White Lotus

by John Hersey

  But here one of them was. An instant’s picture, as he burst in at his gate, panting: warm, shrewd, adaptable, superstitious, loud, and not to be cheated. Raise his level? Ha! He would sooner depress ours.

  “Go, go, go!” he said, waving us on backhanded toward the house for cups of tea before our talk, whatever it might concern.

  There had been rain. On a mild surge of playfulness I placed my worn cloth shoe soles, step after too long step toward the house, in the soft-dirt footprints of my Rock, who walked ahead.

  From behind, the headman banged my shoulder. “Watch yourself. Walking in another person’s tracks will give you backache.”

  Dark within—an impression of an immaculate chest on a matted platform, its old wood gleaming with tung oil, its brass hinges and corner bindings brightly polished.

  The headman’s wife—we had not seen her; she had been lurking inside the house; she had already steeped some tea—was a mix, with “good” eyes having heavy overfolds, a broad nose, and straight black hair. She was silent and deferential, but I could see by her bearing that she had a certain power. Was her husband headman because of her?

  While we sipped at our tea, spied upon from behind his mother’s legs by the walleyed boy, Manager Wu, as this white headman called himself, rambled on a note of off-business politeness. We were town-bred? A joke about a man who was cocksure in the city but was an easy mark in the country. A recent escape from an embarrassing predicament, involving yellow landowner. A grimace and groan, a rupture suffered lifting a cart tongue three months before. A remark about some deep thought, and a gesture to go with it, betraying a belief that the stomach was the seat of the intellect.

  Then Manager Wu’s tea bowl went down with an emphatic clink, and we knew that we could raise our question.

  “Can we settle in your village?” Rock asked.

  “What’s to stop you? We’re all métayers here. Get a tenancy and build a house. Who’s to prevent you?”

  What a letdown this flat indifference gave us! We had wandered as vagrants for many months, and at last we had come to this village in a valley, in the heart of the Humility Belt, where tea was grown, and table foods, a double village, with the yellow section at the “upper hand,” placed more favorably from the point of view of geomancy, according to certain mysterious influences of wind, water, dragons, spirits, and land values, immediately to the northeast of the “lower hand,” where the whites lived as best they could, as free men and women. The village was in a swarm of similar villages, but for some reason it had struck us, when we came over a rise and saw it early in the morning, as precisely the one we wanted. We expected our arrival to arouse some feeling; after all our months of walking here and there we wanted a welcome, even an angry one. The least the headman might have offered us was hostility, but he neither rejected us nor accepted us.

  “Go to Old Lung, he’s the provisioner for this area, he lives in Wang Family Big Gourd Village. See if he will arrange you a tenancy and furnish you. Don’t let him take more than half your crop, the turtle.”

  I saw that Rock did not like this advice. “We heard that you could claim a few mu of land from the former plantations.”

  “Those old promises! Go up to the provincial yamen—see what good it does you! No, we farm by rack rents. And not so well at that. You’ll have to have what we call a ‘second,’ if you want to eat every day. Hairlip Shen” (all the whites in this area, it seemed, had taken surnames of former masters) “makes bean curd and vends it in the neighboring villages. The Lin family makes spiral bean cakes. Rich Shen has one son who’s a carpenter, one who’s a roof-mender. Many of the women make shoe soles. Strong Ma works certain days on the provincial road. The Changs have a son who is effeminate—they send him fishing for carp nights. Do these people sound hardworking? Ai, they’re all lazy! But you can’t manage on tea farming; nobody can. You have to have a ‘second.’ ”

  I said, “What if I started a school?”

  Manager Wu looked at me severely. “You? A woman teacher?”

  “What difference, when everything is confused?”

