silver ingot on my surviving my first winter in the capital. He sent me a packet of ginseng and powdered deer antler to take with green tea to relieve my congestion. Gull took troubles for me that made me weep: Scouring the town to find what I needed, she made stews—of millet meal and pork, of chicken and rice—which were like home food and which, melting on my tongue, took me out of that drafty room into the full sunlight of my family compound at the hot heart of the dry season, with dust rising as Agatha and I ran in circles playing at owl and swallow.

  The Swearing

  I was at work again, though not yet quite well—for the mistress was willing to endanger Young Venerable with my persistent barking because the house was falling down, as she put it, from neglect—when word came to our kitchen by the swift chain of whispers of the slave community that a white woman, Ma’s Flax-head, had been horsed: driven around the icy streets of the city in a cart in which there stood a small wooden horse upon which Flax-head had been saddled to bring her public shame. This was a tour that was supposed to cure wanton yellow girls of whoring. Flax-head was the first white woman anyone could remember having been horsed. It seemed that Big Venerable Ma, trying to rouse one of his three slaves late at night to build a slack fire in his k’ang, had burst into their quarters and had found his slave boy Cricket mounted on his slave woman Flax-head without sanction of slave marriage—without, that is to say, the master’s permission to couple.

  Up to that time, news of a slave’s punishment had inclined most of us to a short course of prudence, to a few days of sheepish industry and humility which infuriated us in the very moments when we displayed them, but for some reason the news of what had happened to Ma’s Flax-head set up among us at the Shens’, and among the Shihs’ and the Changs’ and other neighbors’ slaves, a kind of giddiness and irresponsibility, a tendency to laugh too loud, to slur our manners before our masters, to act oafish, stupid, and clumsy.

  I recklessly sneaked out to Chao-er’s that very night.

  It seemed to me that the smoky rooms were charged with excitement, perhaps on account of Flax-head’s horsing, as if the whole crowd in the tavern were keyed up in some massive game of chance. I made my first skirting round. The slaves’ clothes that night (the beholder’s eye was like that of someone who had just stepped out into full sunlight, I confess) seemed bizarre, brighter than usual, splashed with declarative colors. Chao-er was tipsy. Yes, Nose was there—in a purple-trimmed suiting, his many braids tied up with gold ribbon. Wolf, Fish Bait, Card were there; and meaching-yellow Yü-li, the professor of swordplay.

  At the door of the room where the table for the game like billiards stood, I saw—gaunt, red-eyed, with the crushed look of a lemon rind, all the tart juice squeezed away—the woman who had been like a mother to me, Kathy, now Old Pearl.

  Then she saw me, and she whooped so that heads turned all through the room and the man about to shoot rapped his cue butt furiously on the floor, and she ran to me, and I to her, and we hugged and swayed.

  We went in a corner and talked in English in our beautiful Arizona tones.

  How different this Pearl was from the Mrs. Kathy Blaw she had been! That one whoop of recognition was all she contained.

  “They call you White Lotus?” she said, soggy with cheap wine, shaking her head.

  I felt I must try to cheer her up. “Did you see Nose? See those bows in his crazy hair?”

  “Ftoo!” She waved away all that with a flap of her slender hand riding down the spitting sound. “Lotus, I have a master. Big Venerable Kao.” She stretched out the name and spoke it with a horrible rasp, and then she coughed. I coughed badly enough; Pearl had a rattlesnake in her throat.

  He was a carpenter. He had no woman. His woman had died. He was bitter. He cursed all day. Today he threw a board end—and Old Pearl put a hand on her hip and grimaced in tribute to his aim.

  Pearl’s sadness, her helplessness, her lack of touch with me, or anyone, or anything, were so profound that I wondered to what hardpan depths all the wisdom of her numberless tales had leached.

  I took her with me around the crowded rooms, in which I could feel an atmosphere of belligerency, muffled like the chatter that other night, discreet where the yellows were concerned but nonetheless palpable. Men bumped each other in passing and took offense, arguments climbed to the shouting stage, bets were heartfelt, and the old man, Fang’s Old Hammer, drunk again, cursed Chao-er to his face over some trivial brush. Some jack tweaked Cassia Cloud, the stocky bad-tempered waitress, through her gown as she passed, and being as usual out of humor she let fly with a wine-slop rag across the slave’s cheek, and no one laughed.

