White Lotus

by John Hersey

  We arrived at last and decided in cheery spirits to enter the Tartar City by the Gate of Unmixed Blessings.

  A bannerman stepped from a wooden booth. “Your gate chips.”

  Bang said, “Gate chips?”

  Little bamboo counters, we were curtly informed by the yellow guard, that were issued to whites as passes. Finding that we had none, he ordered us in sharp tones to go down to one of the gates of the Outer City.

  At the Eastern Wicket Gate to the Outer City a guardsman took down our names (we gave false names) and issued us single-entry passes on slips of green paper, and he told us to register with the Red Banner Corps within the city.

  Horsehoof, adopting the humble, appeasing manner of a rural white slave, asked what gate chips meant. Why were passes issued to whites? Why registrations, if it wasn’t rude to ask, Venerable?

  The yellow guard seemed irritated, not by Horsehoof’s questions but by his obsequiousness; perhaps the bannerman knew that it was a stale pose. “It’s because of the Number Wheel,” he said. “Move along.” He waved us peremptorily through, so we could not ask more questions.

  Upon passing through the gate, we were beset by a flock of white beggars flapping and clucking like fowl at feeding time. What could they hope for from us?

  There was a subdued atmosphere, a strained quiet, in the streets. White workmen were at the same old slavey tasks, free men carrying baskets of night soil on shoulder poles, hauling water carts, pushing wheelbarrows overloaded with roof tiles—but instead of being in colorful uniforms they looked drab and foul in faded blue cotton tunics and trousers.

  Horsehoof asked a water cartman if he happened to know a big wonk of a white man named Jumping Stick.

  For answer the cartman only threw back his head and laughed.

  Four times Horsehoof reaped this same scornful laugh, then he began to ask in a low voice where newcomers should go in this city.

  By stages we were directed to a section, north of the Altar of Agriculture, where, in a maze of narrow, twisting alleys, a mixed population of poor yellows and poorer whites lived in inexpressible squalor.

  We spent three nights in a foul doss house; men and women slept like tossed burdens on the floors of the rooms on three sides of a courtyard in which, by day, bricks were manufactured. Clay dust was ankle-deep. At night the coughing around me was worse than the worry of country dogs at the full of the moon. Freedom! The mountain for which I had yearned so long! How I wept!

  The Pigeon Cote

  By the fourth morning panic was coiled in my belly. The string of cash the moles had given me had all been spent long since, and I had not eaten for two days, and my clothes were a hostel for lice which I had time, but no heart, to pick. Horsehoofs great friend Jumping Stick was nowhere to be found. No prospect of work: wherever I begged for work I heard, besides repeated noes, mumbled complaints of the Number Wheel, which seemed to have run over and crushed all vitality in the city. I understood nil, for no one spoke to me.

  These stinking alleyways housed a cooliehood of both whites and yellows, and I sensed a standoff, misery envious of wretchedness. Poor yellows walked one side of the midstreet ditches, poorer whites the other; scowls and sullenness.

  Threading the lanes of the Outer City on the hopeless hunt for work, I wandered into a hutung, Glazed Tile Factory Alley, and found myself in a fairyland of open shops where old books, pictures, and curios were sold.

  I stepped into one of the shops, intending to tell the owner that I had some learning and could do any work he wanted. A yellow youth, livid pimples and frog eyes, came at me with a feather duster, shaking in my face a cloud of potential sneezes and snarling, “Out! Out! No sows allowed in here!”

  I backed into the street with my arms folded above my head, and I turned to run through the crowds, with remembered lines from The Happy Mean ringing their ironies in my aching head, and I bit my lip to quiet the throbs.

  But my desperation wound down, I slowed my pace, and I saw ahead of me a yawing spine, a hobble-walk. I hurried abreast.

  “Mink!”

  At first the face that swung toward mine was blank, then recognition foliated in it. The cripple embraced me; incurious pedestrians jostled our mismatched hug without second looks.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Doing? I’m a runner for a prick of a merchant in cloisonné ware.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Jobs don’t last forever. What slanty boss wants a white with a bad back? It’s very off-and-on. You?”