  Manager Wu did not answer me but carried on the thought he had begun. “Lazy? Not exactly. They’re shiftless—don’t care. You won’t either. I saw Hairlip Shen leaning on the wall of his pigpen saying, ‘Don’t grunt so, old hog!’ They all have to pay me squeeze to pay Provisioner Lung, who keeps some and gives some to Magistrate Su, who keeps some and passes some along, and so on up to the top, wherever that is. All those officials are criminals! You see, we lost the war out here. The yellows they put in charge—ignorant scoundrels. I was a slave to Big Venerable Cheng: a hard man, but educated, alert—you couldn’t get squeeze out of him, and he wouldn’t take it, either. He’s gone. All the masters were killed or run off the land. Start a school for the yellow turtles in the ‘upper hand,’ Mei-mei. They need it. This village is on one little corner of Old Cheng’s place. He had thirty thousand mu of tea plantations—beautiful! Ayah, how are you ignorant city pigs going to learn how to crop tea bushes, make withering tats, roll the leaves? These are skills. You want to start a school? Pfui. I don’t care. You can starve here as well as anywhere else.”

  Being Furnished

  What a happy surprise is Provisioner Lung! How gracious he is! He greets us at the spirit screen of his courtyard, by doffing his enormous, wire-rimmed spectacles, waving them about, and putting them back on again. Once they are fastened behind his ears, one can see, looking into his gentle eyes, that the lenses of these glasses are simply circlets of windowpane, with no magnifying power. He is a yellow man in his seventies, I would guess, with a clean, long, and unusually full white beard. Courtesy, manners, graceful gestures. “Come along, come along.” In the courtyard, slung from the branch of a cherry tree, a bird cage. Groundnut the bird fancier exclaims. Provisioner Lung pauses to show Groundnut his lark. For five “feathers”—moltings, or years—he has exposed the bird to the classical repertory, and with a little kissing sound the provisioner starts the singer off: the merchant names as we hear them the thirteen cries of the wood sparrow, black warbler, red warbler, magpie, cat, flock of chickens, swallow, eagle, yellow finch, wild pigeon, partridge, cuckoo, mating widgeon. Groundnut is ecstatic.

  “Ayah, the three ‘mouths’ of the eagle were the hardest to teach. I had to take him all the way to the provincial capital, to Bring Larks Restaurant, where the proprietor keeps roosts out over the water of the lotus pond there, meat-baited roosts, and eagles come screaming in there. You should have seen my good boy—head on one side.” Whipping his beard, Provisioner Lung turns his head and becomes a lark listening, trying hard to remember. “I had one other lark before him, for seven years. He died, and the very next time I went out walking a dog bit me.”

  He leads us into a modest room, and, being white, I have my first suspicion. The modesty is too perfect, too discreet, too shrewd—no profiteer lives here! A woman enters with tea, and with a vulgar pride Provisioner Lung tells us she is his concubine—the only concubine, he boasts, in Wang Family Big Gourd Village or, for that matter, in all the seven villages closest at hand. Since his wife’s death the year before, Fragrant Dew—she is wizened, and her mouth is all drawn up in wrinkles, like a newborn puppy’s, and her gown is as plain as mine—has been his only company. She moves about silently, serving us. Provisioner Lung says he bought her thirty years ago, “the same year I bought these,” and he holds up a pair of polished mountain walnuts that he rolls in one hand to calm his nerves and promote circulation.

  Does he have to tell three vagrant whites such things? Everything about him is counterfeit, second-rate, and his “style” would certainly not have been tolerated when his social betters were around to keep an eye on him.

  He lifts a tiny corked vase from a table, pours out some snuff into a little brass bowl, and with a forefinger lifts some of the dust to his nostrils. Harrcha-a-a! A peasant sneeze!

  The cups a
re empty. So. Rock speaks. We have talked with Manager Wu in the Village of Brass-Mouth Chang. We wish to arrange a tenancy. Be furnished in tea and food crops.

  There are spikes like those of a thistle on Rock’s voice.

  Now we learn about the whole thieving process. The tenancy, on land with several mu of “somewhat neglected” eight- or nine-year-old tea bushes, will be arranged with the landowner, who lives in the provincial capital, Changsha, or Long Sands, on the river below the big lake. The bushes are guaranteed to bear the first season. We give as rent a percentage of the tea crop only; no percentage of food crops. Do we have a donkey and a cart? No? Provisioner Lung will furnish them, on chattel mortgages. Seed and a half month’s rations will be forwarded on credit, against eventual payment in food crops. When the first flush is ready to pick, another mortgage will be given on the tea crop, to pay for monthly provisions, which may be picked up at each new moon: twenty catties of fat side pork, a half picul of rice for the three parties. Also, clothing and shoes, farm quality. Medicines. Shoeing for the donkey. Harness. Tools. All to be provided in exchange for small food-crop percentages.

