White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I tripped and fell. The shoulder pole broke. One of the baskets struck the backs of Moth’s legs, and she turned and shrilly cursed me.

  From my crouch on hands and knees I looked up at the big man, who, with a bare head, bright-eyed and relaxed, was raucously laughing at my clumsiness.

  The Oil Brush

  Day after day, row after row, boll after boll after boll, I could think of nothing save that man laughing on the dizzying platform.

  I had the impression—perhaps because of the height, the foreshortening—that this man was not quite so huge as I remembered Peace to have been; that he was not gap-toothed, but seemed to have a full set of unclean teeth; that the scar on the brow, with the look it had given of displeased astonishment, had faded, and so had the prophet’s stare; the shaggy braided cone of hair had given way to a shiny clear-shaven pate. The face, against the evening sky, with a glow of the sun on it, had been sly, canny, cynical, selfish, ruthless—all that a slave’s face should be. I melted at the thought of it. On the k’ang at night I felt illuminated like a lantern; once I awakened from desire-fuming sleep with my cheek against a hard rib cage, and I pressed myself to it, only to start up with shame and disgust—Daddy Chick. Moth’s suggestive talk stirred me to lewd answers such as I had never given. I was apt to swing my hips right before Hua’s eyes. I stroked the fur of flea-bitten wonks with great tenderness. All the time, at every moment, I was thinking of that figure on the gin-house platform.

  My life was unquestionably horrible. I was eighteen—ready for harvest. Except for flashing thoughts, in moments of utmost frustration and rage, of “the mountain,” there was no hope of any kind in my world. I was in a frame of mind, like all the slaves around me, to take what I could from each rotten hour as it passed.

  Several days passed before I saw him again. We had filled Hua’s lint bins, and it was time for a day of ginning and baling. When we went to work that morning, the man I had seen was in the squad of four Sun slaves detailed to make sure that Hua’s worthless riffraff, as Old Sun regarded us, did not ruin his beautiful cotton press.

  When I first noticed him he was again on a raised platform, brushing vegetable oil onto the massive wooden screw of the cotton press. He was singing, but he seemed surly. I saw him dust off a fellow Sun slave who tried to joke with him. But when I caught his eye for the first time, he immediately lost his footing and mockingly sprawled on the loading platform at the top of the long oblong box of the press; he threw his arms around the screw as if to save himself. It was all to make fun of me for the fall I had taken in the courtyard that day. I could not, however, catch him looking at me for a long time afterward. But at last I did. From then on my eyes were often on him, and he knew it.

  I was assigned with Grin to the task of laying out the strips of hemp bagging at the foot of the press, to be wrapped up over the bales after the landscape-grasping wooden arms, moved by blindfolded mules on a circular track, had driven down the huge wooden screw and packed the feathery ginned lint into a hard hexahedron. And with a huge curved steel needle and hemp string I swiftly sewed the edges of the sacking while Grin made fast the ropes that kept the bales confined. (Pompous Duke at Yen’s had said I “would not do” as the terrible Matriarch’s seamstress! But look at me now!)

  I had had the sense to rip my slave-trader’s bags, as if accidentally, one day, beyond repair, so I could wear my louse-bedding gown. Now my self-conscious body moved freely in the clinging sheath.

  Grin was obsessed with hunting. Hua loaned him his awkward, heavy gun, from time to time, to shoot rabbits, weasels, and ground foxes, which Hua’s wife cooked for all of us to eat. In the manner of limited men with one-track minds, Grin could remember, and gladly recited, every detail of every pursuit in his entire life, and now, as we waited for the huge screw to worm down, he was telling me about a certain weasel whose habits he had studied in a long, patient, delicious savoring of the moment when he would finally shoot it—how it would slink along the edge of the upper kaoliang field, pause in the shade of the lion-headed marker beyond the irrigation well that we called Big Lizard, and dart toward the duck run with its low mud-brick wall. On and on Grin went with his tedious working out of his perverted lust—until, suddenly, an interruption came to my relief.

  The tung-oil brush, with which the man on the platform had been lubricating the squeaking ridges of the male wooden screw, fell directly at my feet.

