White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I asked Moth, “How is your little boy?”

  “Fo-o-o”—she made a kind of spitting sound. “Dead. Bad lungs.” And for as long as it would have taken to wink she gave me a look so bleak that I was reminded of the numbness—“the white deadhead,” the salt inspector had called it—which I had felt in those awful days at Dirty Hua’s; but her recovery was disconcertingly swift, and her eyes sparkled again with a thoughtless frivolity.

  I asked her then, “How do you live?”

  “On the chits, sweet, the lottery chits. And on my tiger friends.” She patted a pillar of support on either side of her. “Listen, sweet, for a girl there are only two things the lids will let her do—she can work as a silk-reeler, but that’s too hard, ruins your eyes, boils your fingertips all day, f-f-f-f! Or else they don’t mind if you want to sell your mouse. But I always say”—and Moth gave out a trill of her marvelous laughter, a dumpling sound, a filling of peppery disenchantment wrapped in a steaming dough of innocence—“I always say, Why sell something it’s so nice to give away?”

  “Do you mean they won’t let a white woman work at anything else but reeling?”

  “Reeling or whoring,” Old Boxer said. “Either way they make a wonk of you, dear. I mean either way they screw you till you’re nothing but a wornout old wonk.”

  So this was the great cheat that lay hidden like a fruit worm in the “free” city! Of course there had to be one. Rock asked what about men, and little Ox Balls said, with a sneer, that a man had a big choice, he had three kinds of work to choose from—“Tit-Suck, Haul-Ass Number One, and Haul-Ass Number Two”—which, when translated by Moth, turned out to mean house servant, wharf coolie, and ricksha boy. A man could get a permit to be one of those. That was all.

  But what about Top Man? We told about his work as a shroff, and that he seemed well off, and the answer was that there were a hundred men like him in half a thousand thousands in the Enclave—a very few who had picked up a specialized and needed skill, such as shroffing, that the yellows for some reason seemed unable to perform, or perhaps had not the patience to learn.

  There was, to be sure, a certain amount of “clean work” within the Enclave, but according to Old Boxer you had to either pay squeeze to the Forgetfulness Hong or (he pointed to a teahouse waiter, who looked pale and harassed) “swallow your own puke”—by which he meant, it seemed, hide your shame at the double debasement of being white and working for whites. O-mi-t’o-fu! How we had become infected with the yellows’ attitudes!

  I was so angry, so let down, that I could not help asking—the question came out in a low, trembling voice—why so many whites living here couldn’t do something about the work situation.

  “Ha!” It was Ox Balls, rodent when laughter pulled back his lips. “Ha-ha-ha! Listen to the little lady boar.”

  Then Moth said to me (and her voice was low and vibrant, too, but not, I thought, with feeling about what we were discussing so much as with simple loyalty to me in the face of her tiger’s ridicule) that Old Arm—had we heard about Old Arm?—he was, she said, the closest thing to a race hero in the Enclave—Old Arm was said to be planning a huge Give-Us-a-Rice-Bowl campaign in the late spring. Some said it could only lead to a bloody riot—and at this Old Boxer and Ox Balls began to make gargoyle faces, pantomiming delightful violence, drawing sword fingers across their throats, poking lance fingers toward each other’s eyes, looking cross-eyes, gurgling, gritting their tobacco-stained teeth; until Moth, giggling, slapped at them both.

  With a prickly stiffness Rock asked, “What do you turtles live on?”

  The reproach for their clowning that seemed implicit in Rock’s tone only fed the prankish nihilism of the two tigers, and they began to give each other heavy, significant glances, shooting up their eyebrows, looking ludicrously earnest, mocking all soundness of mind.

  I knew that Rock did not like to be laughed at. He sat up straighter and pulled back the slingshot of his voice and fired out, “What do you live on?”

  Old Boxer looked straight in Rock’s eyes and said with unforeseen honesty, “We live on the edge, brother.”

  Rock was suddenly satisfied; he seemed to understand exactly what the man meant. And the tigers made no more fun of him.