  Rock sharply says, “You mentioned ‘somewhat neglected’ tea bushes. What does that mean?”

  “It means that tenants come and go. You will be taking up where someone else left off.”

  “It’s a swindle!”

  I see behind Provisioner Lung’s windowpane spectacles a fleeting look: strange! Can that have been, in the eyes of a man who is in absolute control, a look of anxiousness? But the look is gone. The merchant shrugs. He is now staring at Groundnut, at the top of the shrug, which he holds a long time.

  Groundnut, who has been a beggar, and who knows that beggars do not trump up moral arguments against those on whom they fawn, is grinning, and he imitates the provisioner’s shrug.

  “You come from the core provinces, yes?” Old Lung asks Rock.

  “We do.”

  “I could see that. You don’t know tea.”

  Rock is bristling. “I’ve learned harder things than tea.”

  “I have no doubt of it. And I see that you’re not like most of the hogs around here.” Rock jumps a little at that insulting word. “These people need a creditor to sharpen up their heel bones. You came from Manager Wu in Brass-Mouth? Look, he talks like a lion, he’s the headman of the lower hand over there—but he’s like the rest of those shiftless hogs. This is what I have to deal with. He has no idea of time. ‘Tomorrow,’ he promises—that day never comes. He won’t work if there is some way of getting out of it: came running from the fields to see you, I’ll wager, plenty of time for a cup of tea, plenty of time for complaints about Provisioner Lung. Right? That’s all time away from paying off! He’s a sort of clown. Dirty and smelly, hoo, garlic! Doesn’t know the meaning of chastity, modesty—watch out for him, girl.” The merchant looks at me, and I have an impression that he is somehow inwardly uncomfortable. “He doesn’t know the value of a copper—spends it on foolishness, gambles it away, then comes sniveling to me for side meat for his children: he’s the one with that cock-eyed boy, isn’t he? Gullible! His villagers take advantage of him every day of the year. All right. He goes to the temple, knocks his forehead on the bricks—but he believes in ten thousand ghosts, spirits, charms, demons. He has a mind like a child’s—shallow thinking. He’d steal the underdrawers from your dead mother. Has no respect for property or morality or manners or for life itself—can’t control his impulses, that’s the underlying trouble. And this is what they’re all like. You think I want them in debt? I never get mine back. They break my tools, destroy my carts, lame my donkeys. They pick my tea at night and hide it. Pay me debts? ‘Tomorrow, Provisioner Lung! Tomorrow! Tomorrow!’ But tomorrow they abscond.”

  I keep wondering about that look in his eyes. I think I will give him a tiny shock. In a half-theatrical voice I say, “The Master said, ‘Extravagance leads to insubordination, and parsimony to meanness. It is better to be mean than insubordinate.’ ”

  I hasten to explain that I have concluded from what the merchant has been saying that Manager Wu appraises himself wrongly—as white people are liable to do, I add as a sop. It seems that the headman thinks himself grand, but all the time he is mean. I hide the sarcasm from my voice, a cultured flute swaddled in rags. But perhaps this little experiment in veiled effrontery has been a bad mistake, for now I see distinct annoyance in Provisioner Lung’s eyes. He does not like the thought of a bedraggled white person with some learning. He is deficient in it himself.

  He turns to Rock and curtly says, “All that matters to you is: Am I good for what I promise? Come with me.”

  He leads us through a series of courtyards, giving onto storage rooms, and we see an appalling wealth of carts and plows, shoes and clothes, barrels of salt pork and sacks of rice, seed and manure, dried fruits, and peppers, and cabbages, and umbrellas and pots and hats and jars of herbs.

  “You see,” he said, having led us around again to the spirit screen at his front gate, “I am good for my word.”

  Rock says, “Yes, but we haven’t talked about something else that matters. The percentages.”

  “They’re the usual. For rent, sixty per cent of the tea. For monthly provisions—”

  But Rock explodes. “Sixty is not usual.” He turns to Groundnut and me. “Let’s go.”

  Quickly Provisioner Lung says, “You don’t know tea.”

