White Lotus

by John Hersey

Along the road toward the crowd of whites outside the temple came three men riding fat ponies. Their arrival provoked hasty whispers, then an unnatural silence.

  The three men were wearing papier-mâché masks, representing ancient warriors—faces of such exaggerated ferocity as to break through beyond being comical into the dark unreality of folk-tale fear.

  I heard a young man near me mutter, with a kind of gasp, that the men were members of The Hall out by day!

  The men drew up their horses at the edge of the crowd of whites, and we heard one speak in strange, lugubrious tones, muffled by his mask. “What are you pigs doing here?”

  There was a long, long silence. Several men and girls in our circle looked at Bare-Stick: he knew how to suck hard yellow tits!

  At last, indeed, his was the voice that answered. In the hush of the crowd it crackled louder, perhaps, than he had intended. “Been worshipping.”

  The yellow man—the hands on the reins were yellow—who had spoken from behind the mask wheeled his round little horse suddenly toward Bare-Stick, and we heard the cavernous tones again. “Worshipping here in the road?”

  Bare-Stick alone of all the crowd laughed. “That’s a sharp one, Venerable.”

  “Answer me!” the hollow voice commanded. “What are you doing here in the road?”

  “Talking. Just talking awhile, old uncle.”

  The masked man spurred his pony straight into the crowd, toward Bare-Stick, and the other two followed.

  “You pigs know that you are not to gather in crowds. After worship you go home, or there’ll be no worship. And you, talker! You’ll canter home ahead of us and show these other hogs and sows how to get there.”

  Bare-Stick’s face was as white and waxy as a wave-worn seashell. He turned and headed out from the crowd to the middle of the roadway toward our village. The three ponies followed him. Bare-Stick broke into a run, and the ponies started stiff-leggedly to trot right on his heels. Soon Bare-Stick began—undoubtedly at the urging of that awful voice—to run with uneven, rocking steps, imitating as well as he could a four-legged creature’s canter.

  Advice from Bare-Stick

  Some of the sunset idlers were leaning on the semicircular wall by the well, and some of them squatted on their hams.

  Bare-Stick was louder than ever. Far from having been abashed by his absurd trot home in front of the ponies of the riders of The Hall, he was glorying in it—in his having been singled out, in his having been the only man in the crowd at the temple with horse hooves, as he put it; he meant, the only one who had dared speak to the masked yellows.

  Then Rock, in his style of a mild-tongued “old solid,” asked, as if really interested, “Were you winded?”

  At once Bare-Stick stood straight, making himself as tall as he could, and he said in a put-upon tone, “How ‘winded’?”

  “I mean when you reached the village.”

  “Why should I be winded?”

  “It was a long run.” Rock’s tone was ambiguous: admiring, yet also seeming to leave something unsaid, as better left that way.

  Bare-Stick gave himself away—moved a step closer to Rock. “Why are you interested in whether I was winded?”

  Rock drew in the lure. He shrugged. “I was just wondering.”

  “I have good lungs.”

  “So I hear.” Rock’s manner—his bowed head, mild voice, modest eyes—suggested the innocent reading of this answer: that Rock had heard from a villager of Bare-Stick’s prowess as a runner. But Bare-Stick caught without a doubt the possibility of another construction: that Rock’s ears told him that Bare-Stick used his strong lungs for too much talking.

  “I didn’t hear you talking back to those pricks from The Hall,” Bare-Stick said.

  “No. And I walked home. And wasn’t winded.”

  “What’s all this about being winded?”

  “I just asked a friendly question.”

  “Friendly? Whose friend do you think you are?”

  “But you haven’t told me whether you were winded.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “You were making this trot everybody’s business.”

  “It’s not yours, button-kisser.”

  “I was wondering, though: Were you winded?”

  Several of the men who had been crouching stood up. No one laughed, but I could see devils dancing in many of the watching eyes.

  Rock had reached the trigger in Bare-Stick, who now was inching by tight little steps toward his provoker. “Suppose I was! What is it to you?”

