White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The entire day before the wedding Hua’s wife kept me shut in the work space of the main house, hidden behind a sheet of bamboo matting that she propped against the loom. “A bride must not be seen,” she said. She handed food to me around the edge of the screen in a bowl.

  In the afternoon a cart came from Old Sun with gifts for the bride’s “family”—meaning the Huas: two dozen hunks of bread, a box of noodles, a penury of rice, some salt from the sea, and the carcass of a pig. Obedient to custom, Hua cut the pig in two and sent half back.

  “Look at this skinny animal,” Hua bitterly said.

  A Spirit of Irony

  I felt that the entire Summer Festival was meant for Dolphin and me. The Huas hung willow twigs and artemisia on the door lintel of the main house, and they pasted red papers cut in gourd shapes on the walls—all for us, I felt. The yellow and white children wore five-colored long-life strings—for us? Hua’s wife, Jasmine, Moth, and I pinned paper cutouts of the character “tiger” to our gowns. (I was in my red, for happiness.) Jasmine cooked triangular rice puddings called tsung-tzu, and we ate them with warmed wine in the morning. Feeling that the wine was for me, I drank too much.

  At midday Dolphin’s procession of drunken hogs came for me. It was all shabby and cynical, but I was wildly happy. I was tipsy myself. Two Sun hogs led the way with strings of fingerling firecrackers hung from poles, and when I showed my face at the Huas’ gate I was greeted with their seemingly endless snapping. Savory blue smoke of their exploded powder hung about me, and it mixed with the sweet perfume of my dress to brew a pungent scent like that of litchi nuts. Behind the noisemakers were two men waving lanterns on rods, though it was a bright day. Then came crude banners, made of red paper and bearing characters, some of which were traditional luck-words but some of which were merely obscene—a semi-literate hog’s bad jokes. Drums and gongs shook the air. Then followed an oxcart bearing Quart and Second, Dolphin’s best friends and attendants, quite besotted. And last came two seedy sedan chairs—obviously long discarded by the Suns—one trimmed with green paper, one with red, and in the latter, borne by four hogs, sat Dolphin, rocking and roaring with a neckful of brandy.

  Daddy Chick brought out a jug of cheap wine, donated by Hua, and three bowls, and offered drinks where they were least needed, to Dolphin and his two attendants.

  I stood at the gate, suddenly paralyzed by disappointment and a feeling that all this was utterly without reason or meaning.

  Lank and Grin took bellowing Dolphin by the upper arms and tenderly guided him, as if he were somehow wounded and delirious, perhaps blinded, into the Huas’ sleeping quarters. Before Hua, Dolphin suddenly fell silent, but his bearing was so insolent that I became deeply frightened.

  With a dignity I could not help admiring, Hua’s wife poured a bowl of tea for this Dolphin.

  Without waiting for it to cool, perhaps thinking that it was hot wine, Dolphin took a gulp. It burned his mouth, and he spewed it out on the dirt floor, sputtering and spitting. Hua stood up in a fury, but I saw Hua’s wife touch the master’s arm, and she picked up a pair of paper flowers and firmly pulling down Dolphin’s head pinned them to his hat. Dolphin began wagging his head in a stupid way, to make the paper flowers rustle. Hua’s wife draped a square of red cotton cloth over Dolphin’s shoulders. Lank and Grin turned him around and marched him out.

  He had not once looked at me. Was he too far gone to know that he was getting married?

  Now Jasmine and Moth, my attendants, led me to the red sedan chair and seated me in it. Dolphin was steered to the green-trimmed chair. A Sun hog handed Jasmine a small square mirror, donated to the bride, he said, by Old Night-Soil Basket, and Jasmine slipped it under my gown—to ward off evil spirits that might be lurking along the way to the Sun farm.

  I was now fighting back tears of humiliation, fear, and anger.

  Four hogs lifted me off the ground, and I sat swaying while Daddy Chick tied a teapot of water to my sedan chair, in order that, dripping along the path, it might insure a long, happy tie between the bride’s and groom’s “families.”