  “Ayah!”

  “I know.” But there was no vehemence in this Mink; I remembered the tartness that had made him a scourge to Peace. There was a thin screak of self-pity at the edge of his words.

  How had he come here?

  He told me this brief story: From the Yens he had been sold, through a slave agent, to a miser of a grain factor, the very sort of niggardly hunks who would buy a bent-backed slave on a glut market; but the sweet thing about this cheese-parer was that he lived in Tingchow, and when slavery had been abolished in the core provinces, Mink said, he had simply obtained his freedman’s papers and hopped off to here. “Where nothing is any better.”

  “But, Mink, what is this Number Wheel?”

  “It’s on account of the war.”

  “War?”

  Ai, this was freedom for a white nonentity: Walking all those weeks, I had heard nothing, and no one had had a tongue in the doss house. I was in a dark box of ignorance. A war had been started, core provinces against outer provinces, and all this time no one had told me a word of it. Mink said it twice over, I shaking my head. What was it about? About us! About hogs in the hogpen! No! Don’t tease me, Mink!

  “And the wheel is a lottery for conscripting soldiers. The slantheads are out of their minds about it. They blame everything on us. The drawing begins in a few days.”

  I told Mink I was weak with hunger, he shouldn’t hit me with bad jokes.

  Mink veered off at my word “hunger.” He put his face close to mine, at his lower level, and I had strongly the impression of a wire, behind the eyes, that had been kinked and might part if pulled too hard. “Where are you living?”

  In a few words I told him my plight.

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “I know a yellow woman—takes roomers.”

  “But I haven’t a canary’s tooth to my name.”

  “She’s used to that. She gambles on us.”

  So he took me straight along. On the way he told me about the woman. Fat, and jovial, but her laughter was like boulders rolling down a mountain in a landslide: watch out! She was called, not without sarcasm, “Dowager.”

  “How many boarders does she take?”

  “Not many, not more than three or four at a time. Just now I know of a professional beggar, named Groundnut, and a man of odd jobs, Rock. Ayah, that Rock! A quarrelsome hog. You’ll see.”

  “How do you know her so well?”

  “I’ve stayed with her—it’s not a first-class inn, you know.”

  Indeed it was not. Dowager Chu lived in a hovel off an alley down whose center ran a sewage ditch, and her whole home consisted of three spaces at the south side of a narrow yard, most of which was filled by a pigeon cote and by a tower of bamboo poles lashed together, with a ladder up one side and a platform at the top. On this stage, higher than the roof ears of the house, two men stood when Mink and I arrived, and one of them was coning in wide circles a long bamboo pole with a yellow-and-green pennant at its upper end; in circles in the air, as if towed by the pennant, went a whir of nearly a hundred pigeons. The courtyard, the walls, and the roof were stippled with white droppings.

  At the foot of the tower stood a fat yellow woman, looking up, gurgling joy at men and pigeons.

  Mink made a loud motorish pigeony sound, and Dowager Chu lowered her eyes to us. “Ai, to see the little flag s
uck them down!” She clasped dimpled and fat-braceleted hands.

  “I’ve brought one in for your coops.” Mink meant me.

  Dowager blinked. The dimples and bracelets shifted. An arrangement was soon made: As a favor to Mink she would charge me only forty per cent interest on the rent I would be unable at first to pay. That was good for a jolly laugh.

  The men were climbing down from the bamboo tower; the pigeons whirled down a vortex of fanned air to the cote.

  Dowager asked Mink to stay and share a rice bowl, and at the word “rice” her eyes danced in their prison of fat; but Mink said he must run his errand.

  Dowager took me into her hutch: a k’ang in each end space, a cookstove in the central one. She said I could choose my bed—with the hogs (what a merry lilt she gave that hateful epithet!), with her (suppose she rolled over on one in the night!), or on the floor in the cook space. I said I would spread a mat en the brick floor by the stove.

