White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The Stripping

  Manager Wu and the others left. Having delivered Rock home, there was nothing more they could do; Manager Wu was not empowered to make arrests, or to judge, or to punish.

  So I was left alone with my man. I knew that I would have to try to rediscover him now—and rediscover myself, for that matter, if I could.

  I untied his pinioning, took his jacket from him, and set about washing out blood. We did not speak. Rock went out into our courtyard to do some chores, as if this New Year’s day were any other day.

  Shortly I sensed his standing behind me as I bent over the caldron, at work on his coat.

  “Where’s the hen?” he asked.

  “Stolen.”

  “Is anything else gone?”

  “Not to eat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where’s the money you had the other night?”

  “What money?”

  I stood up and faced him. His eyes were, of all things, defiant. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t remember that you had a leather bag full of copper cash after the first night of the plays?”

  “I’ve been drunk…. Why didn’t you take it away from me?”

  I turned back to the caldron. “Why don’t you sleep it off?”

  Rock did not answer. He stretched out on the platform and in ten breaths was snoring. I pulled off his shoes. He slept all the rest of that day and all that night and until well after noon the following day.

  Late in the morning, while Rock was asleep, I went to the well for water and learned that Bare-Stick was still clinging to life.

  There was a crowd loitering at the curved wall, for our villagers were taking full advantage of the yellows’ tradition that the first days of the New Year, up until the Lantern Festival, should be set aside for visiting, gambling, gossiping, and a general lay-off. Approaching the idlers, I was apprehensive. How would they treat me?

  Ai! They greeted me as on any other day. Indeed, there seemed to be a new note of something like respect in the men’s voices. I was given a full account of Bare-Stick’s condition—dips of unconsciousness, delirious mumbling, weeping, great lassitude because of loss of blood. There were hints of gratitude to Rock—perhaps for dealing Bare-Stick a reckoning that other men had not dared give him, perhaps simply for bringing some excitement into the village.

  I went home fairly skipping. Why was I so lighthearted? Was it because of relief that the whites, at least, would not punish Rock? Was it because Bare-Stick was alive and Rock had not killed a man? Was it because I realized that the crime had to do with me?

  When I reached home Rock was awake. He seemed cheerful and said he was hungry. I fixed him an enormous meal, of side meat and millet cakes and rice and white cabbage and tea. He smacked his lips, nodded at me with his mouth full, and belched in resounding appreciation of the feast. It appeared that without the intervention of words something had been settled between him and me.

  He received the news of Bare-Stick without comment and without visible emotion.

  “I had nothing against him,” Rock said.

  I laughed, and Rock asked me what struck me as so funny. “You have nothing against him,” I said. “That’s an odd thing to say about a man you nearly killed. He may die yet.”

  “Don’t try to make me say I’m sorry,” Rock warned me.

  A few minutes later Rock said, “You tell me there’s a crowd up at the well? Let’s go up. I’d like to get in a game of ‘palm leaves.’ I feel restless.”

  And so we went, and the impression I had gained was amply borne out, that Rock was not going to be blamed by our lower-handers, and might even be regarded as some kind of new petty white mandarin.

  He was soon squatted on his haunches in a card game near the public grindstone, and I heard bouts of laughter from the men who were playing and from the men who were giving the players unwanted advice.

  Manager Wu’s wife, who seldom stirred from the headman’s courtyard, appeared that afternoon at the well, and, apparently stimulated like everyone else by the news of the stabbing, she spoke in a most friendly way to me. I suppose each of us had heard from the village magpies that the other had seduced, or been seduced by, her husband; this was now an absurd bond between us. I think we knew that such games would not be played again on either side. I had a wild thought that one day Rock might succeed Manager Wu as the head of the village. What a pleasant afternoon!

  Late in the day one of my little scholars, Straight One, came running like a blown leaf to the well, straight to me; he was panting, and his eyes were pools of that particular gray liquid that filled white children’s eyes whenever they felt they should not commit themselves in any way.

