White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The Master Collects

  It was now Jasmine, to the surprise of us all, who emerged as leader of the whites on Hua’s farm. This quiet, gentle mother, who had seemed engrossed every minute with the care not only of her own four children but also of Hua’s little yellows, and who, cooking for our owners, had seemed so anxious to please them, saw that our master was on the brink of collapse, and with appalling ferocity, hidden always under a calm, obsequious manner, she began to devise ways of pushing him over the edge.

  Hua, surveying the state of his farm, walked about with head hanging and face as dry, rutted, and depressed as the miserable highway in front of his house. Four cotton fields were a total loss; three might pull through with mediocre crops if rain came soon; five others had got off lightly and might do as well as drought-starved cotton fields could. The kaoliang was ruined, the millet was not bad, the table vegetables were a mixed lot, some capable of regeneration, some killed, some disfigured but alive. At best, Hua could hope for half a crop all around, except in precious all-purpose kaoliang, which was quite lost.

  Hua was in a punitive temper with us from dawn till dusk—perhaps his increasingly fanatic mind had begun to believe the screams of the temple rioters, that white pigs were the cause of all his troubles. Jasmine taught us to act humble, apologetic, hangdog to his face, but to work for his destruction when out of his sight.

  One method was to break tools. In this the men, on account of their physical strength, were the principal agents, and Jasmine rode herd on the crudity of their approach. Neither Dolphin nor Grin had much enthusiasm for this campaign (Daddy Chick could not, of course, be enlisted), but if it was to be carried on, they wanted to be thorough, quick, and manly about it: smash them all. Jasmine showed them that they must be slow and subtle; everything must appear to have been accidental, and the master’s torture of anger and worry over this attrition must be prolonged.

  A hoe one day. A plow stock three days later. The bottom out of a vegetable basket. Three bean poles knocked down. Another hoe, broken in another way, at the throat. A hammer, hard to come by, left out in the fields where the plow stock was fixed.

  Jasmine’s patience was rewarded. Hua did not see the “accidents” as purposive, but only thought hogs infuriatingly stupid, careless, and lazy.

  We began to get rain, a single shower in the morning three or four days a week, and broken clouds the rest of the time; the winds were no longer baked airs from the Gobi Desert but soft maritime good wishes from the east. These rains, rather than cheering Hua, put him in a greater knot than ever, of wanting to save every leaf of every plant. He rushed around like a worried barnyard fowl.

  I kept my distance from him. The more gaunt he became, the more he stared at me with his mad rooster eyes.

  Dolphin, in these days, continued bland, unfiery. He humored Jasmine but teased her, too. Sometimes he deliberately failed to follow her instructions; he seemed just as amused by her dismay as by Hua’s. He was delighted, too, by Daddy Chick’s puzzled rages over our breakage. I was angry with him for this perversity myself, and he laughed me down. Grin, who hero-worshipped Dolphin on account, I suppose, of Dolphin’s marvelous physique, his throat’s tolerance for freshets of baigar, and this fate-defying indifference of his, followed suit.

  Thus all the more it fell to a woman, Jasmine, to lead the way. Moth and I may have giggled a lot, but we were solidly with her.

  I believe it possible that Hua, even though he did not yet realize that a planned campaign of sabotage was being carried on against him, dimly sensed a conspiracy of sows against his dignity.

  Hua and his wife were now working as hard as their slaves, probably harder, considering that Jasmine had us malingering whenever we could. Even the two oldest children, Hua’s Barley Flower and Grin’s Perfection, were put on half-hand tasks; Hua’s wife took the other children to the fieldsides to play, so an adult would not be tied down to watching them; these little children were supposed to keep an eye on Moth’s infant, who remained wrapped in cloths in a basket.

  One day Hua’s wife ordered me (only later did I realize that Hua had put his wife up to this command—that indeed he must have dimly half planned this entire performance) to remain in the work space in the main house mending a canvas donkey harness that had been “accidentally” ripped in two places a few days before. Seamstress again! Everyone else went out to the fields. I took my own good time about the sewing—partly because I knew Jasmine would have wanted me to, partly because this chore kept me out of the fields.