  I could see that this excited Moth. “I have a feeling,” she said. “I have a feeling here”—she pointed to her stomach—“that I’m going to hit the chits today. I have a sweet number. I’m on a chit-clue book—it’s the one called Water Spirit’s Sister Flies to the Moon. It has a code, you see, that gives you outer numbers and inner numbers for each day’s lottery, and I really believe I read the code in the proper way this morning. I won last week, but it was only a first-outer-number win, a four-for-one….”

  She babbled on, her eyes darting now and then to Rock, and afterwards, each time, to me.

  I wanted to ask about silk-reeling; I wanted to be alone with Rock and to talk with him; I wanted to shout my disappointment and anger at this “free” city.

  Moth asked me, with an indifference too thick to be anything but studied, “Where are you living?”

  I told her about the flophouse.

  She bounced up on her chair then and said with a young girl’s fresh enthusiasm that there was a room free in the “puzzle box” where she and the two tigers were living; a woman had stabbed her man with a wharf-coolie hook just the night before, and he was dead, and she had disappeared, and Rock and I should move in right away. Boxer and Ox Balls thought this a splendid suggestion and they began pounding Rock on the arms, urging him to agree. Rock began to laugh, and this made Moth giggle like an unstoppable wren.

  So off we went, through a series of alleys that grew, one after the other, narrower and dirtier and more crooked and more crowded with children running in packs, until we came to a certain gateway, exactly like every other one of the ten gateways on the dead-end alleyway on which it faced, and one of the tigers drew a large brass key on a filthy string out from the inside of his trousers and pushed it through a hole in the thick gate leaf, and let us in.

  “Puzzle box”! Rock and I saw soon enough what that term meant. We crossed a narrow courtyard, its winter-dirt packed and dusty, a country-style open privy with shoulder-high walls odoriferous in one corner, and we entered the shallow front room of the lower of the house’s two storeys. Here lived the tenant agent for the house, and his family of wife and five children. Why was the room shallow? Because the landlord had erected a partition, making what seemed to be a second narrow room at the back; but when, having passed diagonally across the tenant agent’s room and gone through a doorway to some steep stairs, we ascended past this cut-off space, we found that the rear space, in turn, had been cross-partitioned both ways, horizontally and vertically, making four windowless compartments in back, in each of which a household of some sort was established. None of the sections was high enough for a well-made man to stand straight in. The second storey was compartmented, too, by dividers, into eight of these miserable cubbies, and the former kitchen, at the back downstairs, Moth told us, had been turned into a joint home for two families, and the loft over the kitchen was yet another crowded room. Fourteen assorted groups; the landlord had distributed six charcoal braziers for cooking—sources of incessant bickering. One privy; a lean-to room off the kitchen with a huge hooped wooden knee-tub for anyone who dared wash himself in such cold weather.

  Yes, the partitioned house was much like one of the clever little puzzle boxes, made of sandlewood, with sliding sections and false backs and a carved ivory ball to be moved about within, which one could buy from any toy vendor for five copper cash.

  The stabbed man’s body had been removed and had been put in the street to be taken away by a benevolent burial society. The tenant agent had put down a new piece of reed matting to cover the dried blood. We agreed to take the dark hole, and Moth and I, capturing a brazier, set it up on a stair landing to prepare a supper for our me
n.

  And who were our nearest house mates? A woman whose husband, named Blinker, had lately been jailed for breaking into a store at night; a former cook in a yellow sports club who had been fired for stealing face cloths and was now a bowl-washer in a drab Enclave restaurant, living with a silk-reeler; a “she-ram,” who was, Moth said, trying to get her hands under every girl’s gown in the house, and was causing a deal of hysteria among both males and females in the puzzle box; a pair of teen-age tigers, “with sleeves down to their knees,” whose section was a meeting place for an astonishing number of young boys and girls, sweepers, apprentice thieves, semi-prostitutes, peddlers of stolen goods—unripe and gangling adolescents—who pooled their little money, cooked up pots of pork culls, and spent afternoons smoking dross-of-dross, drinking yellow wine, and making love in groups; and sundry decent wharfmen, purse-snatchers, families trying to live clean on reelers’ wages, an Enclave street-waterer, three menservants living together—a collection of the poor, the unstable, the striving, candidates all for arrest on “suspicion.”