  “There’s a cart,” he blurted between gulps of air, “three slanties, teacher—three yellows with a cart at your gate—big oxcart, double-yoker—they’re taking out your things—loading the cart—”

  “Provisioner Lung?”

  Straight One nodded.

  I ran to the card-players and told Rock, and we dashed home. We arrived just in time to see a large cart drawn by a pair of oxen pulling out onto Eleven Villages Road. The vehicle was top-heavily loaded, and we could see that our own donkey cart was on it, upside down, and our short-legged donkey was tethered to the tailpiece and was trotting double-time to keep up with the stolid ox pace; and we could see our chests, our pots, our tools, our bed mats and quilts; and we noticed a huge earthenware jar with a lid, so big a man could stand in it; and we saw baskets brimming with the poor turnips from our root pit, and with the stalks and stubble we had garnered for fuel. Everything, everything. Rock, who knew futility as well as any man, did not run after the cart. This was his punishment; he knew it, and I knew it. We turned inside our courtyard. It was stripped. Every removable object was gone. Every grain of rice was gone. Our chopsticks were gone. Our spare shoes, so dearly bought, were gone. And in truth—ayah, that great earthen jar!—our compost heap was gone, for Provisioner Lung, stripping us barer that bare, had taken away even Rock’s precious excrement, and mine.

  Double Man

  Having slept unquilted on the dusty earth of our bed platform, we started out next morning to consult with Groundnut, to try to make a plan for our future, and, if it must be known, to beg a present meal from him.

  Rock voiced the possibility that Groundnut would take us in at the temple—to housekeep for him, sweep the brick floors, clear away incense ash, dust the idols.

  “No,” I said, “he has become too important to let anyone take care of him. He’s a great official of the valley now. He can’t have anyone encroaching on his place. Besides, he wants the temple dirty. Especially the idols. You know that.”

  Strange! Emerging from the limestone cleft where Provisioner Lung had accosted us, and coming out onto a high point of Eleven Villages Road, we could see, ahead, that a crowd was already gathered at the temple gate. There must be some new sensation in the valley to have convened our parliament of gossips so early in the day. We lengthened our pace.

  Yes, as soon as we arrived at the edge of the circle a group formed around us and pelted us with a score of questions about the stripping. We were a bit pleased, having the impression that we were the cause of the convocation.

  It was some time before the hubbub died down enough for us to learn what really was new: a sensation, indeed, for us.

  Ours was not the only compound that had been scraped clean.

  Provisioner Lung and his assistants had had a busy day, for they had despoiled at least a dozen homes scattered through several villages. There had been strippings before—Simple Hsi, our predecessor in our tenancy, had not only been stripped; his house had been leveled to the ground. But never had there been a dozen in a day!

  So this had not been a punishment of Rock’s crime at all! At least, it had not been the yellows’ requital for Rock’s use of his knife, and if it h
ad been a chastisement, it had been, rather, for the crime of failing to pay debts.

  Then I realized—and the recognition gave me anger rather than relief, demoralizing anger, degrading anger—that the yellows had no interest in the hurts that whites gave whites.

  Later we learned, indeed, that the white victim might be a “criminal” just as much as the white assailant. Bare-Stick’s place was one of those that had been denuded. The big, noisy man had, it seemed, grown careless, or improvident, or both, and he had fallen behind in his percentages. Provisioner Lung’s men had lifted Bare-Stick up off his platform and pulled the mats right out from under him. It was said that Bare-Stick was nearer death than ever—unconscious most of the time.

  We heard a report that Provisioner Lung had taken away even the hot poultices of bran and ground pulse that Bare-Stick’s wife had put on his wounds.

  Ox Yang was standing by when this detail was served, and he clapped Rock on the shoulder and cheerily said, “Then if Bare-Stick dies, it will have been Provisioner Lung that killed him, not you, old turtle-suck!”

  Ayah, we could, in the end, blame the yellows for everything, everything.

  We went inside, and Groundnut, who had already heard of our misfortunes, took us to his throne room and asked us to tell him the whole story. I say throne room, but the elaborate chair was gone—in its place a simple bench. Groundnut seemed distracted, and he was markedly more gentle than the last time we had come to see him.

