White Lotus

by John Hersey

  BOOK EIGHT

  The Enclave

  The Envious Shroff

  CITY OF WONDER! City of modern times! For three sunny winter days we lived on the coppers in Rock’s leather pouch, at ease, walking about. This great port of ocean commerce seated on a curving riverbank, Up-from-the-Sea, was a far cry from the Northern Capital. In the prosperous part of the port, called the Model Settlement, were buildings that loomed up from the ground two and three storeys high and even, in the cases of some of the vast white-walled mercantile hongs along the Bund, laminated skyward five and six floors! Enormous crimson or black characters, names and claims, on hanging signs. Globular electric lamps on brackets out from shop fronts, sparkling polyhedral lamps with tassels of crimson cord hanging down. Tea shops, their upper faces adorned with storytelling woodwork, carved, lacquered, and gilded. Shops of healers of sick rich men, stocked with ginseng, angelica, licorice, and powdered deer antler. Pawnshops—hope for thieves! Caverns of grass cloth, silk, satin, brocade, and embroideries whose intricacies whispered in sybaritic tones of the ruined eyes of a generation of white needlewomen.

  And the traffic, the crowds bustling for profit! Two-wheeled conveyances drawn by white men: rickshas, everywhere. And on the thoroughfares named for provinces and for other cities, several of the smoke-breathing, glistening motorcars of which we country tenants had heard but distant superstitious rumors. And thousands on thousands afoot, whites mingling without fear with yellows.

  By night we crawled into a woebegone unheated flophouse for migrants (one copper per night per chill-racked body) in the huge white area of the metropolis. This district, called the Enclave, was the ancient walled city, a circular urban sore, once historic and all yellow, then gradually encroached upon by, and finally totally abandoned to, the myriad white migrants who had streamed into the city of freedom and hope. The old area’s physical walls were down, but it was, if anything, more sequestered than when it had been girdled by stone: the color line was drawn around it. It teemed. Coming from the sparse lower hand of a deep-country village, Rock and I were strangely elated by this crowding of the whites—for we knew that, much as the yellows used and needed us, they really wanted us to vanish from their sight; they would have liked to have us altogether eliminated—by some respectable and possibly miraculous means, of course—and so we perversely delighted in our very numbers, which were getting beyond any possibility of liquidation. Besides, these whites who jostled us in the narrow hutungs of the Enclave seemed to us, after the country-village cross section, to be clear-eyed, energetic, bright—the cream of our kind. And indeed these were the best: these were the restless ones from downcountry, who had developed an itch for vertical mobility, those who had managed to educate or somehow sharpen themselves and run away. And here were half a thousand thousands of them, jammed with us into the Enclave.

  In those first days we felt free. Change is itself an illusion of freedom, but we felt more than mere escape, mere motion. Despite our having to return to the stable at evening, so to speak, we roamed at large all day, filling our eyes, as if they were our purses, with the city’s riches, and no one stopped us to identify ourselves, no one gave us patronizing looks that demanded bows or stepping aside.

  Rock and I had each other, too, in a sense that had never obtained before. We were coupled in a new state of mind. Rock’s outburst in those awful days in the village had cleansed him. Not that all of his frustration with life, by any means, was discharged; after all, he still did not know whether he had killed a man—a white man, at that. But Rock was freer than he had ever been, in the inner sense; he noticed things he had never seen before, delights both to the eye and to the mind, and it was he who kept insisting that some new sort of firmness was visible among the whites in this free city. It struck me, even then, that this new quality, whatever exactly it was, may have been his to see because it was in him rather than in them.