  Now Rock stretched his words out in a countryman’s drawl. “It seemed to me—I just wondered—maybe you could tell me—wouldn’t a man running on horse’s hooves—I mean, hooves are heavy—wouldn’t a man’s legs feel heavy?—get winded?—long trot like that? I mean, it seems reasonable.”

  Upon the emergence of the naked mockery, embarrassed laughter broke out around us. Bewildered, Bare-Stick whirled away from Rock and faced the laughers. But further confusion! Their laughter was not cruel; their faces were now innocent; they wanted no particular resolution of the duel between the two men.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Bare-Stick himself broke into guffaws, which were as powerful as they were insincere.

  The storm had passed. Bare-Stick seemed irresolute at first, then soon he became positively pleasant to Rock and me, behaving as if he owed Rock money.

  Taking advantage of this turn, Rock said that he and I were ignorant about tea, and that we had heard that Bare-Stick had learned the most expert tea-treating from his father. Would he help us? Just with this first crop?

  Bare-Stick blustered. Had a tenancy of his own. Wife pregnant. Couldn’t go around withering and fermenting for anyone and everyone.

  “Five per cent of the crop?”

  “Ayah, Rock,” Bare-Stick said, suddenly in the best of humors, “you’re a turtle and a son of a turtle.”

  As things turned out, Bare-Stick could not do enough for us. Rock had apparently reached his innermost soft spot, and I allowed Bare-Stick to have goggle eyes for my body. He inspected our tenancy, showed us exactly how to crop the bushes. Promised to loan us his withering tats. Said he would let us use his ovens for the final firing, then Rock could build our own later.

  One evening Bare-Stick brought us a wonk puppy, a squirming ball of orange fur, and he said our compound could not be a real home until it had a watchdog. To prevent the wonk from becoming a wanderer, he said, we should cut off the tip of his tail and bury it just outside the door to the house.

  We did this. Was it to please Bare-Stick, or because we were beginning to think we could not survive without following the absurd rules of folklore? This question depressed me, but the puppy—by night panting and yipping at the loss of its mother and litter mates, but by day racing about gnawing at every worthless and valuable object, playing with shadows and blown dust—made me, and my pupils, too, laugh with a rippling sound that expressed, better than words could, our pathetic eagerness to accept the rotten bargain of our lives.

  Up until then, I had been excited by my school but was far from being made happy by it. The children had no interest in learning, and I felt the heavy drag of their resistance to the masters and to me. What could “piety” and “correct knowledge” and “the proprieties” mean to these hungry scurfy urchins? Why, for that matter, should earnestness and yearning impress them?

  I was, besides, physically tired all the while, and sometimes ill-tempered. It was clear that even with the school as a “second” we were not going to have much to eat, and it was Bare-Stick who—having warned Rock that our tenancy, though more than we could properly till, was too small, too small—introduced me to some supplementary labors, working at hire for other whites’ ‘seconds,’ making bean curds and noodles, spinning, sorting miserable pig bristles by color, length, and thickness. My eyes wa
tered, my fingers were like twigs.

  One evening Rock, Bare-Stick, and I were in our “kitchen”—one end of our single-space hut.

  “You haven’t enough,” Bare-Stick said. “This tenancy of yours is a flea-bitten wonk. It’s the same one Provisioner Lung strapped on Simple Hsi’s back—Simple was starved out in two years. Moved up the valley.”

  “Is it the poor soil—or is it just too small?”

  “Some people say it’s the wind-water. Others say Simple didn’t know how to do things. You have to wait till you’re angry to plant peppers; if you’re planting large vegetables, plant in a squatting position and walk away without looking back. Simple ignored things like that. They say Simple didn’t do anything right—but I think it was the tenancy. Before Simple Hsi it was Hook Wang. Before Hook, another man who even had a son to help him, I forget his name. Two or three years, each one. It’s a wonk. You ought to go to Provisioner Lung and have him change it.”

  “What’s Provisioner Lung’s weak spot?”

  “He doesn’t have one. We’ve all been looking for one with both eyes open.”

  “I’m going to find one.”

  “Don’t try to kill him. If you kill a lizard you’ll grow ragged.”

  “I’m ragged already.”