  The men came in with a basket of washed rice, and what a meal! Rice—delicacy in this millet-growing region—and pigeon eggs beaten and folded into a crisp roll with sautéed onion and bean sprouts! I tried to pretend I had eaten once that day, but I could not help moaning over the egg roll.

  “Blaaah,” the man Rock said, twisting his full mouth toward a pretended retch, but his eyes laughing, “wait till you’ve eaten them every day for a month.”

  Mercy Errand

  Had anyone ever heard such boldness? Rock said that the war, which had erupted during the time when I was walking upcountry from “the mountain,” was going badly, and the population of the core provinces was apathetic. The Emperor had soiled his breeches (Rock’s effrontery!) because he had had to thin out the banner guards of the capital so he could send more troops to the various zones, and the city was becoming disorderly. And now he’d announced that civilians would be chosen by lot to swell out the Imperial army. This was to be by the Number Wheel, and this was supposed to be a liberalization—selecting men by drawing numbers instead of shanghaiing them—but soldiering was the lowest form of life, a louse-infested, mud-soaked, running-away sort of life, and the yellows in the capital were seething. Especially the poor yellows. For one thing, the decree exempted any man whose number was drawn who would pay two hundred taels to buy a substitute. But worse than that, the poor yellows, who had to compete for food bowls with freed whites, resented the “Grand Harmonious Mercy Errand” of the war, as the Emperor kept calling it—the goal of freeing the slaves in the peripheral provinces. Everyone knew that this cause was a filthy rationalization: that the Emperor, who had scooped the floors of the Imperial coffers building new palaces in the Western Hills, wanted to get his shit-smelling hands on the outlying farm lands, for their revenues. (Hooo! I shuddered at Rock’s recklessness.) Rock and Groundnut were outwardly cynical about the issue of slavery in the war, saying that it brought down on our white shoulder blades the sanctimonious “kindness” of upper-class yellows and the frank hatred of the poor; yet by some clue, some tremor in Rock’s snarling voice and Groundnut’s sarcastic but milder tones, I sensed that they were inwardly attached to the Grand Harmonious Mercy Errand all the same—indeed, that it meant so much to them that they were forced for self-protection to turn their feeling inside out, into sneers and railing.

  Rock said the registrations for the great lottery of human beings had already begun, and he had heard that the enrolling officers were to come into this district in a few days.

  Looking for a Food Bowl

  Learning that I could read and write, Dowager said that I must make every effort to “save” myself—get work in one of the inner cities, Tartar or Imperial, away from the miserable swamp of poverty all around us.

  My first task: acquire a gate chip. Gate chips could only be procured at Red Banner headquarters in the Tartar City; one needed a gate chip to penetrate the Tartar City at all; ergo, one could not get a gate chip!—except, as Groundnut pointed out, by buying a counterfeit. Dowager provided the money and Groundnut provided the corrupt man; and soon I had the oblong bamboo domino of legitimacy.

  Miraculous! From a trunk Dowager produced a dingy gray silk gown which fitted my body and made me feel like the best pigeon of all.

  I had no trouble getting through the Hata Gate, under the Fox Tower of shivering memories. A tall bannerman took my chip in his hand, flipped it over, and tossed it back to me, saying, “Hai, little fox! Would you like a nice skewer of Tartar lamb?”

  In a fury at the soldier’s foul mouth, I hurried into the inner city.

  Such a whirl of responses to all that I saw! Nightmare memories, yet a strong fondness for the best of the past: a catch at my bowels at the thought of carrying out Big Madame Shen’s dirty bath water, yet a sweet weakness, as if my limbs were drowsy, at recalling the revels at Chao-er’s.

  I saw that in my aimless meandering I was following old paths. Everything was altered. I came to the place where the noble gate had stood: HARMONY IN ALL THE COURTYARDS!—now a cold entrance to a warehouse where the flags, catafalques, sedans, liveries, and drums of one of the Boards were stored. The old vegetable market—now the site of a bannermen’s barracks. An alley, Chao-er’s tavern—now a school, chanting children’s voices. The great temples, the purple inner walls, the curfew towers, the Coal Hill, the white dagobas, the golden roofs—all the signs of yellow mastery remained; what was vague, what seemed to melt before my eyes, was any image that attested to my own change of condition, to my freedom now as a human being. I began to feel the sensations of that horrible numbness I thought I had left behind forever.

