White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The whites in the crowd cheered, whistled, and hooted with pleasure, and the bird seemed to nod and bow at the applause.

  Yes, the slaves made all sorts of joyful noises—and yet, and yet: What was the heavy atmosphere, like a layer of smoke, that hung over all our heads? The applause was false, the laughter was false, my own melting luxurious warmth of contact with this man who was always on my mind—that, too, would play me false. This was a celebration in honor of a new year, which could bring us nothing but worse. How strange it was that we could express our sorrows through cheers, our utter hopelessness through gales of mad laughter!

  “Baby, baby,” Dolphin said, “this is no day for that.” I realized I was weeping. Then, evidently understanding my pain-in-pleasure, showing a hint of bottomless grief himself on his face with its now livid bruise, Dolphin said in a soft voice, holding me tighter than ever, “Bastard sons of turtles!”

  Darkness fell. Sun slaves lit lanterns all around the courtyard. Old Sun gave us a stingy feast—pork meat, kaoliang gruel, white cabbage; what we called white man’s slops. Horrible feast for the New Year’s eve!

  “What can you expect from Venerable for three hundred hungry bellies?” Quart said, rising to the defense of his master.

  When it was time for us to go home, Hua bought for a few cash from a peddler at Sun’s gate a handful of pine splits with big knots at the top, and we lit the sap-filled knots, and our procession of smoky flares made a long sulphurous glowworm going through the fields. I was light of step. I felt that in the easy flow of my feelings toward the man I had begun to think of as mine I had found at last the secret of survival for one who was white in a yellow world.

  We stayed up in the slave hut till the arrival of the New Year, talking about the many colors of the day. When Hua struck a gong at midnight, we went up to the house and removed the sesame stalks from the courtyard, to avert bad luck from the family, and yellows and whites together kowtowed toward the east so we would not be stung by scorpions all year long.

  Dragon’s Head

  Hua felt complacent about his crop, stacked in the safe godown of Old Sun, and he honored the traditional period, from the new moon of the New Year to the full moon that followed, of a thorough suspension of work. But for the daily chores to keep the animals and fowl alive, and to get the cooking and washing of the household done, we were relieved of all labor. Grin hunted; he shot his long-watched weasel. Jasmine mended her family’s clothing. Daddy Chick sat all day in the door of the slave hut playing his fiddle and dozing. Lank, armed with written chits authorizing visits to nearby farms, spent whole days in the traditional pastime of the New Year layoff: gambling, mainly with dominoes made of bamboo; he grew thinner and more morose than ever. Hua’s wife’s mei-mei, her younger sister, visited us, and our mistress wanted to show how aristocratically one could live with ten souls in the slave quarters. “Mei-mei wants a foot-warmer.” And I would have to heat a brick and wrap it in cotton cloths and carry it to the mei-mei and kowtow after I tucked it under her tiny blood-starved feet. But several days Moth and I, wearing cedar twigs wrapped in our hair in the belief that they would protect our bodies from lice, got chits from Hua to visit Old Sun’s. Moth was tired of Quart and had taken up with a humorous hog named Second; her pregnancy was by now thoroughly noticeable, but nobody seemed to be put off by it, and men still sought and enjoyed her company. And I? I spent the whole layoff softening Dolphin’s heart by devious means.

  For instance: Moth told me that a pinch of dust from a woman’s footprint sprinkled in a man’s food would make the man’s private parts itch unbearably in desire for that woman alone.

  It took me three visits to Old Sun’s and a great deal of fatuous byplay to get a few grains of dust from one of my own footprints into a bowl of cabbage that Dolphin was about to eat.

  From a peddler in the crowd of itinerant salesmen that was forever milling about the side gate of the Sun compound, where Sun’s housekeepers did their buying, I bought, with two cash I had stolen from Hua’s wife’s bag of kitchen coppers, a piece of root from the plant called never-shame-weed, and I kept a small piece of it in my mouth and chewed it whenever I was near Dolphin, for this was said to provide an irresistible magnetism.

  I played, as well as I could, Moth’s game of offer-and-snatch-away.

  I had no inkling how my efforts were succeeding until the holidays came to an end, on the evening of the full moon, with the Lantern Festival. We had learned that the Sun slaves had organized a procession that would go from farm to farm that night to entertain yellow masters of the countryside; we supped early and cleaned up and waited.