  Late in the morning—so late that the others were doubtless eating the noon meal they had carried out—I began to hear strange noises somewhere near the compound. I ran to the door of the house, and I heard Hua shouting furiously and a kind of whimpering—was it Moth’s voice?

  The sounds came closer. I made out now that Moth was in for a bambooing.

  I was paralyzed. I wanted to run out of the compound gate and intervene in some way, but I knew that that would not rescue Moth and might indeed earn me my first beating. I stood like an anchored post and listened in horror to what followed.

  “Come around here, you pork bait,” Hua’s enraged voice said. I could hear the two going around the outside corner of the compound wall.

  Hua had given a picture of himself as a reluctant chastiser, who thought corporal punishment a mean business, to be performed out of sight and sound. Ostensibly this was why he was going around to the far side of the compound: to be well hidden from the rest of his force, who were working, in any case, in a distant field. (But he must have known all the time that I was inside the compound.)

  “Get down.”

  “I beg you, Venerable!” Poor Moth, trying by the use of an honorific title to get herself off!

  “Come on. Down, down, down.”

  “Have you forgotten everything, Master?”

  For Moth’s sake I wanted not to hear her. But I could not move.

  Then it sounded as if Hua’s throat was almost splitting open with fury. “Silence! You filthy field whore. You think you can use that bastard turtle baby to get off work?” (I heard later what had happened: that Dolphin had—deliberately?—ruined a whole series of cotton plants by under-hoeing their roots, and Hua, having railed at Dolphin for this offense, then spotted Moth sitting under a locust tree beside the field, her back comfortably reposing against the trunk, with her baby cradled in her arms, her face tenderly bent down; for some reason the baby had been crying, and she had gone to comfort it. Hua had run over screaming that she was not due for a feeding until after the midday meal. Moth, failing to rise out of respect for her master, had mildly answered back—the baby was suffering with gas; something of the sort. Hua, really angry at Dolphin, had flown out of control at Moth’s effrontery and had taken her off for a thrashing. We had a saying, that the pig is whipped oftenest who is whipped easiest.) “You think you can get out of hoeing on account of that little slug?”

  “Master!” Her tone of voice seemed to mean: You are the baby’s father!

  This appeal only threw Hua to the extremities of blind rage. “Get down!” he roared. “All right. Pull up your louse-bedding…. Farther, you whore…. Now. From now on you think about working for Hua.”

  I heard the first whirring stroke, and the blow. There was not a sound from Moth beyond a sharp intake of breath. The second. I could not stand Moth’s control. I threw my hands over my ears and I ran inside the house. I waited, with my palms pressed to the sides of my head, minutes. Then I had to know that it was over, and I took my hands down. Silence. I stepped to the door of the house. I heard just beyond the wall Moth’s labored breath.

  “Enough?” Hua said. ‘’‘Do you understand now?”

  Moth remained silent—whether through defiance or defeat I could not tell.

  But Hua apparently felt it was the former. “So you haven’t had your lesson yet? Good. I’ll teach you, you sow. Turn over o
n your back.”

  Now I heard one horrified word from Moth in a barely audible tone. “Master!”

  “Be quick about it. Gown up. Now.”

  I heard the renewed blows. Even though I covered my ears I could hear Moth’s cries. “No, Master! Please, Master! I’ll work, Master! No, Master! No, Master! Please, Master! Ayah! Ayah! Ayah! Ai, Master! No!…No!…No!…”

  At last it stopped. I took down my hands and heard a shuddering low guttural moaning from Moth, and I thought I heard the master walking away toward the gate of the compound. I ran into the house and with shaking hands took up the harness.

  Hua came into the doorway of the work space. I realized that tears were coursing down my face. I daubed at my cheeks with the crook of my right arm.