  Sore and dulled though I felt, I could not help giggling during the slow ride along the path where I had so often run in my haste to be with Dolphin. I jounced up and down on the springy poles of the sedan chair; my bearers were comically drunk; the mere fact of being carried in honor and supposed joy was bitterly funny.

  The Huas followed in a cart.

  When we arrived at Old Sun’s ornate main gate, Quart, with a great deal of sarcastic pantomime, set fire to two bundles of wheat straw, while Second, dancing around like a monkey, at last wound up and threw a small cake over the gate. All the slaves were laughing now, because these acts were supposed to mean that “the groom’s household,” signifying really Old Sun himself, would grow richer on account of the wedding. Ha-ha-ha!

  I was at last beginning to enter into the real spirit of my own wedding, which was irony.

  Yes, I got a huge laugh from the crowd of slaves at the gate, when, stepping over the cloth saddle that lay on the gate sill—for the yellows’ characters for “saddle” and “peace” were homophones—I squatted momentarily over it in the awkward crouch we sows had to use relieving ouselves in the open fields at work.

  I was led before the tablet of Yü Huang, god of heaven, Jade Emperor, and I kowtowed before it with no hope of any kind that the god would bless my marriage. Then I was led before Old Sun, and for the first time I saw that the old man had cataracts in his eyes; he could not see me. He did not remember the name of his own slave, the groom.

  Old Sun had killed a sheep, and we had a “feast,” which is to say that each slave had a tiny taste of mutton. During this affair I was oppressed by a constant tinkling of small bells—for the bells were on a high metal rack that was locked to the back and shoulders of a hog who had tried to go off to the mountain, but who had been caught; he was forced now to wear the rack of bells day and night. This was one occasion at which I did not want to think about the mountain.

  Dolphin was now too drunk to recognize me.

  After the feast Old Sun and his entire family, together with the Huas and their Barley Flower, Cart Tongue, Stone, and Little Four, led a procession to the slave quarters, where, in the bare room in which Dolphin lived with five others, a nuptial chamber had been prepared; his fellows would sleep elsewhere for one night. There Sun and Hua bowed to each other and exchanged congratulations, and pledged eternal friendship. Then interminably the slaves of Sun trooped past him, kowtowing on the floor and congratulating him.

  It seemed that in this way I was married, for when at last this endless process of adulation of Dolphin’s master was finished, I was simply pushed into the nuptial chamber and Dolphin was half-carried in and stretched out on the k’ang, where he began at once to snore.

  Slave musicians started a racket at the still-open door, and I shrank back against the k’ang as I saw that one of the percussive instruments being pounded for a clacking sound with a small wooden tube, was an animal jawbone—and I remembered that other jawbone of futility held high under the lamp in the smithy in a trembling white hand.

  Someone shoved shut the two leaves of the door of the room. All night, drunken-hog pranksters howled and cat-meowed and donkey-brayed outside the door, and now and then pushed a lit firecracker through the crack between the leaves.

  One of these firecrackers wakened Dolphin. He clamped his hands to his temples; he had a throbbing headache and was bad-humored. He sat up for a time, however, and tried to talk about the day with me. He nodded off now and then. We kept the oil lamp in the wedding chamber lighted, because we had been told that whichever put out the lamp would be the first to die.

  At the dawn gong I had to flee, without benefit of procession or sedan chair (in fact, Sun’s gate guard stopped me on the way out to ask who I was and why I trespassed in the Sun compounds), back to Hua’s farm, to scrape cotton. In the
fields the kaoliang was knee-high, the cotton ankle-high. We were thinning the cotton rows to single stands. Hua did not even welcome me back; he was working his jaw muscles over the eight rainless days we had had. He shouted at us to hoe the soil toward the plants. I worked wondering if the day before, the day of my wedding, had passed in a dream, or in delirium. Nothing at all was changed.

  Married Life

  If there was change, it was for the worse. For all concerned. I was in a continuous fever of wanting to be with my husband. “You are useless,” said Hua, furious at me for my begging of chits, his eyes drought-ravaged like the brass sky we had been having.

  Dolphin refused to come to Hua’s. “Hua is like a badger. He smells like a badger,” Dolphin said. “I can’t stand his gut-rot smell.”