  In the distance, at last, we heard, coming across the lanes in the fields from the direction of Old Sun’s, a confused noise of gongs, peddlers’ drums, sweet timbrels, and short strings of firecrackers, and running outside Hua’s walls we saw a sparkling celebration creeping towards us—lanterns held high on poles and flaming pine knots weaving about, and at the heart of the beautiful train, a long, writhing, cloth-backed dragon with many capering and dancing human legs. Barley Flower and Perfection wanted to run into the fields to join the thrilling parade; Hua struck his oldest child a flat blow on the head to give her better sense. Cart Tongue, Stone, Tale, and Tender jumped up and down and squealed with excitement at the magical apparition, and in this they acted for Moth and me; we wanted to leap and chirp, too.

  As the procession came near, we fell into our proper places—Hua and his family in the front rank, to be entertained, we slaves behind, “in attendance.”

  The dragon, the light-bearers, and the accompanying noisemakers and performers stopped on the worn, grassless square of ground between Hua’s gate and the road, and under the many swaying lanterns and torches a group of slave athletes performed, wheeling around a female contortionist, whose knots of limbs and grinning glances at us from between her own legs made me slightly queasy, as at the sight of a double deformity—body and skin both unacceptable. There followed, to the beat of the timbrels, a yang ko, or sprout song, in the haunting whole-tone scale of the yellows, to which its performers soberly danced charades—and I thought of the mute planting in the Arizona manner danced for me, and for me alone, by that red-eyed tipsy man in Chao-er’s tavern so long before.

  The performances were over. The dragon, which had been standing by in a drooping condition, now heaved up its cloth flanks, and its head, built up in fantastic lacquered intricacies of ferocity, began to waggle, and the noisemakers all began to bong and rattle, and the long form—thirty men’s worth, at least—resumed its twisting dance. The lanterns and the dragon were going to leave us.

  The dragon, having described one full circle, seemed all at once to hesitate. Then it turned toward us of the house of Hua. Its head dipping and yawing, it advanced in our direction. It came past the Huas. I began to have the strangest feelings. On one side of me Moth retreated toward the gate with little feminine half-laughing shrieks, and on the other side the squad of Jasmine’s children also fell to rout. Rooted in I-knew-not-what audacity, I stood ground alone.

  The dragon came to me. The noise seemed deafening now. Confronting me so closely, the huge paper head, trailing spiral paper snorts out of its nostrils and blinking its warrior eyes with lashes of pig bristle, seemed not fearful but buffoonish, clumsy, playful, and charged with overwhelming lust.

  The head dipped before me. It bowed to the ground. Abandoning all ferocity, it nuzzled its cheek in the dust toward Hua’s wife’s consolation, my ugly slave feet.

  I believe I was blushing all over my body, from head to foot.

  The dragon’s face, constantly rocking and nodding, lifted up, and waggling its fang-studded lower jaw up and down in a dragon’s chomping grin, it began a series of marvelous leaps into the air.

  With these leaps I saw that the legs under the head were encased in bright red trousers.

  My feelings, as the dragon crawled away to the ditchlike
road, were in a swirling confusion like that of the procession itself. Dolphin, human engine in the dragon’s head, had singled me out before the entire gathering, and I should have felt, I partly did feel, the keenest delight I had ever known. But beneath and within the delight, I felt disgust and anger. Why should this man upon whom I had fastened my hopeless self submit himself to this indignity, to entertain a few yellow masters, cavorting through the countryside wrapped in a papier-mâché bestiality? Yet…Better to be the head than a meaningless segment farther back! Yet…What had happened to us? How had our natural white courtesy turned into spineless humility? I had seen Dolphin taking his cheap gift from Old Sun’s hand on the day before the New Year: humble. How had stiff backbones become so flexible: moral strength became a willingnes to kowtow? No, no, what had happened to this Dolphin was insupportable. He worshipped, as we all did, in the yellow temple, and his faith, if he had any, was fatalistic, and fatalism brought out strange traits—selfishness, lasciviousness, and an urge to martyrdom. I felt a struggle within me, at the very moment when I might have burst with joy, a struggle between submission and rebellion, giving and stealing, resigning myself and hardening myself. Death of the soul, or the mountain! Take the easy way with Dirty Hua, or—or what? Why did the dragon not carry me off?

