White Lotus

by John Hersey

  At the foot of the decree were many chops and seals, in red, blue, and black inks, impressing upon the miserable document the many jealous authorities who hovered like hawks over our lives, all down the skyline to Manager Wu.

  When I had read the document I simply turned away, leaving the headman as bereft of the forms as he had me. The gate stood open. I returned to the children, who had, in the absence of my discipline, resumed their usual harsh crow song and cricket talk.

  I took my place at my desk, and, not knowing or caring whether Manager Wu was still standing in the open gateway, I continued the recitation where it had broken off.

  Then, when it was over, I told the children that the yellows were closing our school.

  Ayah! My children were white children, indeed! Not a sign, not a sigh. No emotion whatsoever. Guarded, cautious, hooded eyes. No comment, no protest, no questions.

  My own heart was in such pain that I was starved for some show of grief from them, but they gave me, as they would give every authority, nothing, nothing.

  The girl Big Phoenix said, “Do you want us to go home now?”

  “No,” I said, “we’ll finish out this morning’s time. You may play now.”

  Out in the sunlight at the center of the courtyard, soon, the children began a game called “bow to the four directions.” They formed a circle about Little Root, who was wearing, that day, funny striped cotton trousers. The circle began to turn. Little Root slowly turned in the opposite direction, bowing, nodding, shaking hands with himself. The children whirled around, faster and faster, and their shrill laughter was no less gay than on any other day. Little Root in his striped trousers sang out, in a voice as loud and doleful as that with which he had so many times recited to me the wisdom of the masters, a queer, queer song about a wedding, the depths of which I was sure they understood no better than they fathomed my biting my quivering lip:

  “Bow! Bow! Bow to the four directions!

  You men from the four directions, give the bride two gifts:

  Two gifts and two gifts, they’ll be gaudy.

  The groom rides a fine horse, his hat is a new one.

  Change the new hat! Wear a fur hat!

  The fur one is fur, and the sky is gray.

  The sky thunders, dogs bite the thief.

  The pomegranate girl and the vegetable snake enter the bedroom.

  Hair oil, laurel string,

  Things in the bowl and things in the jug;

  The fragrance is strong.

  The girl moves one step, tap tap.

  When she moves a second step, see her silk trousers with the design of the golden duck egg on them!

  Blossoms lie in the stream and fall in the stream:

  Who knows whether you have stolen anything from the room?

  We know not, we don’t know.

  So give some money to buy air in your stomach!”

  Careless

  In the autumn weeks that followed Rock and I became—in many ways—careless. We were so discouraged, so put down by Provisioner Lung, so deeply disheartened by the indifference to their own face and interest of our fellow whites in the lower hand of the Village of Brass-Mouth Chang, and by their abject helplessness, that we slipped into being heedless, inconsiderate, rash, slovenly, imprudent, loose, listless, indiscreet—and, yes, even singularly elastic, buoyant, and lighthearted in the most bitter way. We did not actively desire our own and each other’s destructions; we simply did not mind what came along.

  Rock was unfaithful to me. I let him be and went my own way. It seemed that we had tacitly agreed to get the most we could for the senses out of each moment. The verb of our lives: to take. That was all.

  Rock did not sneak. Neither did I. The bad faith was all right out in the evening street; whoever lounged by the well could see Rock make his approach, first to Ox Yang’s unmarried daughter, who was at sixteen a laughingstock on account of her promiscuity—would trade her mouse, the women said, for a garlic bud, for a broken comb, for a pin with a paste-pearl head. Rock blatantly told me to run on home, he would be home later. I got a laugh from the bystanders by asking Bare-Stick, in a low voice which his deaf wife could not hear, to carry me home on his back—for, I said, I was tired out from running home so many nights. Bare-Stick the blusterer did not have the gall to escort me home then and there, but as soon as he had safely seen Rock drift off with Ox Yang’s daughter, he came trotting around and knocked softly (the shouter’s muffled knock!) at our gate, and in no time, instead of my being on Bare-Stick’s back, I was on my own, ayah.

