White Lotus

by John Hersey

  “Hai, hambone!” Bare-Stick called to Rock: a way of calling Rock a white pig.

  Rock, lashing the notched ridgepole to the king post with raffia cord, looked affably at the big man and asked him what he wanted.

  “You a city man?”

  Rock knew enough not to answer such a sparring question. “Why?”

  “You have that turtle-screwing rope on backwards.”

  “What do you mean, backwards?”

  “You’re winding it south-east-north-west; it ought to go southwest-north-east.”

  Rock did not answer, but went right on binding the timbers in the same direction as before.

  Bare-Stick moved a few steps closer.

  “Did you get permission from the lids to move in here?” “Lids” was secret white-talk for the yellows—standing for eyelids, their folded eyelids.

  Now came this surprising “old-solid” behavior of Rock’s, which, it seemed to me, simply fed the braggart’s fire. “We arranged things with Manager Wu,” Rock politely said.

  Bare-Stick spat and moved yet closer. “You’d better make yourself known to the upper hand. If you don’t you’re liable to have visitors from The Hall some night.” He rolled his eyes in a mysterious way. “That is, if this house of yours stands long enough for you to spend a night in it at all.”

  Rock went on with his work. Bare-Stick, obviously displeased with the newcomer’s silence, turned on Groundnut, who was handing materials up to Rock. “Did I hear that you people are button-kissers?” This was the derogatory term that had been used by yellow Seditionists for their enemies from the core provinces—“button” standing for the Emperor’s mandarins, who wore colored buttons on their hats according to their rank.

  Groundnut had the beggar’s instincts: appease, whine, flatter; and besides, Bare-Stick was a big man. “Whom-kissers?” Groundnut asked in a high, squeaky voice with a nervous laugh.

  Bare-Stick wrinkled his nose in disgust at Groundnut and addressed himself again to Rock. “What’s your ‘second’?”

  With a forbearance and sweetness that seemed absolutely genuine to me, Rock, looking straight into Bare-Stick’s eyes, said, “We’re going to start a school and teach the classics.”

  At this Bare-Stick gave out, first, a single bark of laughter, then two barks, then a half dozen. Then he began doubling over, pounding his knees, rearing back, mouthing great lumps of laughter; his face grew purple and tears started in his eyes. He turned and staggered to the silent circle of squatting onlookers, and we could hear him, half choked with his guffaws, shouting a report to them. “Classics! Classics!” we heard him cry.

  A few young boys in the watching crowd laughed halfheartedly. But for the most part Bare-Stick’s uproar was greeted by silence; the eyes were as sullen as before.

  Within a week we had finished our house and built a courtyard wall.

  The day before we were to sleep for the first time in the house, Groundnut announced to us that he was not going to live with us, for he had found a snug corner, he said, in a more or less abandoned temple at some distance from the Village of Brass-Mouth Chang—ayah, the rendezvous, no doubt, of white thieves, beggars, conjurers, ruffians.

  Rock said, “We’ve built you a bed here.” But it seemed to me that Rock did not really press Groundnut to stay—even though the pair were true friends, and even though we would badly need Groundnut’s two hands to help make a living from our tenancy.

  It was just this last that Groundnut himself had realized, and he said now, with a sheepish smile, “You know me, Rock. Honest work is bad for me. Helping you build this house has knotted my hands all up, like fish netting. I wouldn’t last a week on the tea bushes.”

  Rock seemed not the least upset. Somehow he procured colored pictures of Ch’ing Ch’iung and Yü Ch’ih, warriors of darkness and light, and he pasted them on the two leaves of our courtyard gate, to ward off thieves. On the mud wall of the empty pigsty he affixed an untrue notice on red paper: FAT SWINE ARE IN HERE. Provisioner Lung furnished us a crude chest, and by the two locks Rock pasted red papers with these inscriptions: GET MONEY AND RECEIVE PRECIOUS THINGS and TEN THOUSAND OUNCES OF GOLD. On the door of our simple chamber he pasted a picture of the fertility god, riding a unicorn and carrying in his arms something Rock apparently wanted as much as he wanted an end to wandering—a boy child.