  On the afternoon of the third day of our aimless luxuriating in the city, we were standing in the street in our rude quilted country clothes—all we had left from the bounty of Provisioner Lung—staring into a treasure cave of an open-fronted shop on West-of-the-Mountains Road, where were sold headdresses, tea-root figures, combs and fans and pearly pins, ear guards, purses dripping with silk fringe, painted umbrellas and embroidered shoes, and many other toys of vanity, and we noticed that there was one white employee: the shroff. Very few whites worked in the Model Settlement; we had seen a handful of shroffs. This one sat within a little cage, and at each transaction, after the yellow cashier had ticked up the sum of the purchase on an abacus, and after the yellow clerk had accepted some well-dressed yellow woman’s money, the coins were slid along a board into the cage, and there, with a juggler’s flowing fingers, the white shroff tested the coins. He would balance them one by one on the middle finger of his left hand, and with a sound coin riding free on a fingertip of his right hand he would strike the two together, an ear bent down to the sweet silver chime or copper plink they made, and then he would feather-lightly place the coin in a certain slot in an intricate little scale, and then he would lift it waferlike to his mouth and click his teeth to either side of it—all with such lightning speed as to make the whole trial seem only one floating wary gesture, as of caressing a cat. Virtuosic performance! And how often (there must have been many a patient cheat in this free world) he rejected a coin!—shaved, debased, flawed, tapped, leaded, clipped…. We had stood gaping at the man’s swallow-wing dexterity for some time before I began to be vaguely uneasy in watching him.

  Then my heart was hammering, and I gripped Rock’s arm. The shroff was Top Man—the slaveherd from the Yen family farm. He was wearing a black skullcap and a gray silk gown, and, what with his yellow-shop-clerk dress and his astonishing skill, he had a suave and cosmopolitan appearance, which the slaveherd had certainly never worn. But no mistake: Top Man.

  I hurried Rock down the street away from the shop and told him who the shroff was.

  Now Rock and I had often discussed former times that we had not shared, and he knew very well my assessment of Top Man—a yellow man’s white man; how hard the slaveherd had tried to please Overseer Li and the young master and the Matriarch, yet how pathetically in the last days of our planning he had tried to enlist with Peace. Shame-faced bearing. Big-chested false show of authority. Guilty instrument of punishment. Craven before the yellows. Ayah, how I had despised him! And yet…

  Yet how thrilled I was to have seen him now! And Rock, too, was excited. I am sure that our sudden feelings of cordiality toward Top Man were as alloyed as some of the coins that he, with no sign of emotion, had slid back along the board from his money cage: we must have realized at once that he might be useful to us. But there was, as well, for me, a genuine joy in having seen Top Man again. Perhaps it had to do with a stirring up of the past, which, though miserable enough, had attained a fierce value merely from being gone. Perhaps it had to do with the exaggerated, automatic closeness a white person felt with any other white whom he had ever known; we were all fellow members of a league of underdogs.

  Rock and I decided at once that we dared not go into the genteel yellow store in our filthy peasant clothes and make ourselves known to the shroff; free as this city was supposed to be, such a trespass might be a misdemeanor, and it would at best cause Top Man to eat loss, at worst to forfeit his valuable job. We agreed that we would wait outside the store, perhaps a little down the street from it, until its closing time, and waylay Top Man when he came out to go home—for his home was sure to be in the Enclave.

  Dusk fell while we waited, and the hanging shop lamps along the street came on, picking out rills of gilt and glints of red lacquer along the store fronts; we could see our breath fogging as the night’s sea-damp seeped along the streets—and through our sleazy quilts.

  At last the heavy plates of barrier planks were carried out and were upended and were locked in place, and, as we moved closer in the shadows, we saw at �
��our” store a metal net rolled down over the planking as a redoubled precaution against burglars. It was quite dark. Figures began to emerge from a gate at one side of the building, and I was suddenly afraid I would be unable to recognize Top Man. I lunged forward toward this and that striding form, and recoiled again and again at glimpses of yellow cheeks in a pale lamplight.

  Then there he was. That slaveherd pace, that same over-assurance of the unsure. He had changed from the gray silk gown—perhaps it belonged to the store—and seemed to be in a long quilted winter gown probably of cotton; it had no sheen under the shop lamps.