  Rock aimed himself at more and more difficult marks, and I soon guessed that he was climbing up a valley of thighs to those of Manager Wu’s mix. I understood that this ultimate goal was not set because the headman’s wife was partly yellow; it was because she perched alone at the social apex, for what that was worth, of the white part of the village; because she was a powerful personality; and because she was inaccessible and so maybe exciting: Manager Wu did not air her in the street, and he barred the gate of his courtyard. (A jar of cash was said to be buried somewhere in it, but I think that was a myth, spread perhaps by himself to hone the edge of his bargaining power.) The headman’s wife was twenty years older than Rock, and if he ever got in a position to flirt with her, this fact would be his shame, or else his joke, and her temptation.

  So, having in the course of time frittered my favors on various brave hogs of the village, Rough Ma, Talkative Chang, Horse Hsing, and others (but I drew the line at Hairlip Shen), I decided to go after Manager Wu—not, I swear, as a competitor with Rock, but for my own reasons. To erase, above all, or perhaps to avenge, the chagrin of standing limp at the gate when the angry headman had unrolled that vile scroll. Avenge, by giving idle pleasure? Yes, in the sense that he would not be able to condescend to me, but would beg, beg, beg for what I could let him have or not as I chose!

  It would be easier for me to snare the headman than for Rock to gain access to his mix, and I must be careful only to see that my assignation with the husband did not prove to be the occasion for Rock’s with the wife.

  Before the next new moon the thing was done, on my side—and, if village gossip, which was always laced with malice, was to be credited, on his, too. For my part the business was all too easy and, like everything else in our lives, not worth doing. I visited Manager Wu on a pretext of requesting permission to reopen my school, and right under the half-yellow nose of his mix, dutifully pouring tea, I gave him vague signals as to possibilities.

  He followed up the very next day with an errand to our courtyard to report an invented interview he said he had had with certain parties in the upper hand. Purely imaginary “negotiations” on the reopening were now undertaken, and these required numerous conferences between the headman and myself. (Of all the miserable doings of that hollow time, this shadow-acting about my lost scholars was probably the most disgusting.) One day Rock was away and thoroughly accounted for, and Manager Wu duly begged, and when the begging had gone on long enough to have been recognized by him for what it was, the thing was accomplished with little pleasure and no remorse, so far as I knew, for either party.

  How or when Rock flew his wonderful kite for Manager Wu’s wife, I did not know, or care to know.

  All this was a product of our rope-end frustration. Rock and I knew that we had more joy of each other’s body than of anyone else’s; we were hopelessly careless. We had foul fights, which enlivened the dullest periods of all.

  Often heart-free and fiercely gay, I also wept often, trying to figure out what was happening to me and to my Rock—ai, yes! I still thought of him as mine. Besides his philandering, Rock was spending much time gaming; he gathered with others at Hairlip Shen’s to play a card game called “palm leaves” and a sort of dominoes, which, because the counters were made of horn, was called “pushing the cow.” Groundnut had told me long since that Rock was not a
true gambler, he must simply have wanted to pass the time, to lose money we did not have, and thus to ensure beyond question our utter penury.

  Every day we cursed the yellows, and most feelingly on the days after we had been unfaithful to each other—until, finally, we had persuaded ourselves that the yellows’ grip on us was not only responsible for every one of our personal failures but even excused them and demanded new and worse ones. Thus we became, on top of all else, complacent and self-pitying. This was even more demoralizing than the discouragement that, not long before, had led Rock to conclude that the white race was good for nothing. What of it? The yellows were to blame.