  The Village

  The Village of Brass-Mouth Chang lay in the played-out valley of the Box River. It was closely crowded by Hsing Little Village, Ma Family Graves, Seeing the Horse Village, Mud Bridge, Hot Pepper Village, Wang Family Big Gourd Village, Tiger-Guarded Village, Liu’s Dog’s Tooth Village, and the Village of the Benign and Loving Magistrate.

  Since the war the countryside had changed. The great slave-economy tea estates had been broken up; the population was growing; freed whites abounded, in many places outnumbering the yellows; a rash of divided villages like ours had erupted all across the area known, from the poverty of the inhabitants, both yellow and white, as the Humility Belt.

  In the upper hand of our village were nineteen gates, altogether one hundred and three yellow mouths; in the lower hand, sixteen gates, counting our new one, with one hundred twenty-eight white mouths, counting Rock’s and mine.

  Now that our mean house was finished, we felt free to move out into the lower hand of the village. In the lengthening evenings we put on the new clothes Provisioner Lung had supplied us, and we went strolling. It seemed that in the pleasant hour before sundown the villagers, who formerly had seemed so forbidding and resentful, could not help being cordial. We sauntered along, and the white men hailed Rock: Talkative Chang, Rough Ma, Hairlip Shen, Ox Yang. We stopped to chat; Rock was an “old solid,” agreeable to all questions. Suggestive jokes flew my way, and I felt that the men were excited by the arrival of a new young woman in the village. We paused at the communal well with its semicircular wall against dust and evil emanations, and a gossip, pointing to a compound gate, told us about Suspicious Chang, the old founder of the village; his cow had sickened and died, his son had run away to the city, and thieves had stolen the brass clock from within its glass case on a chest on his bed. The empty glass case still stood on the chest, bearing witness to that outrage. Old Suspicious seldom came outside now; he locked his compound gate, wore a ragged beard, peered with care at strangers on the few occasions when he walked. “He will hear about you,” the gossip said, “and he’ll blame everything on you.” We learned, too, about Rich Shen, the most prosperous man in the village—at that, he had only thirty-seven mu of tea bushes, of which he owned but twelve and farmed the rest on rack rents like everyone else; his riches were his two sons, carpenter and roof-mender, and they were said to be quarrelsome with him. Though the men rolled their eyes at me, a new female, there were, in fact, too many women in the village, which some considered to be under a spell. War, disease, and cities had taken off young men, and even in childbirth the village was luckless—thirty-two girls to twenty-four boys.

  We saw some of these boys, oblivious to the village curse, if there was one, beside the common grindstone spinning a top with a whip—a game they called “beating the button-kissers.”

  We were warned against intruding into the upper hand of the village. Manager Wu was the only white who was supposed to go up there. The yellows there were poor—“not so poor as we, of course,” the villagers said—and they were somber, vindictive, joyless. They never strolled in the evenings; every gate was double-barred.

  Our white lower-handers were, indeed, adept at the art of enjoying themselves. “Ai,” they said of anything unpleasant, “toss it on the compost pile,” which in every courtyard consisted of human manure. Life was cheap, crime was easy, a joke cost nothing. Why hurry? What’s the difference? A man who was careful was called by our villagers a “tight bowels.”

  Conversation by the curving wall of the well in the twilight hour was fluent and witty, an
d much of it was detractive. No one said anything good of Manager Wu’s mixie wife. The women considered her sheepish; her beautiful hair they called “the black willow tree,” her good eyes were “steamed meat dumplings.” Manager’s ruptured groin was material for much speculation and snickering, and the men said Manager was quick to tell jokes about the yellows but whenever he went to the upper hand on business he came away with an empty basket.

  In general the Box River valley, with a leached-out soil for tea, rice, wheat, kaoliang, peas, and peanuts, was no worse off, and certainly no better off, than most of the Humility Belt. Whites shared with yellows the psychology of defeat. Political corruption was widespread. At the end of the war the Emperor had sent forth a locust swarm of bureaucrats, yellow men, of course, mostly inexperienced, who had tried to take up the government of the Sedition provinces where the now destroyed educated class of former slaveholders had dropped it. These men had tried at first to put the remaining yellows and the freed slaves on the same footing, but quickly they had seen that peace of soul lay in squeeze, and they had settled down to a life of extortion. Upon the shoulders of our tormentor, Provisioner Lung, sat one of these grasping bureaucrats, Magistrate Su. Yellows and whites alike called him and his kind “weasels”—after the biggest thief among the animals.