  “Hai! Turtle! Down there! Throw me up my brush.” These shouts were addressed to Grin, but I had already bent down and snatched up the brush, and I looked up, to see the shouter leaning over the edge of his platform. Hua was in the gin house at the time.

  When he saw the brush in my hand, the man unveiled his dirty teeth in a smile that made me wonder whether he had dropped the brush at my feet on purpose. “Ayah,” he called, “there’s little Fall-Down. Throw it up to me, you sweet little sow. Let’s see if you can.”

  I shook the brush at him, in a little threat. What a glorious man he was! He had all the power of a Peace who had shed, as a locust sheds its taut waxy skin, the saintly, ascetic, dedicated stiffness that had made him so untouchable, unreachable; and he had Nose’s abandoned, disenchanted air without the awful melancholy of those bloodshot eyes; and Arizona Gabe’s fresh, unspoiled physical strength, too. But there was a new quality, close to the surface, visible in his frank face and manner, a trait which seemed to me perfect in a slave—utter selfishness.

  I coiled myself, with the brush hanging down from my fist behind my back, to try to throw it up to him on the platform, knowing in advance, with a warmth of inner laughter, that I would fail. But before I could unwind he sharply shouted down, “Watch out! Don’t trip yourself! Be careful! Don’t fall down!”

  Now I was laughing out loud. I threw the brush. It arose end over end but had not half the force it needed; it plopped against the box of the press, leaving a fan-shaped stain of oil on the dry wood, and fell again to the ground.

  The slave on the platform guffawed, and so did the other Sun slaves. Grin joined in, but faintheartedly. Moth, feeding Grin and me sacking from a heap in the corner, slapped my rump in playful rebuke.

  “Try again, little Fall-Down! Throw it again.”

  I ran and picked up the brush. Now all work had stopped in the press as everyone, with cheerful face, leaned to watch. The great screw groaned; Lank was outside leading the mules. I bent even lower than before and let the brush fly; it went higher this time but arched far away from the platform.

  Everyone laughed. “Ayah, what a dangerous sow!” the man on the platform called out. The other Sun men up there with him roared and punched each other.

  I ran again for the brush. I laughed as I ran. I was tightening myself for the greatest pitch of all when I sensed a sudden silence, renewed activity. I straightened. Hua was standing directly behind me, his face a typhoon edge. “What game is this?” he roared. I was astonished at this mild, henpecked yellow man’s sudden fatherly severity. Daddy Chick, who had apparently come into the press with our owner, stepped around him toward me and took the oil brush out of my hand and looked up toward the platform. “Who was using this?”

  My teaser pointed at the man beside him and gravely said, “Bark is the one who oils the screw.”

  “All right, man,” Daddy Chick said, “come down the ladder and get it.”

  The hog called Bark snapped his fingers in my man’s face, but willingly, with a stylized agility in the manner of yellow-trained slave acrobats, he spilled down the ladder, took the brush from Daddy Chick, made an ironic little kowtowing crouch to him, and squirreled up the ladder again.

  Hua, in the meantime, had moved facing me. He gave me, again, that deep look of curiosity, of interest, that was far more harrowing than chastisement.

  For an hour we were all strenuous, servile, engrossed. At last we became more natural in our timing, and everyone was chattering, and I asked Grin, “That Sun pi
g with the oil brush—what’s his name?”

  “That’s Dolphin.”

  “Is he troublesome?”

  “Look, child, that man is bad-disposed. Lank says he’s probably going ‘wild’ one of these days.”

  “ ‘Wild’? To the mountain, you mean?”

  “Hold your tongue,” Grin said in a low voice. Daddy Chick was walking toward the base of the press, not far from us. “You stupid little sow,” Grin said, when Daddy Chick had moved out of hearing again, “you can kill a man with your loose mouth.”

  But I was not frightened by Grin. I was wondering: Would Dolphin always be on platforms? My heart was still dancing; laughter still pressed at my throat. For the first time in my slave life I had a clear-cut goal.