  Our white cabbage, quickly cooked in sizzling peanut oil, was delicious, even if it had to be eaten to the sounds of a screeching argument between two women in upstairs-lower-left-front.

  A Brief Career

  Rock said, “The first thing I will not do is to become a donkey and pull a ricksha. The second thing I will not do is to become a dog and work as a houseboy. That leaves only one kind of work to do.”

  He went off to the wharves one morning, and he did not come back for three days, so I began to think he had tired of me and had skipped away to some city vixen.

  Late the third evening, however, Rock returned to our puzzle box with a rope shoulder sling, a nasty-looking hook, seven coppers, and a good temper.

  For two days and nights, he said, he had moved slowly up what we called the Greater Queue—a line nearly two miles long, from the Garden Bridge well out into the district called Yangtszepoo, of men waiting for work. There were two tens of thousands of wharf coolies in Up-from-the-Sea, he had learned, and thirty tens of thousands of unemployed men: men who wanted to work, not counting beggars, tigers, idlers, and men who lived “on a string”—by flying their kites, trading a living for the reliable servicing of employed women.

  The work on the wharves, once he was hired, Rock said, was at least not monotonous. There were many “skills” to be mastered: lifting, hauling, pushing, ayah, tugging at rope falls, pulling carts, rolling kegs, hooking bales, shouldering poles, prying levers, tilting boxes. And, above all, grunting. Ai, there were so many tones of grunting to learn!—almost as artistic as learning to play the flute.

  This good mood, ironic as it was, and a product, I think, of those seven coppers carried home, did not last any longer than the money, which was gone the next day.

  The third evening after work Rock said, “I saw Old Arm today, the race hero that Top Man told us about—said he was so rich, so puffed up, remember? He’s a wharf coolie, like me! He may be rich at night but he wears rags by day and works at Haul-Ass Number One. I talked with him—or rather, I sat on my hams listening to him during our midday rest. He’s shrewd, very clever—and he dampened me. Ayah! He’s a man who’ll never have enough. He had a circle around him. At first he was talking about the squirrel wheel we whites are in: how the yellows’ ideas about us—that we have undersized brains, that we’re shiftless and dirty, that we’re incapable of learning to read or of running machines—how all these ideas are given proof, as the squirrel wheel turns, by our shirking, our lying, our going on the pipe, our squalid kite life, our breaking everything, our not wanting anything beyond today’s bowl. The lids ‘know’ that the hogs are never going to better themselves because they ‘see’ that the hogs are stupid, lazy, unambitious, and (here is where those huge round eyes of Old Arm’s began to glint!) cowardly. He’s a short and slight man, with an almost comical ridge of bone running down the center of his crown, which is shaved, and he has a weak chin. But he has huge eyes, like an owl’s, of a hazel shade that seems not to reflect but to suck all images into his head, and a voice that growls like a charcoal fire in a deep brazier when you blow on it. He has heat, force, plenty of it. I suppose his smallness is the wellspring of his power, and his power seems greater because he’s small. Ai, ‘cowardly’ was the word that set him going, and this was the part I didn’t like. He milks hatred. He talks about the Give-Us-a-Rice-Bowl campaign, but the tone of his voice says, ‘Take it! Take the rice. Don’t let them call you cowards. Hit them. Use knives. Use wharf hooks. Use bamboo shoulder poles.’ I had to ask him a question, I became upset and had to ask him: ‘Have you ever killed a man, Old Arm?’ The moment the question flew past my lips I wanted to eat it, get it back down, because this Old Arm was both arrogant and elusive; I could see he would put me in the wrong, he would make it seem that I had misheard, misconstrued. And he did but he didn’t. I mean, he just stared me down, he made my question seem a squirt of impertinence that was somehow disloyal to the white race, but at the same time he did nothing to answer me—he did not by any means deny the imputation of blood hate and blood lust. I had the most peculiar feeling—that he would never forgive me for that question. And in the end I felt torn and depressed—perhaps because the man I had killed, or may have killed, was white! I think about Bare-Stick often—every day—you know that. And it’s true. That was a white man I stabbed. I didn’t hate Bare-Stick as much as I hated any yellow stranger in the upper hand. My instinct now, much as I hate every yellow turtle I meet in the streets, is to be against a policy of stabbing him with a wharf hook—against what I thought I heard in Old Arm’s voice—”

  Suddenly Rock began questioning me: Had Bare-Stick ever taken me?