  “How long do you think you are going to take on that harness?” Hua asked with glittering eyes.

  I could not bring myself to answer.

  He took a step forward. “What did you think you gained by hitting me with a broom?”

  Then I knew what was in store for me. My master was going to collect his debts.

  He came toward me and stood over me. There was no mistaking his intention. My feeling, at that moment, was of a total numbness. I was somehow beyond disgust, fear, hatred, outrage, sadness, loathing. I was far beyond dealing with Hua by screaming or scratching. I was numb. Was this what was wrong with Dolphin?—this white-skin numbness? Had I at last reached the final lot of a slave—to be filled with and enveloped in absolute nothingness? Was my heart beating at all?

  As Hua began to bend forward toward me I said (the sensation was of shouting into an impenetrable fog), “What if the mistress comes in?”

  Hua still did not speak. He firmly pushed my shoulders back and down. He began to yank at the hem of my gown. Now the numbness had poured into every reach of me, and Hua, fumbling at his pants, was about to mount a kind of cold, cold corpse. Moth’s low moaning beyond the walls served as a perfect dirge for this dead body of mine being claimed by its owner.

  Asses’ Laughter

  Before that day was over Hua’s wife, fifteen years older than he, was fiercely jealous. She understood, with her powerful intuition, exactly what had happened. This was the beginning of awful times on the farm.

  Hua began to see impudence in everything: now in our answering with one tone of voice, now in our answering with another, now in our answering at all, now in our not answering. We had to wear blank faces—until blank faces were thought impertinent. It mattered how we inclined our heads; how we raised our hands; how we stepped out—all might be thought insolent.

  At the same time, our sabotage began in earnest. The gate in the wall of the swine run was left open, two donkeys were brutalized till they hauled up lame, the plow stock broke again (this was rash), plants were trampled in the dark, a cart axle gave way right under the master. We became artfully plausible, assuring Hua that a task was done when we had only skimmed its surface, and in cases of “accidents” making excuses that he was obliged to accept though he knew them false.

  The mistress treated me like an infected prostitute, with utmost scorn and distaste. I took tender care of Moth’s cuts; she seemed to understand, without being told, what had happened to me. In fact, I felt that everyone but Dolphin knew what had happened. Even Daddy Chick was unusually kind to me in his pottering way. Dolphin, however, was unchanged: impassive, aloof, cool. Did he have most of the time that horrible sensation of numbness?

  Hua and his wife were in an agony of despising and needing each other, but their misery gave us slaves no comfort because they poured their bottled-up rage at each other onto us.

  The two donkeys that had been lamed now sickened. The braying of Hua’s four asses had always seemed to me the purest expression of hopelessness I had ever heard. Those hee-haws, half screamed mirth, half bawled sorrow, spoke for us who were white-skinned with an open grief, touched with insanity, that we could never dare express. And now, when one of the creatures, then another, fell ill, growing thinner, staggering in their mud-walled stalls, their sobbing cries seemed to me almost unbearable because so faultlessly true to my feeling.

  One day, while we were working in one of the table-vegetable fields nearest the Huas’ main compound, Bargain, Jasmine’s second child and oldest boy, a lazy, cheerful child of about ten, began tormenting the Huas’ third, Stone, who was well named—round, hard, old-looking, dirty, and stubborn. As often happened when the children began to roughhouse, laughter spilled over into tears—this time from the yellow-skinned child. Jasmine, having no time for investigative justice, ran over and gave Bargain a hard blow on the side of the head and told him to treat Master Stone with respect. This was a perfunctory command of Jasmine’s, but Bargain chose this occasion to take a formality literally. He saw no reason why he should kowtow to stupid Stone. Jasmine hit him again.

  “I’ll run away,” Bargain suddenly screamed. “I’ll go to the mountain.”

  Where had the child heard this expression? I felt gooseflesh creeping down my arms.

  Aghast, looking at Hua’s wife to see whether she had heard (she obviously had), Jasmine clapped her hand over Bargain’s mouth.