  Moth was whispering and giggling about my ears. “You’ve got him,” I heard her murmur. “Take him out in the fields some night.”

  Dirty Hua

  On the day of the resumption of work, the sixteenth of the first month, our master went off with five carts, four of them rented from skinflint Sun, taking Lank and Grin as extra carters, to carry his twenty-eight bales of cotton to market. As they set off, with a basket of food for four days cooked by Jasmine, and with two of the donkeys in their cart shafts tied by their bridles to the carts ahead, so the three men could manage five carts, Hua was in high spirits: this was the best crop he had ever raised, and his wife’s mei-mei, whom he clearly disliked, as an extra mouth for both eating and talking, had gone home, and—ayah, he was fifteen years younger than his dry-necked wife, and he was going for an unsupervised sojourn in the district capital.

  Lank and Grin were excited, too—Lank by the prospect of having the measly cash that he had won from country card players eased away from him by city gamblers with drooping eyelids and honeyed fingers, and Grin by the idea of loosening his tongue at the taverns and telling townsmen of the low-bellied, razor-fanged beasts he had stalked and bagged.

  How brave, each in his own vein, those three seemed to think themselves!

  In their absence Daddy Chick was in charge of us. He loved his flimsy authority so much that he grew befuddled, and went around clearing his throat and shifting us arbitrarily from task to task—knocking down and burning the dead cotton plants; bringing in the kaoliang stalks, which had a hundred uses, from fencing to fuel; hauling out rotted cotton seed, ginned from the old crop, for fertilizer; marking out the plow lines; and patching the walls of both houses with straw-bound mud, which we dug from the pits where, on the day of my arrival, I had seen yellow and white children playing like blood kin.

  In these days I saw something remarkable: Hua’s wife at a wooden plow, listing the kaoliang fields for the new planting. In the absence of her man, who had been so glad to leave her, she was grim, powerful, stone-jawed. She ripped the bowels of the earth in lines as straight as bees’ flight….

  Moth and I were alone, storing kaoliang stalks in a drying rick hung from the rafters of the work space in the Hua house. She was in a confidential mood.

  “Do you know why they call him Dirty Hua?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m telling you this for your own good. He’s like all the yellow men. Don’t let him touch you. Listen, small flower, never let a yellow man touch you in that way. Hua has this curiosity—he’s like the rest of them—this curiosity about us. He thinks we’re different—better—when it comes to…you know what I mean. All these yellow men want a white woman—do you know why? They have heard about the romantic idea that the whites are supposed to use—they think we use it—like some sort of tickler—something like that—when we lie down together. Or like a fascinating position. Hush, dear; Dirty Hua—I call him that, too!—why shouldn’t I?—he told me all this. Shhh! He says he can’t help himself, he says he has to learn about this Idea that is supposed to make the white people almost explode—down there—you know what I mean—when they do it together—the Idea getting into that place and making it different—better. Listen. I’ll have to whisper. He’s quite cute. He’s very polite when he tries to find the Idea inside there, only he’s scared to death. He’s afraid he won’t have the Idea in—or on—his own—well, you know—and so he won’t be as good as the white men. And, being afraid, he isn’t. He just isn’t. I swear he isn’t as good. And then he gets in a terrible heat to show that he could be. I told him that the idea of the Idea was nonsense—we don’t do it with our heads—it’s just that slaves have no other way to be wild except that way: he won’t accept that. He won’t let you alone. He also thinks we’re made differently—you know where I mean—and he wants to investigate. It gets disgusting. He is dirty. Listen, my mei-mei, keep him off you. Treat him like a biting fly. Slap him hard. I’m telling you for your own good.”

  Both Moth and I were blushing like two angry girls.

  In a shocked voice I said, “Then he is the father.”

  “I don’t know.” Moth was suddenly wringing her hands and appealing for help no one could give her. “That’s the worst of it. I don’t know.”

  It made no difference anyway, because a white woman’s child was always her responsibility. The Imperial courts had long since held that nothing could be expected of a white woman’s baby’s father, whoever he might be. Moth must have known this; probably she was terrified of Hua’s wife.