  At the wellside we heard whispers of a shadow that lay over the lower hand: the yellows’ band of “visitors” from the mysterious organization called The Hall. “Stop-Wind and I and the children were asleep on our platform. Somebody lammed at the outer gate with a staff or a knife handle, it might have been. Stop-Wind whispered, ‘Run hide in the storage hole, they won’t hurt me.’ I said, ‘They’d find me there, kill me sure.’ I went out and opened up the gate. They walked right past me, inside. Had warriors masks on, hooo! They pulled the quilt off her, looking. She sleeps bare but they didn’t say a word, flung the quilt back on her. They lifted the plank off the big jar in the corner, and I said, ‘That’s fat-meat, that’s all.’ One of them said in the mournful voice they use, ‘We come from Hell-Beyond-the-Mountain, we don’t look for dead meat, son.’ Said they were looking for Stop-Wind’s brother. He lives forty li downriver. Said he’d done something or other.”

  Dusk was settling down. The children were away, and voices were low. We heard itinerant vendors, poor white men, each with a distinct chant or signal, still hoping to eke out a transaction before pitch dark: the vegetable-oil-seller with a hollow wooden block, toc-toc, toc-toc; the seller of women’s combs, thread, soap, powder, hair oil, with a middle-tone snakeskin drum on a handle, thrum-a-num, thrum-a-num, thrum-a-num-a-num, going farther and farther away; the cabbage-seller, his empty-purse chant on a dying fall; the tinsmith with a deep, deep drum; the man who made little rice-dough effigies, hooting his last on a two-toned flute.

  Then a cymbal’s clash from the upper hand. Curfew for whites. We hurried home.

  Our Scattered Strips

  Neglected in truth our tea bushes were, and partly under cursory instructions from our neighbors, who did not seem fiercely eager to have newcomers succeed, and partly by watching them closely and imitating what they did, we began to prune the shrubs and to cultivate between the rows. Our tea share consisted of three widely separated plots, the largest comprising some thirty rows, a quarter of a li in length, the others much smaller, with bushes of varying ages. All three plots were set without hedge or fence into a huge area of similar plots—quite simply the less desirable stretches of the great tea plantation of Manager Wu’s onetime master, Cheng, broken into strips. Yellows owned or rented the richer soil and the better bushes. Our tenancies were marked by numbered corner stones. We had, as well, two food-crop strips, also far apart, and we planned to place a garden of greens in our courtyard.

  Rock and I worked endless hours, which in the good weather seemed swift, and we ached and stiffened. We had not much left over for reflection, and the days ran like empty-headed hares.

  How sweet the blossoms on our shabby tea bushes!—white, with anthers of a buttery hue; they were like little wild roses.

  Groundnut Finds a Food Bowl

  One day Groundnut sought us out in the tea plots. His face shone with happiness, and his whole pate glistened from a recent shave. He had found a brimming food bowl, he said: and indeed, he had brought us presents—three fat white cabbages and a bottle of vegetable oil. He did not offer to help us work but stood between the rows praising his own alertness and acumen.

  “The bird makes his nest by going and coming,” he said, “and by keeping his eyes open.”

  A small distance from our village, he told us, partway to Mud Bridge and not far from Seeing the Horse Village, there stood a temple, Restful Thoughts, that even after the war had served the yellows, but it had gone sour, and they had abandoned it. Geomancers said that the establishment of a new graveyard to the west of Mud Bridge had disturbed the local dragon; this had changed the wind-water of the temple, so its idols were impotent. Also, a slaveowner’s son had hanged himself from its rafters. Its images were badly flaked, dust mantled the gods, spiders were doing good business. White riffraff slept there and moved on. Young white lovers sometimes crawled in behind the statue of Buddha to wrestle a few minutes. Otherwise abandoned, proprietorless. Groundnut had observed that the roof was sound; the idols, though degenerating, had been well made; a sweet-water spring was nearby; pretty birds were plentiful; and the view from the gate was splendid.

  In short, Groundnut had carefully focused his eyes on a good living, a beautiful swindle, and a humane service. Why not become a priest?