  Giving an account of the stabbing, Rock said, “You told me, you rabbit of a priest, to think before I acted. Don’t you see that that was my trouble? I’d been thinking, thinking, thinking, day and night, and I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “But why Bare-Stick, son? Why not the yellow man?”—surprisingly honest query from Groundnut.

  I expected, perhaps I half hoped, to hear Rock say: Because Bare-Stick had taken to fumbling at the mound of my wife’s privacy.

  But Rock said, “I don’t know. I haven’t anything against Bare-Stick. But I think it was this: I think I saw that I was turning into him. I was becoming exactly him. That may be why I wanted to get rid of him. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

  “There is no good reason for hurting any living creature,” Groundnut said; this was not quite the old voice that was unconnected with any reality whatsoever.

  I had been right: no mention of our moving into the temple grounds, even on a temporary basis.

  Now when the question of eating came up, Groundnut did provide for us, but not without a deal of unpleasantness. It seems that a beggar, being begged of, cannot resist mimicking all the rebuffs he has suffered over the years. The pupils of his eyes become little pinholes out of which distaste squirts, his hands flutter high about his neck to avoid poverty’s contamination, his face is like an abacus ticking off the calculation: How little can I give and yet discharge my responsibility for the inequities of human life?

  Still, I was curious about Groundnut’s manner through all this habit-ingrained chariness: he kept glancing over his shoulder, as if expecting someone in his quarters, and twice he excused himself, hurried from the room, and came back looking preoccupied.

  Rock surprised me—for I had thought him wholly absorbed by our own fix—by saying, “What’s gnawing your liver, Groundnut? You’re in a condition.”

  Down came Groundnut from his loftiness with something like a rush of pigeon wings, and in a confidential voice he said, “Another priest has moved in with me. To stay.”

  Rock guffawed. “You’ll be paying squeeze to a priests’ league soon—you’ll find that the yellows squat on all the temples!”

  With a perplexing sincerity Groundnut said, “This man’s an old good. I want him to stay.”

  “You mean he’ll draw business.”

  Groundnut blushed. “I want you to talk to him about your trouble.”

  He trotted out, and soon he was back with another man. “This is Runner.” And to the other: “I’ve told you about Rock.”

  Runner was older than the rest of us, perhaps in his late thirties. He wore dirty red robes like Groundnut’s, his head was shaved, his face glowed with a health of frugality and kindness; one could see at once that he was kind, that he had an inner strength, an armature of experiential iron supporting this outer warmth and giving it a firmness that was not sickly or false at all. I saw in a first glance why even Groundnut was impressed by him.

  Rock was diffident, perhaps suspicious at first of the very things I had seen in the priest’s face, so Groundnut told him parts of our story, and his response seemed to me electric. His questions were all about Provisioner Lung. I felt that his mind was leaping ahead. I wanted to linger and talk with him, but Rock grew irritable, said we had to leave.

  So, with appeased stomachs and heads quite empty of prospects for the next meal, we went back out to the crowd in the road.

  But we did not leave; indeed, where for? I stood by Rock. The whites by now had chewed and swallowed all the bitter details of the strippings; there was a kind of communal satiety, a dullness. Rock, the stabber, provided a new center of interest, and people gathered around him. O my tiger! He held his head high, and I thought he was talking too loud. Double man! What he uttered as modest disclaimer emerged as inside-out boast. His guilt was his release from guilt; his crime had been a positive act. I remembered our original two-sided impulse to come and live in the Humility Belt—to be absorbed into the mass of whites, but also to help raise the level of the poorest whites. Here was my Rock, caught in that ambiguity: triumphant, at one with the ignorant crowd, admired, probably disliked because he was admired; and yet also aware of his helplessness before the yellow power, pessimistic, bitter, suppressing his feelings until they drove his sharpened tongue to bragging, or his sharpened knife into the wrong body. Double vision; double values. Torn, he veered from shrewd calculation to animal impulse, from forms and proprieties to cheating and plotting, from kowtowing to sneering, from sacrificing at chipped idols to spitting in the priest’s footsteps, and from honoring his wife to philandering in beds of ashes. How I loved him at that very moment of seeing through him! White man! Ayah! Was Rock to be a mere firecracker? How scornfully he put down Ox Yang and Hairlip Shen, his fellow villagers!