  “But that’s not why they call him Dirty Hua,” Moth said, recovering suddenly and solidly from her discomfiture.

  “Then why do they?”

  “Because of this,” Moth said, opening her arms to the squalor of the crowded work space. “Those Sun hogs are used to satin and lacquer. Second says to me, ‘Do you have good mud in that wallow you Hua pigs live in?’ ”

  “But Hua works!” I said. “He works in the fields.”

  “I know, child. But that is no reason not to call him Dirty.”

  “I’m not trying to defend him,” I said rather sharply—though in truth I had a feeling of protective anger on our master’s behalf, and this had made me disgusted with myself, even a little alarmed, and short with Moth. “It is only that the Sun hogs’ calling him dirty means that they think you and I are dirty too.”

  “Ayah! We are!”

  There was no answer to that. We were. I felt bad-tempered all the rest of that day. Everything Moth had said about Hua upset me.

  The Glut

  Five days passed and Hua did not return. Six days. Seven. Eight.

  As if bad weather had set in, we gave up all pretense of hard work and huddled nervously in the main courtyard.

  On the evening of the ninth day we heard carts drawing off the road in front of the courtyard, and Daddy Chick, Jasmine, Moth, and I rushed out and gave our master a welcome the warmth of which was wholly false. We kowtowed, rushed about helping with the donkeys, and gave Hua many flowery expressions of our gratitude at his safe return.

  Hua and his two men had empty carts and long faces. We had expected Hua to bring provisions and gifts back from the city.

  I heard Jasmine say aside to her husband, Grin, “You stayed long enough. What kind of game were you hunting, man? Mice?”

  When we entered the house I saw that Hua’s wife, too, was furious with her husband over the length of his sojourn in the city. She and Jasmine seemed to attribute their husbands’ gloominess to shame and remorse. But our master soon set the women straight as to that.

  “It’s a disaster,” he
said, with haggard well-pouched eyes. “You should have seen the cotton! Every man in the whole district was out on the road with the best crop in a thousand years. Carts piled twice as high as ours, till half of them overturned when they tried to get out of the ruts. Pole boats on the rivers stacked with bales twelve tiers high. Every man in East-of-the-Mountains Province was suddenly a planter, merchant, comprador, factor, all talking cotton, cotton. Suffocating! The godowns were vomiting cotton before we even reached the city. I thought we would never sell our lot. And when we did, it was for a price that ruins me. Last year we got forty-eight taels of silver for a four-hundred-catty bale. This year the official price is twenty-six taels. I got twenty-two. Ai! It costs me eight taels a year to feed a pig.”

  The last word he spat out at us, his slaves.

  This was the beginning of a change in our master.

  My Chimney-Head

  I was as happy as a slave could ever be. Day and night, daring thoughts of Dolphin pushed much that was evil and ugly out of my mind. I saw him one morning at Limestone Hill Generous Temple. He was brusque with me, but I perceived in his eyes and around his mouth telltale signs which gave me all I needed for encouragement. I was determined, for his sake, not to be a dirty pig of Dirty Hua—to be as close to satin and lacquer as louse bedding and tung oil could make themselves. Some of my efforts to become attractive were, as I came eventually to realize, extreme and bizarre. The yellows had conveyed to their slaves the idea that the black, coarse, and straight hair of yellow women was “good” hair, and anything unlike it was “bad” hair. Mine, being brown, fine, and inclined to curl when damp, was “bad,” and I now bought from an itinerant vendor at Old Sun’s side gate one of the many hair dyes for white women that these scoundrel peddlers foisted off on us. It consisted, I am afraid, of lard and soot perfumed with a few petals of nicotiana. This stuff made me exactly what I wanted to avoid being—filthy. It came off on my clothes and on our communal k’ang. Daddy Chick called me a chimney-head. When I perspired in the fields the preparation ran down my neck and forehead. But I was sure that I was more attractive than before. Lank said in his sour way, “Do you have a ‘good’ little mouse, too, baby?” I had a traveling barber pierce my ear lobes; Moth had showed me how to make earrings of shiny black beans and silver thread. I wore tight shoes and hobbled like a woman with bound feet.