  “You don’t want to be with me,” I said, and I hated myself for whining.

  “Here I do. Or in the fields. Not at Dirty Hua’s.”

  This meant that I saw him less than I might have.

  Our work was scraping and irrigating. The cotton plants were as tall as small dogs. We hoed the channels between the rows, leaving water furrows, and we hauled at the lifting levers of the scattered wells until our arms ached, but still the plants seemed parched. Hua ran to the temple every day to demand rain.

  As summer moved on, Dolphin, besides scraping for Sun by day, was assigned on rotation as a nocturnal crop-watcher. In the sixth month, when table vegetables came to harvest in the rich man’s vast gardens, the temptations for both slaves from neighboring farms and poor yellows from the countryside to steal good food in a dry season were curbed by Sun hogs’ standing guard. The vegetable fields were dotted with small booths, which had walls of reed matting and each contained a light wooden bench-like litter covered with a layer of kaoliang stalks.

  Dolphin gave me notice of his watching duties, and these shabby booths became our “homes.”

  What frenzied nights we had in our “homes”! With utter hopelessness we poured out to each other on the rustling litters the full intensity of our feelings—our violent lusts that seemed our only escape from slavery; a crushing occasional tenderness which, when it welled up in Dolphin, so that his hands played on my cheeks with a trembling touch, reduced me (for he was usually so selfish, so callous) to awful hacking sobs; jealousy (was I the only one who helped him guard the fields?); and, now and then, a clawing at each other that took the place, I suppose, of our destroying our yellow masters.

  One night he had a jug of millet liquor.

  “Where did you steal that?” I asked, delighted. We’d make our “home” shake that night.

  “I bought it,” Dolphin said.

  “From your money belt?”

  “I earned the money. You turtle-daughter!” Dolphin suddenly blazed up. “I get up before the dawn gong to weave baskets. I made eight mats. I’ll spend the money any way I like. It’s nothing to you.”

  “Yes!” I said. “Get rid of the money! Piss it down the latrines!”

  “All right,” Dolphin said, tight as a well rope lifting a full bucket, “just try to get your Dirty-Hua-sow mouth around this jug neck! Not a drop for you. This is mine.” At that he took an enormous drink; I could hear bubbles gurgling up into the tilted earthenware bottle.

  But this was strange! I knew what the little hoard in the money belt was for. Dolphin had more than once called it his “mountain-climbing money.” I had hated the money. It might have meant the end of me—the removal, I mean, of the vessel of my passion, my obsession. Yet here I was in an uncontrollable fury over his spending a few coppers for some stomach-dissolver.

  “You selfish beast!” I hissed in his face. I grabbed for the jug. Roughly Dolphin snatched away his hands, with the liquor safely in them.

  “So you want my money, you little pig whore!”

  “Have you forgotten that I brought you money—gave you money?”

  I closed my eyes. I began to shake as a terrifying thought battered at the back of my eyelids: that perhaps I wanted Dolphin to go to the mountain. Did I love him so much I wanted him to be free—but so little, too, that I wanted to be rid of him forever? Now suddenly I yearned to make peace with him, but I heard curses still streaming from my mouth like blood from a wound. I had not yet stemmed the flow when I felt the bottle thrust into my trembling hands. Silence. We were both panting. I drank. He drank. I again. It all happened in a flash. We laughed at our own, and each other’s, rages. We lay down together, and our connection was ferocious. Afterwards we fought again on exactly the same topic.

  It was as if we could not steer our poor selves.

  All through these days I was in terror of a separation more complete than that of Hua sow and Sun hog—in terror of the mountain; in terror, too, lest Sun, who knew no names of his slaves, only statistics, accountings, might sell Dolphin away. Until, one evening, Hua gave me a surprise with some wild hope in it.

  In small and absurd matters the Huas liked to pretend that they were wealthy slaveholders. They insisted on petty forms: we slaves had to address Barley Flower with the honorific “Kuniang,” or “girl lady”! From the rafters over their k’ang Hua had suspended a kind of swing, and as the hot weather progressed and swarms of bluebottles and gnats invaded the house, Jasmine’s ten-year-old son Bargain was placed in the swing with a pretentious fan of peafowl feathers in one hand and a donkey-tail fly whisk in the other, and it was his duty to fan his master and mistress and whip at the swarms of insects.