  I had heard Jasmine say, “You dirty little shoat, you don’t know what you’re—” when suddenly the two sick donkeys began to bray in their stalls not far away, drowning out all speech. This time the braying sounded like heartbroken laughter.

  Jasmine pushed Bargain away from her, and the boy, exaggerating his mother’s roughness by several fold, fell to the ground, though he could easily have kept his balance. When he arose he limped, to show that his own pig mother had crippled him. Offstage the crazy guffawing of the donkeys’ abject misery rang on and on.

  Where had Bargain (who was soon racing around without a trace of hobbling) picked up this idea? We had lately been having more news of the anti-slavery movement in the core provinces, but we whispered it to each other, far out of hearing of the little ones, when it came. I had, in fact, in recent days, acquired from a sow belonging to Sun a broadside from the Uncage-the-Finches Society. I had folded this paper into a tiny wad and had hidden it in a chink of our k’ang; one day, with mad daring, I carried it in the tiny tobacco pouch on the string around my neck that contained my mole paws of good luck. These paws themselves had taken on new meaning, for we had heard at the temple new whispered stories of the Kingdom of the Mole. From time to time we had also heard, however, chilling tales of runaways being caught: just two days before, of a hog found drowned in Gray Pearl Pond, his hands and feet in chains and his skull crushed.

  Hearing these stories filled me with fear—though on some days I felt waves of the numbness sweep over me, washing away fear with every other emotion. When the numbness receded I was afraid of not being afraid: terrified of betraying to the yellows, through not caring, some secret that might mean safety and freedom for a runaway hog. I suppose that it was a numb day when I wore the broadside in my neck pouch.

  It seemed to me that Hua watched me closely, perhaps for a giveaway opening in a moment of this non-feeling. I knew how practiced his eye was, at probing out slaves’ unguarded moments. Could he possibly want my lifeless body again?

  He wanted us to talk while we worked. He could not stand a silent slave. “Make a noise, make a noise,” he would say. “Bear a hand, you pigs. Let’s have some chatter.”

  On the fifteenth day of the eighth month, the Moon Festival, when most farms granted a three-day holiday, we worked straight through. We had a barren feast of a scrap of pork, noodles, fruit, and moon cakes, and with a begrudging stiffness Hua gave each of us a miserly basket containing a couple of sugared millet rolls, a few grapes, a piece of moon cake, and a cheap woodcut of the rabbit who lives in the moon. He had already set up in the dirty courtyard a table with an incense burner, a clay rabbit, some moon cakes, and some peaches as offerings to the full moon which bathed the scene in its cool light by the time we set o
ut for the slave hut and sleep.

  Passing the sacrificial stand with his basket in his left hand, Dolphin casually trailed his right hand across the table and came away with a peach, which he swung into his basket.

  Now Dirty Hua was a poor farmer, and glass was a frightfully expensive item in East-of-the-Mountains Province, but our owner had bought and set one small square pane of clear glass low in the paper window by his k’ang for the obvious purpose of keeping a sharp lookout for his interests. And now he must have seen the slave’s hand skim across the table.

  He came roaring out. He counted the peaches. “You turtle excrement! This is the last from you! I am going to sell you!”

  Acquiescence

  Heat. Dolphin and I were seated alone together under a black haw during the noon break. On stifling days Hua gave us a long recess in midday—not out of any mercy but to get more work out of us the rest of the afternoon. We two were the only slaves awake. The rest had lain down in the shade and were napping, with the shallow cones of their sun hats, of a sort we wove for ourselves of reeds, tilted across their cheeks to keep the light out of their eyes. Hua was fanning himself in a crop-watching shelter; a slave-watching shelter, now. Hua’s wife had taken all the children back to the house.

  During the noon meal I had told Dolphin I wanted to talk with him. I was excited and anxious; he was impatient—wanted his nap.

  “All right, baby.”

  “You call me ‘baby.’ You could have a real one on your hands.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am pregnant,” I said.