  Now Groundnut comes in for the first time. “But we know bad bargains.”

  “I am the only merchant who furnishes for Brass-Mouth.”

  “There are other villages,” Rock says. Again he says to us, “Let’s go.”

  The merchant sighs and comes down to fifty-five per cent. It takes a quarter of an hour to get him down to fifty. All the other percentages and charges require long haggling. The lark sings in the background, intermittently pretending it is an eagle. We stand the whole time at the spirit screen; amenities have been forgotten.

  Our Own House

  We were building a house. Ever since the meeting with the provisioner, Rock had been in a wool-gathering mood, and he was behaving like an “old solid,” one of those whites the yellows preferred, of the type that appeared to be gentle, tractable, peaceable, and possibly stupid and easy to best. He was also distant; he would not tell Groundnut or me what was on his mind. I had the feeling he was storing away his bitterness against some future need.

  No one would take us in, and while we built our house we slept in the open, on the ground, as we had often done on our travels. We lived sparely on Provisioner Lung’s rice and fatty side meat, which we cooked over open fires of dried grasses and twigs.

  Manager Wu had assigned us a location for our courtyard, at the bottom of the village, on low ground, a poor place, and for some time we had been making flat mud bricks, a thumb’s length in thickness, a foot wide and two feet long; we made them in wooden molds, grudgingly loaned us from the communal village supply by Manager Wu. Groundnut cut the mud and mixed it with dried reeds that we scavenged from a nearby swamp, I filled the molds, and Rock tamped the matter into the flat boxes with a heavy stone rammer.

  Groundnut, with the brashness of a beggar, poked about in the village more than Rock or I, penetrating into courtyards asking questions of the hostile population, and one day, seeing on his return a wise-cat look on his face, I asked him what he had stolen.

  He pulled out from under his jacket a pamphlet bound in brilliant yellow paper and handed it over to me. It was entitled Almanac of the Year of the Tiger. I flipped through its pages. Ayah, it was made for ignorant people, all, save the simple numbers of the dates, in pictures!

  “You can’t piss in this village without getting permission from the almanac,” Groundnut said. “Every question I ask, they go to the book and look at the pretty pictures. I thought we’d better have one.”

  “Look up housebuilding,” Rock said. He was perfectly
bland and serious, and for a moment I had to restrain myself from teasing him: we had planned to educate and elevate these benighted whites, and we were letting ourselves, instead, be stupefied by them.

  Here! On third third, the Spring Festival, soon to come—one could see a picture of graves being repaired, blossoms, a man planting a tree. Marked by the yang, the sign of the male, light, positive, benign principle of life, were those things it was auspicious to do on that day: offer sacrifices, pray for wealth, visit friends, walk in fields, take baths, cut fingernails, cut out clothes, cure the sick by acupuncture, put money by, and what we meant to do: raise king and queen posts, lift up ridgepoles. Under the forbidding yin: undertaking mercantile dealings, weddings, making wine, sinking wells.

  So we waited for the holiday, and on it, while the yellow villagers from the upper hand strolled in the countryside gazing at the flowering trees and darting warblers, and the whites from the lower hand dozed by their compound walls, chatted, gambled, got drunk, argued, or crouched on their hams sullenly watching us, never once offering to lend us a hand, we erected the frame of our single-space house.

  Fortunately, Rock knew what he was about, or we would have been heartily laughed at.

  There was one man, however, who could not resist telling us that we were doing everything wrong. His name was Bare-Stick Wang; Groundnut had heard and told us about him—the village firecracker. He came forward from the circle of our audience of squatting villagers. A big man, he wore a cloth cap at a studied angle on the back of his head, and his light-brown hair, which had a slight curl, was braided into an unkempt loose queue as thick as his forearm. Most of the village men were fastidious about looping up the flies of their outer gowns to their necks, but Bare-Stick wore his unbuttoned nearly down to his waist, revealing a deal of dirty white undershirt. His shoes were down at the heel, showing—the aggressive man’s little surprise—elegant embroidered silk socks. He carried a snuff bottle on a string from his waistband. Groundnut had told us he had a reputation for setting fires, destroying crops, and informing on his fellow villagers at the yamen of the district prefect; he would also hire himself out to settle scores.