  Bare-Stick began to huff. “Don’t try to kill him, Rock. Don’t try to be a boar. We don’t need a big-prick boar of a race hero around here. I mean it, Rock. You’d spoil life for every mourner in this valley.” (“Mourner” meant white person—white was the yellows’ color of mourning.)

  “I don’t mean to kill him.”

  “What do you mean to do?”

  “I don’t know. Just look for a weak spot, I guess.”

  “All right. Get him to change this wonk of a tenancy. But don’t meddle with the rest of us. Cut your own mud.”

  I was worried about Rock, and I had more and more strongly the feeling of being dragged down, down. Rock was thin, and he was playing the “old-solid” part with too much conviction; gone was the arrogant, quarrelsome, care-nothing air that covered caring too much. It seemed to me that his fire was banked and burning low. I could not tell what he was thinking, and he took my body infrequently and with a passion that seemed as weary as my poor frame. Was he to become a kind of automatic man, propelled through life by superstitions—when planting a tree, name it for a tall person, and it will grow large—and was I to be a pig-bristle sorter the rest of my days?

  Yet how I laughed when the puppy wonk came wriggling to me!

  Provisioner Lung’s Counter-Probe

  Once again Provisioner Lung was all charm and form; it was as if we had never haggled like vulgar chaffers over percentages. He wanted us, as honored guests, to inspect his beautiful set of the game called “house sparrow”—its ivory-faced tiles engraved with flowers, cranes, circlets, and characters, the hard tusk incised as if by delicate brush strokes. In a mumbling voice I read on certain tiles the colors of the dragons and the compass points of the winds, and Provisioner Lung complimented me on my culture as effusively as if I were a laureate of the Imperial examinations.

  “I understand that you have a tasteful school. Tri-Metrical Classic. Most impressive for a white village.”

  Nor did Provisioner Lung’s compliments end there. He praised Rock for the soundness and modesty of the house he had built. Humbleness was a quality he admired. “ ‘He who walks with his head too high slips on the mudbank underfoot.’ ”

  At this Rock showed a moment’s spark. “Meekness,” he said, “did not prevent me from slipping more than once when we were cutting the mud to build it.”

  Provisioner Lung laughed heartily. Humor was another quality he cherished. Especially earthy humor. Ha-ha-ha! Earthy—mud: Did we catch his intention? Ha-ha-ha!

  As the merchant’s withered concubine, Fragrant Dew, passed bowls and poured steaming jasmine-flavored tea, we traded laughs.

  Ai, how pleasant we were! Yet I knew that hatred for this man was in Rock’s bowels; Rock yearned to find his weakness.

  “I hear,” Provisioner Lung said, “that you have a frisky house pet.”

  Sol Now his prying compliments were intruding within our courtyard gates. Provisioner Lung must have had contracts with five hundred tenants in the villages all about, yet he knew—and by his pretty volleys he was letting us know that he knew—every detail of our lives.

  And next, a discreet rap on our knuckles: Did we have any idea how much a full-grown dog would eat?

  A long silence after that. How could we answer such a question? The tea was too hot to sip. But Provisioner Lung did not let his chance pass. “Speaking of eating,” he said, “I know why you have come to see me. At least, I can guess why you have come. And I am full of admiration for you, Rock Liu, for coming to me—for not waiting until it was too late. You’re a superior hog, young man. You’re a hard worker. I saw when you first came to me that you might not be like most of the pigs hereabouts. You want to improve yourself—and considering that you two have a school, it seems you want to improve your fellow pigs, too.” The repetition of the insulting term was all that we needed to grasp the warning undertow that was now flowing beneath the smooth surface of Provisioner Lung’s praise. “It is a pleasure at last to see some enterprise from clients of mine. Listen: The only way to deal with the shiftless pigs that stayed on in this valley after the war is by debt-slavery. Listless men without a grain of ambition in them have to be kept under pressure, for their own sakes. I doubt if you will accomplish much with your school, T’ai-t’ai”—what a load of irony that honorific bore when he tossed it at me!—“because these pigs have atrophied brains. They couldn’t learn anything even if they wanted to. But I’ll say one thing—perhaps you’ve observed it: These white pigs, who aren’t nearly so clever as you are, Rock Liu, have one amazing talent. It’s a talent for being happy in the middle of the most sordid surroundings. Laughter in squalor! It is wonderful! They must be children of nature—born of crickets and dung beetles!”