  This time I tugged at Rock’s sleeve and set out in certainty. Following at a distance far enough to be well away from the store, I then trotted a few paces, and in a soft voice said, “Top Man!”

  Our quarry whirled. A lamp was shining full in his face, and the source of light must have been behind Rock and me, so that Top Man could only see our outlines; I had chosen a poor place to accost him. His face was congealed in its old familiar look—noncommittal caution. Were these beggars? A woman with a strong-looking male accomplice—knockdown cutpurses? How had the woman known the name?

  I quickly said, “I am White Lotus. From Yen’s farm. Do you remember me? Do you remember ‘the woman of Sorek’?”

  I have to say that Top Man’s reaction was immediate, spontaneous, and quite without stint. He stepped forward to me, clasped my shoulders in his hands, and greeted me with—it is true, for I saw the icelike flashes of reflection of the lamp in the overflow—tears in his eyes. I introduced Rock, and at once Top Man said we must come along and have a cup of tea with him. Not a meal, a cup of tea; but the invitation was hoarsely issued, with a push of sincerity.

  We walked along toward the Enclave. “Oh, yes,” Top Man said, as we spoke of the new sense of ease we had felt in Up-from-the-Sea, “I can move about as I wish, I don’t have to stroke the lids at all. You saw the job I have—clean work. I can speak out, and I can speak on my own side. There’s money here and there are ways to use it on yourself.”

  And he told us that this was a city in flux, with open gates, a city of kite-flying and “the pipe” and sports according to choice. Top Man’s speech was peppered with a terse argot, apparently of the Enclave, yet he had also developed a certain pomposity, a largeness of tone, to which Rock, I could sense, did not respond well.

  Now a minor surprise and shock: Top Man took us, for the tea he had offered, not to his home, but to a seedy, crowded teahouse on a narrow street. Had he, under some lamp, taken a close look at our tenant rags and suddenly become ashamed of us, of me? Did he want to avoid a continued relationship? He treated us, all the same, with something like warmth, though there now seemed to me some stiffness and caution in his cordiality.

  Then I saw his caution, as well as his kindness, as a sort of insurance—against exulting over my bad lot compared with his easy one; there came into my mind, from a past so dim as to seem a dream, an Arizona proverb: “The reason the sheep has a split lip is that he laughed too hard when the goat fell down.” Top Man would be careful not to laugh at me, though he surely must have remembered, with thanks for the irony, his abject humiliation before the moral superiority of such as I on the day before Peace’s doomed rebellion. Now we were another way around.

  The Yen place? Broken up, after the war. The Matriarch had died of a ruptured purse, the young master had fallen in love with a rich boy from the Northern Capital and had wandered off. The place—the area—all gone to seed.

  The girl Harlot, from the Yen farm, said Top Man, was somewhere here in Up-from-the-Sea. He had seen her. Yes, she was doing rather well. This was a good city for a mixie woman.

  He talked to us about the Enclave. It had the Model Settlement on one side, where whites could wander freely enough, but better not go off in the other direction, where lay a swarming nest of poor yellows, known to the whites as Fukien rubbish, vicious, spiteful, and dangerous people. The only other place where whites could live, besides the Enclave, was a satellite enclave of foul huts in the southwestern section of the city, inhabited mostly by the white scum who pulled rickshas.

  “White scum”? This sounded strange on Top Man’s white lips.

  If there were poor yellows in Up-from-the-Sea, why couldn’t whites find new places to live? Why couldn’t they break out from the Enclave? Couldn’t they rent space outside?

  Key money. The device of key money stopped them, Top Man said. To consummate the agreement for a rental, a tenant anywhere in the city was obliged to “hire the key” by putting up a sum of money. Whenever a white tried to rent property outside the Enclave, no matter how mean the hovel, a sudden mountain of key money would be required.

  Ayah, the Enclave was the city’s night-soil heap, where the yellows dumped their poorest merchandise, their vices, lusts, and perversions, and their third-rate yellow city officials—their tenth-rate policemen.