  Now came one of those nightmare repetitions of life under the yellows, a refrain of unpleasantness; one of those events that could no longer evoke protests because it evoked only the cry, “This has happened to us before!”

  Three scourges of The Hall rode up. One of them asked in a mask-damped roar why we were congregated so. Those who had been put down looked to Rock. I saw his bare-stick eyes. At last he said, “Worshipping, Venerable.”

  The familiar exchanges, then Rock being ridden down, then a command for him to hoist his hooves for home.

  But Rock said, “I have no home.”

  The mounted man nearest him gave off a muffled explosion behind his mask—a warning against being clever.

  “But it’s true,” Rock said. “The yellow man who furnished me took everything away yesterday. He’s driving me off my tenancy.”

  One could see the quandary of the man on horseback, feel the pause of moral hesitancy. Then he said, “Aren’t your villagers going to take care of you?”

  “No, Venerable.”

  Then one of the other riders edged forward and impatiently said, “Is your house still standing?”

  “It stands empty.”

  “Then that’s where you belong for now. Move along, hog.”

  I saw a look of despair and fear on Rock’s face, and I understood it—not fear of the yellow men hiding behind papier-mâché masks, but fear of what he was degenerating into: the village braggart, the bully, the stabber, the one who would always be singled out to canter home with yellow men at his heels.

  Under the Steerage Chains

  When I walked into our gutted house, Rock, sitting on the b
arren earth bed, looked up and said at once, “We have to get away from here. This place is no good. There is no way here. I have to get out of this valley right now. If Bare-Stick dies I’ll have to take his place in the village, and I am not really like that. Do you understand that? Sometimes you get into a kind of pen, or trap, and the confinement takes ahold of you and turns you into a stranger, even to yourself. Do you understand that?”

  “Ai, I do, Rock. I know you. You aren’t Bare-Stick.”

  Rock suggested that we go to the coast, to the great modern city, Shanghai, Up-from-the-Sea, about which we had heard encouraging rumors. It was said that whites could make some kind of life there.

  “But how will we get there? How will we live?”

  Rock did not answer me but went to the wall of the house, near the stove, to a place at the height of his mid-shin, and scraping with a fingernail he cut through some thinly plastered mud until, in a few moments, he had exposed a loosened section of mud brick. He drew this out and reached into the hollow space behind it and pulled out the leather purse full of cash that, drunk, he had showed me the first night of the theatricals.

  “You think your own wife would steal from you, don’t you?”

  “She might,” Rock said. “To get away from me.” But Rock was grinning.

  We left straightaway, without even telling Groundnut. We walked, lying in fields overnight, to Long Sands, where we embarked on a lake boat, a steam paddle-wheeler, that carried us out to the Great River. At Mouth-of-the-Han we took passage on a cargo steamer downriver, and our quarters, we learned, were ones set aside for whites: the rearmost section of the afterhold, an area unspeakably filthy with coal dust and grimy rags, cluttered with ship’s gear and with the baskets of the white beggar-vendors of the river, who were called “musk shrews”—after ratlike water animals that were notorious for their rotten odor. The great steerage chains clanked and rattled over our heads day and night, the propeller thumped directly beneath us. No fresh air could penetrate our miserable den. Some twenty whites, most, like ourselves, quite without baggage, sprawled on the rusty metal decks. As we traveled, well-dressed young yellow men came into the compartment ostensibly to drink and to gamble but really to try to find a way under the gown of a likely-looking white girl. I received some exploratory attention along these lines, but opportunely, from time to time, my powerful Rock would loom up out of the shadows and speak to me, and how the little yellow spaniel heat-sniffers would scatter! I found myself thinking sometimes about Runner, the priest—the first pair of eyes I had seen in a white face for almost ever that had nothing to hide; eyes of a giver without limit. In eight days we reached our destination.