  I told Rock that I had never asked him for a list of women who’d got his kite up.

  He pressed me hard, and soon we were in the midst of a shouting fight of a sort that seemed quite at home in the strife-packed puzzle box; and I ended it with a cruel line which subdued my Rock: “What are you trying to do, Rock—justify stabbing Bare-Stick?”

  When Rock came home the next evening he told me this story:

  At the end of each working day on the wharves, the coolies formed lines, at the wharf sheds of the various hongs, to collect the day’s wages, and immediately beyond the cashiers’ cages swarms of white human parasites descended on the newly paid coolies, competing with every wile for a share of the few coppers each man had just received. Beggars begging from beggars! Opium-dross providers, sellers of fried beancakes, pimps, lottery-chit-runners, wine-peddlers, thieves, younger brothers of volunteer whores. An impression, Rock said, of a gnat cloud of white men. There was a wild excess of white men in the city: thousands of tenants who had left their wives and children on the farms while they went up to the famous city of freedom to make their pursefuls; herds of idle men—last hired, first fired. Drifters: never able to earn enough to settle down, never able to learn enough to have an inner value, they had first been driven into a pattern of restlessness and then the restlessness had developed a pulse of its own, so that now wandering itself was the only pleasure in life. Scum, Top Man had called their betters, the ricksha boys; so these must have been the sub-scum of white humanity. How superior we had thought all the whites in the city to be when we had first arrived!

  On being paid, Rock slipped the nine coppers of his day’s sweat into a cloth bag and tucked the bag inside his trousers, where it could not be slit or pilfered, and he was elbowing his way through the eddying clamor of wheedlers and leeches when suddenly he was confronted by a stooping, twisted figure holding up a rack of brightly printed lottery chits. It was Mink. Rock recognized him at once and spoke his name, but for some time Mink could not seem to focus his eyes on Rock’s face. He was as thin and limp and pallid-gray as a newborn field mouse, and his eyes looked lost in a feverish dream—the pupils were constricted to tiny black awl holes. And when Rock had at last put across his identity, Mink’s joy at the
meeting was generalized, indiscriminate. Ayah, he was on the pipe! Rock heard in Mink’s droning, whining tones of happiness the opium-smoker’s deep indifference. Yet Mink clung to Rock’s sleeve, begging him to buy some lottery chits, in a way that seemed to Rock to be something more than an appeal for needed cash for the needed drug.

  “Do you remember,” Rock said to me, “Mink’s thrill, the first day of the Number Wheel riot, at the idea that he and the yellows had a common cause? I had a strange feeling that his pawing of my arm was saying, ‘Please forget that. I wasn’t myself then. I was mad then, but I’m sane now!’ What he was actually saying was: ‘I have good numbers. I have good inside numbers. Ask the regular players. They all know that Mink has the best inside numbers. Rock, my friend!’ Then it seemed that he had recognized me on an entirely new level, as if the door to a new room in his head had just opened up. And he began to weep. I tried to persuade him to come home with me—to see you. Floods of tears when I mentioned your name! But he said he had to sell his chits, muttered something about the Forgetfulness Hong. I asked him where he lived, and he gave me the name of a ‘basket’—one of the lottery pickup stations in the back of a shop here in the Enclave—where he said a message would reach him within six hours on any day, because there are two drawings daily. Look, I bought two outers from him—he said they were just right for you.”

  Rock held up two slips of cheap rag paper on which were printed double pairs of numbers—on the upper one, 37-52—and over the numbers little woodcut pictures in red ink, the codes of the day: a wolf, a cormorant, a peony, a lotus for me.

  I heard myself asking in an angry voice, “How much did they cost?”

  Rock made me bite my tongue. “Two coppers for a friend,” he said.

  Next morning I took the slips to a lottery basket near our house and checked them against the posted lists of winning outers of that forenoon’s drawing, but wolf and cormorant didn’t even figure, to say nothing of lotus.