  Now Provisioner Lung sipped his tea, with the ferocious slurping sound the yellows affected. The expression on his face, as he set down his tea bowl, was serene and gracious.

  “By the way,” he said, “at your house, did you remember to leave a little hole in the paper window? You ought to have a little hole in the window until the first of the tenth month—that’s when ghosts and spirits are shut away for the winter by Ch’eng Huang, you know, the wall god. When you built your house, you may have trapped someone’s malign spirit inside, and if it couldn’t get out by that little hole, it might cause you all sorts of trouble. The reason I’m saying this to you is that I believe this is what happened to the hog named Simple Hsi, who had your tenancy before you. He only lasted a year and ten months. I think a ghost soured him. It is easy to take this precaution. All you do is to wet the end of your finger and apply it to the paper window from the inside, the unshellacked side. A tiny hole the size of your index finger is all you need.”

  “Might it be,” Rock asked, “that Simple Hsi failed on the tenancy because the tenancy can’t support a family? The upper tea plot—”

  “—‘has crabbed bushes! The lower-middle plot is sour-soiled!’ ” Behind the windowpane glasses Provisioner Lung’s eyes were so gentle, so sympathetic, as Rock visibly started, hearing Bare-Stick’s exact words! “If I am not mistaken, you have been listening to Bare-Stick Wang. Bare-Stick’s father, Cudgel Wang, was one of the finest slaves in the valley, but this boy—something went wrong. They say—but that’s a long tale…. In him there is a Law of Opposites. He goes around shouting. Every white man for himself. Do not interfere in another man’s life. Cut your own mud. At the same time, in practice, this magpie meddles in everyone else’s courtyard and neglects his own.”

  The accuracy of Provisioner Lung’s shots simply dumfounded Rock, who had come to call on the supplier partly to ask for a larger tenancy but mainly,
I thought, to probe for the Provisioner’s vulnerability, whatever it might be. To the contrary, what was happening was precisely that Provisioner Lung was probing for Rock’s undefended point. And perhaps he had even found it. Perhaps Rock’s weakness was that he might allow himself to see his fellow whites as Provisioner Lung saw them, with such apparent accuracy—shiftless, double-visioned, dry-brained, foolishly laughing progeny of dung beetles—until, in the end, Rock might come to see himself as just like all the rest of them.

  “But you,” said the Provisioner to Rock, as if he had just read my mind, “may be different from these other pigs. It strikes me that you may be. You haven’t come out and said so, but I assume that you want to ask for a bigger tenancy, and a more fertile one. I’m interested in you, Small Rock, and I have a proposal. Let’s wait a short while and see—see whether you really are different. Let’s wait until after your first cropping, at least, and let’s see then what we’ll say to each other.”

  A Study of All Things, One by One

  My schoolchildren at their games made our dingy courtyard echo with delight. Some of the boys kicked a shuttlecock; others played a game of nimble fingers called “catch stones”; three girls whirled in a wild dance with interlocked legs, called “linking and framing.”

  I clapped my hands. Time for recitation!

  It took a while, as for a coltish wind puff from the north to peter out, for the squeals and laughs to die down. Then I was seated behind my “desk”—a plank resting on two stacks of mud bricks—and the children were seated in rows on the ground before me. I was oppressed by a feeling of futility—where, among these eyes looking into mine, were the appetite, the urgency, the yearning I had felt so long ago under Smart’s teachings in the soot-stained smithy? Here they squatted, sullen after the interruption of their play. Old Tiger, Little Fat (who was thin), Little Stupid (scholar’s name!), Little Third, Little Root, Straight One, Little Maid (a sickly boy), and the girls, Big Phoenix, Persimmon, Little Duck, and Precious Necklace. They did not seem to want what I had in my heart and head to give them.