  A priest of what? A priest of Everything.

  “These hogs around here,” he said, “are starved for conjuring. I had a white tea tenant come in (they flocked to me as soon as they heard a priest had come)—said he’d been riding his cart along a sunken road, and a chinaware washpot jumped right off the tea field beside the road onto the wagon behind him. The lid rattled at him as if trying to say something. Frightened him—but his wife wanted to use the basin. Asks me: Should he let her?”

  And so Groundnut would bring comfort to those with fears, would barter counsel for eatables. He would preside over thieves. He would manage crude justice, as between white and white, through omens, oracular pronouncements, and conjurations. He would be a politician, a mumbler of wisdom, a boss, an intriguer, a receiver of stolen goods, an idealist. He would be a spiritual juggler, too, keeping earnest good faith spinning in the air along with tact, kindness, understanding. All this, of course, as Rock and I understood without being told, would not entail betraying his basic craft—of cheater, beggar. He would leave teaching to us; as for him, he would play on ignorance.

  How could we be disgusted with Groundnut for being himself?

  There came a day when Rock and I could bend our backs no more, and by way of easing them we went to visit Restful Thoughts Temple and its self-appointed priest.

  The walled grounds were spacious, the buildings shimmered in the sunlight with an unassailable grace of proportion—of perfect curves resting on slender columns, roofs of heavy tile seeming to float on misty air. Within, an atmosphere of gloom, hopelessness, benign faces crumbling, birds nesting on beams.

  Up behind the main altar in the first building rose a once gilded Buddha, his fat pocked with faults, so one could see he was made of humble earth bound with swingling tow; his set grin was flaky, one eye had fallen out. Sitting in an orderly row beside the Buddha were nine figures of elderly men, once richly dressed, in dusty-elegant tatters now, their benevolent expressions rendered sinister and hypocritical by the cracking and spalling of their painted clay flesh; one of them was patting an earthen dog. In the second building three female idols stood, each with an altar crowded with dust-caked vases, candlesticks, and incense burners, relics of long-dead hopes. The figure in the center held an ancient infant, fissured and chinked, in her arms; the two on the sides, seated on huge lotus leaves of corrupt gold, had many arms, and t
hey held in their many hands net bags of many hundreds of artificial eyes, offered in years long past by yellows who had pleaded to be cured of in-closing darknesses. In the wings once malignant-looking divinities stood robbed of most of their evil by the fearless chippings of neglect, yet perhaps the more horrible in being, in their ruined state, facetiously stern and cruel.

  A sort of suppressed terror hung about us in these chambers, yet Groundnut bounced beside us, in grotesquely shabby crimson robes, winking and grinning, happy as he had used to be when he cooped his rice-robbing pigeons in Dowager’s gate yard. While we moved about, a few miserable whites, suffering over this or that, and having heard that the temple was alive again, drifted into the buildings; they kowtowed before the figures, muttered prayers, and left humble offerings, some of which, edible, Groundnut snatched away from the altars and popped into a basket that he carried before the worshippers had even turned their backs.

  He was not at all ashamed, because, as he whispered to us, “I have something of great value to give these poor pigs: a path to resignation. I’ve taken a hint from the yellows—let these miserable people be interested in the only thing that can give them hope, which is death. Since they haven’t kept track of their dead ancestors, let them worship dead-looking idols: I don’t plan to renovate here. Do you see? The trick is to get their hopes up over their next life. If a pig has no hope of happiness in this world, he can find comfort in thoughts about another; he can hope that maybe he’ll come back to this one another time as a more fortunate being. If he’s really lucky he may come back as a yellow! I’m helping these ignorant people, and I mean to keep them ignorant if I can. You want to teach them, White Lotus, but I know that my power depends on mystery, darkness; I want them ignorant. Eyes on death! Look, this is not at all selfish of me. It helps them. They find strength by denying any meaning or importance to the ‘facts’ of their daily lives. The things they can see and touch and smell—their tea bushes, their hard sleeping platforms, their compost heaps—these are illusions, just shadows of dreams; the only substance lies in the spirit. Observable facts and truth have nothing to do with each other; ‘truth’ is an inner matter. You see, Rock? This eliminates despair, which comes from the unbearable realities we see around us.”