  An Old Uncle

  An old uncle, a distant relative of our mistress, from a nearby village, was always hanging about the Hua house and courtyard. For a yellow man he was a pathetic figure, nervous and irritable, dry-skinned, a kind of beggar, one of those worthless derelicts of whom it is apt to be whispered, to account for their broken spirits, “He was disappointed in love when he was young, and he has never been the same since.” Such was not, in fact, his disappointment, but another, as I learned to my benefit one market day.

  I was idling alone in the courtyard, surrounded by the Huas’ pack of wonks. These mud-caked, scurfy dogs, who usually slunk about with their bushy tails between their legs, dodging cloth-shoed kicks, their eyes alert for flying stones, had, ever since this selfish Dolphin had dropped an old oil brush at my feet, seemed to me touching creatures, themselves something like slaves: the smallest sign of kindness raised their hopes to the skies. Old Uncle came into the courtyard. As usual recognizing this visitor as a fellow outcast, the dogs swirled about his legs, fanning the air with their tails, and he, poor man, feeling that even curs were against him, tried to drive them off. The dogs took his feeble thrashings for loving play, and they frisked all the more.

  I had learned how to calm them with a sedative clucking sound, and I did, drawing them off Old Uncle. He was as grateful for friendliness as one of them, and he began to chat with me.

  Soon he and I were seated side by side on the beam of a harrow, and somehow our random talk settled on Daddy Chick, and I happened to speak of the “touch-hog-tiger-eat” sign on the old slave’s hat that he wore on errands to town, and Old Uncle, with a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of a water well, nodded and said he had written it for Hua.

  I remembered the crudeness of the characters on the hat sign. “Forgive me,” I said, “I did not know you could write so beautifully.”

  “Do not have the air of a guest,” Old Uncle said. “Write? Hai!” As a boy he had been chosen by his family to be a scholar, he said. Scholarship, as I knew, was the path to yellow power and influence, because civil servants and officials of the Emperor’s court were chosen by competitive literary examinations. He had applied himself, he said, and he had “soared like a hawk.” He had memorized the great classics and had combed and caressed the art of essay writing. “I was the highest of seventeen selected from four hundred after the terrible four-day examinations at the perfectural town. Out of two hundred perfectural survivors I stood fourteenth in the examinations at Tsinan, the provincial city. The examinations lasted a fortnight. The hall was dark, and when it rained the roof leaked onto our essays. Four scholars died of cholera at their desks. One man, after writing for eighteen hours, stood up for a moment to stretch his limbs and for this the literary chancellor beat him a hundred blows on his brush hand, and his characters then showed the pain, and of course he failed. In four years I passed the grades of hs’iu-ts’ai, lin-sheng, kung-sheng. I wore a brass button on my hat, and I was entitled to a semi-official robe and a title of respect. Then as a Selected Man I went to the Northern Capital for the ministerial examinations. The morning essay was on a theme from Mencius, ‘Like climbing a tree to catch a fish.’ I was aflame with ideas. The characters flew off my fingers like crickets. I would be a minister of the third rank, the second rank, I knew it. I had come from an East-of-the-Mountains village, and I was going to live in honored robes in the Forbidden City—I knew it. My poem in the five-character meter—the sounds, the tones, the meanings were all interwoven like brocade! I transcribed exquisitely a passage, as required, from the Sacred Edicts. Midnight was the deadline; I finished just after the last quarter-hour gong. I went back to my lodgings and slept twelve hours. I was not afraid. I knew I was among the best. We had to wait two days. Then all the candidates went to the Examination Halls and waited and waited. At last they ‘hung the boards.’ Of fifteen who passed, my name was fifteenth. I thought I would die with joy. I drank wine until I could not see. It cost me eight thousand cash to send a messenger to my father’s house in East-of-the-Mountains Province with the strip of red paper announcing to him that his son had achieved all that he wished. I had six hundred Joyful Announcements printed from woodcut blocks, proclaiming that I had placed fifth—everyone who passed exaggerated, most announced they had come out first. At the very moment I was paying for my lodgings to leave for home, where I would wait for my high appointment, whatever it might be, an Imperial constable came for me, and he took me before the literary chancellor, and that official announced to me that I had committed a terrible crime—cheating against His Imperial Blessedness. Not only had my name been removed from the boards, he said, but also all my ranks, down to hs’iu-ts’ai, were stripped from me, at the Emperor’s command. All my work, all, all, all! I felt that I was in the grip of a nightmare, then the dream turned to utter madness. My protests were disallowed, and I was thrown out into the street like one of these yellow dogs. My repeated appeals for hearings were turned away. I could not believe this calamity. How could I go home to my father? I lost my appetite. I never slept. I became as thin as a leper, and I shuddered and shivered morning and evening. I knocked daily at the chancellor’s gates, and always the watchmen set on me with staves. Then by accident, after four years of this deranged life, I learned what had happened. The youth who had stood sixteenth, just behind me, on the examinations, and so had not passed, was a son of a rich Northern Capital merchant, and it was he who had brought the accusation and the “proofs.” Now. Do you know the world? I’ll tell you something. Some scholars did cheat. Oh, come, you little sow, did you think every magistrate was a pure scholar? Look, there were three good plans. First: the ‘little-box’ plan—the candidate padded his white silk vest with prepared essays. They were written on small sheets in fly-eye characters, you had to be keen to see them! Or carried them into the examination in a false bottom in the basket of provisions he could take into the hall. Second plan, ‘coin-honor.’ Buy essays from essay brokers. You could smell those men, they were like pimps—got posts as inspectors in the hall for the literary chancellor by graft. Third plan, ‘transmission.’ Ayah, this was sporting! Theme is assigned. Subject is thrown over wall to courier. Courier runs to eminent scholar outside. Scholar writes essay. Courier wads it carefully. Runs to wall. Gives signal—dog barking, or maybe peddler’s drum with a certain beat. Throws wad over. Inspector catches. Enters hall. Drops at candidate’s feet in passing. Candidate copies. But listen, little sow. Those vultures picked my bones dry! I had ‘entered’ honestly! I had never experienced such inspiration as during the examination! I was innocent! I was not a cash scholar! The young number sixteen, the failure just behind me, who would replace me if I could be eliminated, had gathered ‘witnesses’: inspectors who could be bribed to sell essays could be bribed to slander. Even the literary chancellor had spoken against me and had ridden in a new carriage within a month. Ayah, listen, little sow, life is a cheat. Evil men connive against good men. It is all useless. Utterly useless. You are a slave, small sow. You know what I am saying. Don’t you, now? Don’t you?”