  Then I was in the plaza leading to the Meridian Gate, and before me was a cluster of white men, free men, playing a game. They had formed a circle, and they were tossing from one to another a large polished ovoid granite stone into which a metal handle had been studded. The stone was a load—must have weighed twenty catties. Yet flinging it in arcs and catching it always by the handle and swinging it round for new flights, the men made it seem grasshopper-light. They never missed. While the stone was leaping among them, they started up as well a foot shuttlecock, which they bounced from one’s side-flung heel to another’s, so they had two timings to follow, of granite and pinfeather. Their adroitness and grace were breathtaking. Their cries of mutual admiration and delight were like sounds in fruit groves long ago. No yellows were watching; no yellows were tossing coppers. I could no longer tell which object was heavy and which light. My spirits began to jump with the stone and the cock, and my incipient numbness gave way to something akin to excitement, an impulse to laugh, a flicker of hoping that freedom might mean something after all. I felt as if freedom had at least kissed me on my eyes and ears.

  I was supposed to be searching for a food bowl.

  I winched up my courage and applied at an imposing gate—Imperial Horse Department. I got no farther than the gate guard.

  My manner was slavish, I spoke with dipped shoulder and slight humble whine—any work for a clerk? copyist? recorder?

  I got, for my effort—besides an air of irritation which responded, I sensed, to my ritual white meekness—nothing but a transparent formula.

  I tried that afternoon half a dozen great gates of bureaus and boards—for I wanted no more housework. I tried a more arrogant bearing and only earned an even greater irritation. No, nothing, move on! I needed some key to these gates.

  My free mood that the playing whites had given me was evaporating. But I summoned up a thought of that contentious man, Rock, who was simply not satisfied with anything, and I did smile thinking of him.

  The sun was plummeting, and I was fearful of being caught within the Tartar City by the nightly closing of the gates, and I ran a long distance to get to the Hata Gate; so fast did my worry carry me that the sun was still on the afternoon’s hip, above the western wall, when I reached the portal.

  Around the foot of the Fox Tower swarmed white beggars, some lying in the dust, legs dr
awn up in fetal self-satisfaction, seeming to sleep, others plying their trade.

  As I approached the guardhouse of the gate, a cringing creature, a man as short as I who made himself smaller, came up to me and began to croak, “Ayah, T’ai-t’ai, save me. Send me down some money. I’m hungry. My hunger hurts my belly.” This monster, the remnants of a white man, was so hideous that one could not give him alms in pity; rather one paid him to go away, to remove his revolting person—a caricature of suffering humanity—from one’s sight. The murmuring was on a dirgelike monotone, a sound of self-mourning: “Hunger is eating me. T’ai-t’ai! Hunger bites my belly. Ayah, T’ai-t’ai.”

  Three quarters of the beggar’s crown was covered with a white cap of fungoid rot; one of his eyes was filmed to blindness with a greenish mucus. He limped; he shuffled; he leaned.

  Something about this figure haunted me. What dim memory did he evoke?

  “T’ai-t’ai, T’ai-t’ai,” he wailed. “I pray for you. I kowtow to you, Ta-niang. Save my life! My pain is unbearable.”

  I had no money. What could I do? His clawlike hand plucked at my sleeve. I looked at the face as I wrenched my arm away. There was a ghost of a smile around the filthy lips. Those lips, that smile—vaguely familiar. What was I reminded of?

  I myself was hungry; I had had nothing to eat all day. I began to tremble. Was this some kind of supernatural visitation from the past that kept up its moaning appeal? “Ai, ai, my hunger eats me. Send down money, T’ai-t’ai. Save me, save me.”

  The claw was on me again. The decomposing face came closer. The lips were bent to a grin. In my ear the wailing voice: “Give me money, White Lotus!”

  I was so startled at hearing my name that I almost dived into the face; our noses nearly touched.