  The Drum Tower Boys were blustering, and when Pearl and I moved to the edge of their circle, Nose, his eyes refusing to scurry for safety to his two villagers, suddenly began a queer tale of his first hunt at home.

  …the older hunters took him up Chaco Rico for mountain lion, and at night by the fire he cleaned his gun, and in the morning, at the first weeping of doves, he cooked pancakes for the older men. Boss Carboot led the men out and placed them along a ravine, and they waited. A huge Mexican jaguar presently came under the crag where the boy Gabe was stationed, and he let fly, hitting the lithe animal’s shoulder, and the animal leaped, fell, and died. Just as the boy shouted for Boss Carboot to come and truss the carcass, the hole of the wound suddenly grew larger, and a pocket gopher jumped out from within and ran away, and then another, and many more, and as each gopher escaped from the hide the corpse grew smaller, until, with the arrival of Boss Carboot, all that was left was the body of a thin, mangy goat.

  Ch’en’s Fish Bait, perhaps believing Nose had meant the story to be funny, did not laugh but scoffed, pushing a large rejecting hand toward Nose’s face.

  Nose sprang to his feet, his eyes wide, his teeth biting at oaths, wanting to go at Fish Bait’s throat in earnest.

  Others settled Nose down, but there was anger on both sides.

  Wolf had a dozen bowls of a rotgut liquor, baigar, in him, and with Peach Fragrance beside him he began to mimic his master, the grain merchant Shih. No one knows a man so well as his slave. Wolf stood and in elaborate caricature showed us the prudish, straight-laced, thin-lipped man measuring out millet from from a storage box with a metal scoop, adjusting the balance weights on some scales with over-delicate finger flicks, greedily totting the price on an abacus, then bending over to make fast the bag, with his buttocks wiggling in the most expressive way. The performance was vividly comical, but—would he, like Nose, leap at the windpipe of a disbeliever?—no one laughed.

  Suddenly the whole room was silent. A tall, slender slave woman was standing ghostlike in the doorway—Ma’s Flax-head, the one who had had to ride the wooden horse. She was a new one at the tavern. She was said to be young; it would have been hard to tell. She had an odd face, all pushed forward at the lips and chin; we looked at her in silent fury, the personification of all our angers at our masters. She walked gracefully across the room to some friends, determined now to lose herself in sweet ruination.

  Some clapping started up, and in one of the rooms there was boxi
ng out of grudges by pairs of men. Two white girls got in a slapping scuffle. Nose went across the courtyard with some slave woman, and although I had known this would happen to me sometime, I was blindly furious. Old Pearl, quite drunk, grew ferocious in the way that had used to frighten me. Someone had a piece of chalk and drew a circle on the brick floor in one of the rooms; no one would go near it. A yellow diviner was throwing dried beans against a wall. Nose came back looking mean. It seemed to me that the whole room shook with rage.

  After a few minutes Nose called with hoarse shouts for silence. He had a hand on Chao-er’s shoulder, and the white man and the yellow man were standing beside the chalk circle. Several of the Drum Tower Boys were in a ring around it. Yü-li, the little swordmaster, was flitting at the outskirts like a gnat. Not a slave dared whisper.

  Fish Bait, Wolf, and a slave named Unicorn each placed his left foot in the circle. Chao-er, in a pompous, thick-tongued voice, with sparkling eyes in his triangular face, which was purple with wine and agonized good will, said, “Do you swear, when the Forbidden City has been burnt, to set fire to your masters’ houses and kill all the yellow people who come to see the fires? Do you swear it?”

  The three slaves stamped their feet and bowed their heads. Nose annointed each man’s plaited hair with a few drops of wine.

  Now, as if ungagged, everyone began to giggle. The weird pair of drunk priests, one yellow, one white, ranged others around the chalk circle and swore them in, and little Yü-li ran back and forth to the kitchen, supplying Shao-hsing for the dousings. Soon we were all laughing; the tension was flowing out of us. This was a lark. What an incredible scene: the whole town in flames, the yellows in panic, the slaves turning into masters!