  A desiccated yellow hand patted mine, and silt-laden tears were flowing like the Yellow River down the dirty leathery cheeks, but I had a conviction that th
e old man had in fact cheated on every one of his examinations, from district town to Imperial Capital—how he had relished telling the three “plans”!—if, indeed, he had ever been a scholar at all.

  Yet my mind was racing. I saw a chance, and I knew its value.

  I asked the broken old man some questions to keep him prattling and, idly, as he talked, I took up a stick and scratched in the dust right at his feet the three-peaked character shan, “mountain,” which Smart had traced deeply into the cinders of my mind in the blacksmith shop at Yen’s:

  Old Uncle’s eyes fell on this meaning in the dust, and I thought I saw a flicker of surprise—but perhaps he thought that I had simply chanced upon the shape of this rather symmetrical character. I therefore drew then one of the marvelously expressive characters, ma, for “horse,” mane flying, feet in motion, full tail swept downward.

  The old man stood up, his hands spread and patting the air as if to press down two impossibilities in one. This from a woman and a slave!

  I looked up into his eyes, and I whispered, in tones halfway between those of an imploring child and those of a seducer, “Will you be my teacher?”

  He sat down hard on the tongue of the harrow, and I thought he would begin again to weep. To be a master of the classics! For one who had gone for so many years from gate to gate of distant relatives to eke out a millet cake here and a bowl of bean curd there—to teach!

  Swiftly there passed across the old uncle’s face, like the shadow of a crow flying between him and the honest sun, a brief look of such hate-laden craftiness that I was all the more convinced that he had been a many-year fraud; but at once he mastered this look of self-betrayal. “We will have to get Húa’s wife on our side,” he said, speaking secretively and looking over his shoulders.