  Drinking the Forfeit Cup

  What a school for priests is beggary! Groundnut was already a power in eleven villages, and at a new low point in our general lowness we went to see him, on the chance, I think, that with his help we might be able to bring to bear against Provisioner Lung some form of destructive magic. In an antechamber of the temple’s main courtyard, Groundnut had devised a room for consultations, where everything was, as throughout the temple, purposely shabby, except for a single piece, the center and focus of the room: a fine wooden chair for himself, a kind of throne which he must have hired or bullied skilled white artisans to make for him, brilliant with designs of herons and pheasants against backgrounds in crimsons, yellows, and blues more lurid than even an Emperor would dare or care to use. There were, as well, grouped around this throne, a half dozen birdcages, containing siskins, canaries, and larks. Was it Groundnut’s ambition to out-lark Provisioner Lung? When Groundnut was seated in his high chair, and we before him on a low and rotten bench, the effect he gave off was of a startling grandeur of spirit. We knew him through and through; we knew his sharp ways. Yet—perhaps the utter vitiation of our own morale allowed us to be hypnotized by his spread sleeves and his dream-dimmed eyes—he now gave a powerful illusion of being wise, decent, and in a position to intervene with authorities. His birds sang his praises.

  Rock spoke in a dispirited voice. “It’s Provisioner Lung—the one who furnishes us, you know. I feel as if he has me in a box, or, let’s say better, a real pigpen. I asked him to improve my tenancy, and instead he ‘improved’ my credit. He’s like a rodent that sucks bird eggs. I’ve been trying to think of a way…”

  “When you see a bad man,” Groundnut said, “examine your own heart.”

  I couldn’t help coughing up a laugh at that. “You’ve learned your words well,” I sarcastically said to Groundnut.

  He waved a hand as if warding off the painful thought I had thrown like a dart at him. “You are unkind, White Lotus. You have always been short on self-restraint. Without due self-restraint, courtesy becomes oppressive, prudence degenerates into timidity, valor into violence, and candor into rudeness.”

  Ayah, how deeply he had embedded himself, like a frog in a mudbank to get through freezing weather, in the majesty of priesthood! He almost seemed willing to pretend that we had never known what he was really like. “No,” I said, “I am sincere. You are so convincing that you have begun to believe yourself.”

  “Be quiet, White Lotus,” Rock said. “Let me talk to the man…. Listen, this lid spies on me when I’m picking my tea leaves. He stands at my gate when I’m curing them to make sure I won’t hide a single leaf from him. He charges…”

  “Rock! You are not yourself! Where is the ‘old solid’ you have been? The higher type of man is calm and serene; the inferior man is constantly agitated and worried. Now. This Provisioner Lung. Pity him if he is bad. All men are born good; he who loses his goodness and yet lives is lucky to escape. And remember, it is at least better to be niggardly than to be arrogant.”

  Groundnut spoke with a deep and apparently heartfelt sadness, as if he were carrying on his weary shoulders all the woes of all the whites in the eleven villages.

  “Hai! It’s all very well for you to talk about pity,” Rock said. “You’re getting as fat as any idol on the offerings up here. We have to think about eating.”

  “With coarse food to eat, and little of it, with water to drink, and with the bended arm as pillow, a man can still be happy. Compare, my friend: Compare the lower hand of any village in this valley with its upper hand.”

  “Do they pay you to say that kind of thing?”

  But Groundnut could not be ruffled. He seemed truly to have imbibed the tranquility of the sages; there was something more than glibness sitting on the ornate throne before us. “Why do you have such a strong wish to overcome, to grapple? If a spirit of rivalry is anywhere unavoidable, it is at an archery contest. Yet even here the refined man courteously salutes his opponents before taking up his position, and again when, having lost, he returns to drink the forfeit cup.”

  Archery! “We assume,” I could not resist saying, “that the white man always drinks the forfeit cup. Is that so?”

  Groundnut ignored me. “Do not do anything rash,” he said to Rock. “Think before you carry your anger into action, but do not paralyze yourself with thought. Chi Wen-tzu used to reflect three times before he acted; when told of this, the Master said: Twice would do. Look for the better side of Provisioner Lung. The nobler sort of man emphasizes the good qualities in others, and does not accentuate the bad.”