  We were at an evening meal. The dry weather was still on us, and Hua was in a vicious mood. The leaves on the cotton plants were limp, the irrigation wells were almost dry. We slaves, eating in the work space, kept a somber silence, knowing that our master was near his wits’ end.

  Suddenly we heard him roaring for Jasmine. But Jasmine was at the cookstove at the most delicate stage of quick-frying some white cabbage; she poked her head around the divider and whispered, “White Lotus! Go see what he wants.”

  I saw, the moment I entered the Huas’ chamber, what was wrong. Bargain in his fanning cradle had fallen fast asleep. His donkey-hair whisk was hanging loosely by a looped thong from his limp left hand, and its long ass hairs were hanging down directly in front of Hua’s wife’s face. The ends of the peafowl feathers on the long-handled fan were dipped in a bowl of chicken broth. The Hua children, awed by their father’s massive wrath, were struggling not to titter.

  Seeing me, Hua grew still more enraged. “I asked for Jasmine! Where is Jasmine! Why did they send this weed-back?”—an expression for a slut who would lie down to either whites or yellows in the open fields. “You!” he said, addressing me with a penetrating stare; this look suddenly had in it an element which, fearful as I was, puzzled me—a glint not merely of rage and frustration but of something else far more disturbing. Occasionally a man can be seen suppressing an up-bubbling smile when he is saying something sad, bitter, cruel, or outraged; Hua’s mouth showed such a struggle. “Get the boy out of here and then come back. I want you to listen to speech.”

  I wakened Bargain; now the Hua children laughed openly, until Hua’s wife, resonant with echoes of Hua’s smile-fumed anger, cuffed Barley Flower. All, including Bargain, began to weep. Hua roared for silence, causing the children to raise their voices to howls. I took the fan and whisk, lifted Bargain down, and hurried with him from the room.

  The bedlam—but not its basic emotions—had subsided when I returned to the room. Hua, cross-legged and arms folded, his neck tense, his mouth still twitching with inappropriate delight, was waiting for me.

  “I’m sick to my heels of your running off to that hog at Sun’s. I know what you do at night. Did you really think Daddy Chick would hold out on me? Listen to speech, you filthy weed-back. I am going to put an end to your being so tail-tired all day that you can’t lift a hoe. I’m not going to write a single chit more for you.” He waited, savoring my terror, and then, with the smile now daring t
o emerge openly under the false colors of a new idea, he said, “I’m going to trade. I’m going to get that pig of yours over here. Then you won’t be running off every night. I’ll trade Lank off for him. What’s his name?”

  “Dolphin.”

  “I’ll teach the turtle to work. Those Sun hogs don’t know what it means to be slaves.”

  The disturbing look on Hua’s face was now fully open, like some poisonous flower, and I understood it. It spoke of debts. I owed Hua for my marriage; now I would owe him for the man-trade.

  But I was so overcome with pleasure at the news just thundered at me that I ignored the look; I even failed to wonder how Dolphin would like the idea of being traded off to the badger, Hua.

  Stripping Day

  On an agreed day in the seventh month each year, according to an unwritten law of East-of-the-Mountains Province, whoever chose to do so could go into anyone else’s kaoliang fields to strip the lower leaves up to a man’s height. This was supposed to allow the stalks to “breathe.” The leaves made fine fodder and had almost as many secondary uses as the stalks.

  The whole countryside descended on Old Sun’s estate on stripping day. Hua, who had carefully defoliated all his own kaoliang, left Daddy Chick and Grin to guard his acres and took the rest of us, including his wife, with huge cotton-lint baskets, to garner what we could from Sun.

  Hua put us to work. Then he said he wanted to talk with Venerable about the trade of men, and he went off.

  Lank was as excited as I. The prospect of getting away from our master’s squalid farm, and of change for its own sake, had this morose gambler in a state bordering on agreeableness.

  Soon Hua returned. His wife, who also wanted the trade, because she had seen what a powerful hand Dolphin would make, in place of bony Lank, asked what luck he had had.