  As Top Man started to pour out his resentments and complaints, his grand manner began to decompose before our eyes, the patrician affectations that we had seen degenerated into envious whining, the tight control of his exquisite shroffing gestures gave way to nervous motions of chopping, punching, and stabbing with long-nailed forefingers. And I thought: Ai, he hasn’t changed. He has tried to train himself, but he’s the same man.

  “You want to know why we’re embedded in this cesspot of an Enclave? It’s not key money. It’s our own out-fronters—our priests, our chinkties, our hong men, our little stuck-up white mandarins. They want to keep us right where we are—right in their sleeves. Do you remember big Duke, the Matriarch’s Number One Boy? Ai, yes, he’s here, too. They’re all here. Duke—ayah, that tiger thinks he’s the next thing to a lid himself. Hooo! What a chinkty he is! He? Duke? He’s some kind of comprador for the Forgetfulness Hong—that hong runs everything in the Enclave: the lottery, the pipe dens, the provisions shops, the mousehouses. Every tiger in Ivory City who’s on the pipe has to pay squeeze to some miserable Forgetfulness Hong runner. The hong owns all the street vixens, and it runs all the gambling holes. It has every man in Ivory City right by the eggs. Duke stands around—you should see him!—in a black satin gown; he’s grown fingernails like long drips of snot. Hai! Parasite! But listen, White Lotus. If you think he’s bad, have you heard about Old Arm? He’s the big race man, the boar of boars. He’s going to right all the wrongs, lead us out of Ivory City, put us all on even terms with the lids. He feeds us on promises—how he’ll humiliate the lids. He’s rich—and how do you think he got all the rice? He pretends to be for the race but he has sold out like all the rest of them, and what makes you despise him is that he didn’t get rich from selling out; he got rich off his own white people and then sold out to the lids for a stingy potful of pork chitterlings. He’s puffed up just like Duke, only worse. I tell you, White Lotus. The mourners in this city have nobody but their own turtle-screwing out-fronters to blame….”

  On and on he went, spewing out envy and spite. After a time he suddenly jumped up, paid a waiter for the tea, and left, and only then did Rock and I, who still sat on at our tiny table, realize that Top Man had talked so long and so fast that we had not been able to ask him any questions that mattered—about how to live.

  The waiter came to us and curtly said he needed the table because there were customers in the outer room waiting to come inside.

  As we were making our way across the room to the door I heard a tinkling, feminine splash of laughter that was so familiar that I snapped my head about to see from whom it had come.

  There sat Moth, from Dirty Hua’s, with two men’s arms around her.

  The Puzzle Box

  As in the old days, Moth had a little porcelain pitcher in her heart, full of emotion: she poured it out, put it back, and—hai! i-ko lang-tang!—it was instantly full again, like the slopped-out bowls in an itinerant white magician’s water-bowl trick. She sat us down in her company and bathed Rock with mod
est-lascivious looks. Her two “tigers,” as she called them, were of an unemployed type we had seen standing around in knots in the alleys of the Enclave. One was named Old Boxer. He wore, as “tigers” were somehow able to do, a new and well-made quilted jacket with exaggeratedly long sleeves, and his gesture of shooting his hands out, ruffling the sleeves up around his elbows, holding a fist up and shaking back the cloth around his wrists—all was done with such a cheeky look on the face, such cool loose-jointedness, such a straight bearing of the back, that I had the impression that indifference, nihilism, selfishness, and contempt for all striving had achieved almost perfect expression in him. The other, named Ox Balls, was a sparse, thin, short, sniveling, sneaky-eyed fellow, who looked like a pure opportunist with a sharp nose for meat, a bedbug of a man; he kept his hands clasped within the long sleeves and appeared to be cold through and through. Besides these two, Rock, who was by no means a tenderfoot, looked stolid, prosperous, and even complacent—whereas only a few minutes ago, seated by Top Man, he had seemed haggard and all played out.