  Yes, Groundnut did seem to believe his own words—or the Masters’, when, like the thief he was, he stole them and made them his own—and there was so much manifest human decency in these words that the rising anger I felt, and that I saw swelling the veins on Rock’s face, was puzzling to me. But then Rock cleared away the puzzlement, and I was simply angry. “You’re asking us, your old friends, Rock and White Lotus—you’re asking us to suck the yellow tit.”

  “The nobler sort of man,” Groundnut said with unchanged tone, “is accommodating but not obsequious; the inferior sort is obsequious but not accommodating.”

  “But we can’t accommodate I If we give in to the lids all along the way, we die!”

  “No, son. Make the best of life. Do not be blind to the good things around you. It is only when the cold season comes that most people know the pine and cypress to be evergreens. And, at any rate, having heard the True Way in the morning, what does it matter if one should come to die at night?”

  “Ayah, ayah,” Rock said, “how can you be on the yellows’ side? My old pigeon friend! Don’t you remember Bad Hog?”

  But now Groundnut had, as it were, lost touch with us. His voice began to drone. “The nobler sort of man pays special attention to nine points. He is anxious to see clearly, to hear distinctly, to be kind in his looks, respectful in his demeanor, conscientious in his speech, earnest in his affairs, careful to inquire when in doubt, alert to consequences when angry, and mindful only of his duty when offered an opportunity for gain.”

  Rock and I left the room, but not without a bow toward the priest mumbling yellow-man’s “truths.”

  Dunned

  Time runs fast when life is very good or very bad; when it is bad enough, one is constantly on the move, as is a métayer’s thin hen scratching first the seedless dust, then its own mite-infested feathers. So the end of the yellow year was on us before we knew it. We had harvested a second flush, and though we had succeeded in gathering and curing more than the first time, our outlook had become, if possible, worse than ever.

  A few days before the yellows’ New Year, Rock and I, having visited Groundnut’s temple, were walking home along a path that cut shorter than the eleven-village cart road, which veered from the temple to Seeing the Horse Village to Mud Bridge and back to Hot Pepper Village before it swung around to reach ours. It was an afternoon hour; a gray sky lay low over the valley; a dull chill was on the air. We were going through a declivity, a freakish cut in a limestone ledge, on a path that yellows must have used for centuries, since long, long before they had any whites under their knuckles—so long that there were places where cloth shoes had worn the stone smooth! Here in this cut I always h
ad a disquieting thought: How had the yellows kept up their self-esteem without the whites to tread underfoot?

  Rock and I, just at this time, were more or less at peace with each other—a weary peace of inuredness rather than understanding; we were simply tired of being upset by each other, or by anything at all. We chatted with each other in a friendly way, and there, dropping down through the stone-flanked cut, we happened to be talking about Provisioner Lung. Was he richer than he seemed to be? Could there be a paradox so cruelly funny as that furnishing and bleeding the miserable whites was, after all, unprofitable? I was in fact half laughing at this mad idea exactly when, coming around a limestone shoulder darkened with the skin oil of centuries of hands that had groped for support just there, there, and there, I came suddenly face to face with the man himself. Provisioner Lung seemed to jump out at me as from a stone-fort ambush. I stopped so short that Rock, watching his own footing, bumped into me from behind.

  At once we were at the usual disadvantage: It must be the yellow man who would set the tone of the contact. He could greet us or ignore us, stop to talk or hurry past, bring fists together and pump out a show of humility, demanding reciprocity, or keep them tucked in sleeves, demanding discreet reserve. The initiative was always the yellow man’s, his to choose the degree of intimacy or impersonality of each social moment, and he invariably kept us teetering off balance by unexpected turns in his mood. Our being in a heap, on account of our near collision, increased the disadvantage.

  This time Provisioner Lung promptly signaled two things: there would be no ceremony, there would be some talk. He did not whip off his glasses and oscillate them cheerily in his customary greeting. He barely nodded—and how was a white supposed to respond to a curt nod?