White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Four days later Rock lost his job. He and three other coolies had been assigned the unloading of a dried-hemp junk and they had taken up the loose deck planks from the forward cargo compartments and were beginning, two by two, to hook up the fragrant bales, when Rock examined his partner for the first time—a short keg of a fellow in shameful rags, with eyes of an intelligence that seemed to forswear the rags; he almost seemed an actor in costume. His name was Gentle. Generally Rock had little to do with scurfy partners that he drew by chance for the wharf-side labors, and he put down an impulse to speak to this one. Better simply do the work and not get involved. They carried two bales down the ribbed gangplank and placed them in the marked area on the asphalt Bund, alternating rear and front positions. For the third bale Rock was in front, holding the handle of his hook with both hands behind him. Halfway down the plank he felt a sudden jolt at the backs of his legs, and, about to lose his balance and fall forward, he felt the hook handle twist out of his hands. Stumbling forward from the plank onto all fours on the dusty asphalt, he heard a splash, and he was about to turn, rise, and curse his partner when he looked up and saw the thick little man already standing over him and pouring abuse on his shoulders. Then the hong’s yellow comprador was standing there, and before Rock could stagger to his feet the short man had clicked out a lying story that Rock had for no reason let go of his hook and caused the fall of the bale. The comprador, who seemed on familiar terms with the heavyset man, would not even listen to Rock’s side of the story; he took him to the wharf shed, then and there, gave him six coppers, and told him to be off. Rock raised a noisy fuss, and he stayed by the hong’s wharf shed until payoff time, hoping to persuade the other two men in the hemp detail to be witnesses of his innocence, but he found that he could not recognize them among all the coolies being given their coppers. Afterward, in the crowd of paid men and urgent parasites, he saw the thick bullet who had been his partner and accuser talking with another man just as short as he, and much thinner—Old Arm. They were laughing.

  A Whitelist

  We had to eat. Rock returned to the wharves and learned, after having stood in the Greater Queue two more days and nights, and then after he had been turned away by hong after hong, that all along the wharves his name was on a whitelist of coolies with bad records; in short, no hong would hire him. Baffled and bitter at the thought that he had been trickily punished by the whites’ race hero for having done nothing worse than to ask a heartfelt question—Did you ever kill a man?—he refused to seek work as a servant or as a ricksha boy. We had to eat; I knew what I must do.

  The Filature

  Early on a cold gray morning I walked along the Bund of the Model Settlement and over the Garden Bridge and out to the crowded industrial section called Yangtszepoo and took my place in the Lesser Queue, the line of women seeking work in the silk filatures.

  As I moved slowly up the line during the day I saw on either side of me the dreary long narrow sheds of the filatures, their walls of prisoning brick, the northern slopes of their roofs sheets of wire-meshed, grime-filmed glass, every vent and fissure issuing into the winter air cheerless plumes of yellowy steam.

  None of the women near me in the line had ever worked at reeling before, so I could learn nothing of what lay ahead.

  When dusk fell the filatures all shut down—not, I gathered, for humanitarian reasons but because the work of reeling could only be done under light of day—and I found myself a scant fifty bodies away from the top of the line, which now also stretched a long distance behind me. Some of the waiting women had brought small round baskets of rice, which they consumed without sharing, but Rock and I had no rice; we had eaten only a single small millet cake a day for three days. To keep my place in line, I lay down in the dust, and I managed to sleep a good part of the night, though chilled to the marrow.

  In the morning, after the alto whistles all along the narrow sheds blew the dawn call to work, I was readily hired, and soon I found myself inside one of the filatures, being led to my station by a white instructress.

  Ai, what a sight! Along the entire length of the corridorlike building was a double series of copper basins connected to each other by steam pipes; there must have been three hundred pairs. On the one side stood a row of little white girls, beating at the boiling water in their basins with small reed brushes, and on the other, separated from the girls by a wire-net partition, were seated the white women reelers, dipping up cocoons from their basins and making swift motions with their hands and working treadles with their feet.

  The air was hot, and the light pouring down from overhead was steam-dimmed.

  Pipes clanked, the basins hissed and bubbled, the treadles clattered, the girls and women kept up a hum of talk.

  My instructress, a narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped white woman who by her tucked upper lip and her flared nostrils made me feel like spoiled and wormy meat—ayah, how much haughtier and more condescending than any yellow she had become in her superior position!—led me along behind the row of reelers’ basins to an empty stool. She sat down, placing me directly behind her, and, with a sniff of disgust directed, I supposed, at my presumed inability to learn anything at all, told me to watch with cat eyes.

  Standing opposite, beyond the wire mesh, stirring cocoons in her basin of boiling water, was a girl perhaps ten years old, with lumpy features and a look of stubbornness and of middle-aged weary-wisdom. As soon as the instructress took her seat, the girl rolled a cocoon up the side of her basin with her reed brush and, balancing it against the brush with a fingertip, passed it through a small window in the wire screen and dropped it into the shallower reeling basin; then she passed through another and another, until there were six on our side. The instructress, with fingers apparently hardened to all feeling yet as sensitive as butterfly probes, plucked one cocoon after another, up to five, from the steaming basin and somehow found strand ends and with pinching motions attached them to a thread, itself finer than a human hair, which ran up through a system of brass rings and tiny pulleys back over her head and mine to a reel in a box on a high rack. By working the treadle she wound the five-strand thread up and back onto the reel. As the thread moved she dipped out the sixth cocoon and held its strand end in readiness to be attached to the thread the moment one of the other strands broke.

  Within a few minutes she changed places with me and watched over my shoulder, breathing condescension and disapproval into my hair as I tended the thread.

  I felt at once that she was right in her wheezing disparagement. I would never learn. I would fail. I would be dismissed. Then what would Rock and I do? The water and the steaming cocoons scalded my fingers. I could scarcely see the ends of the strands lying against the tawny cocoons, and my stinging fingertips seemed far too gross to pick them away. From time to time tears flooded my eyes, and I could not see whether a strand was breaking. I perspired in the air heated and moistened by the pipes and bowls.

  I was aware of a new pair of eyes. I glanced up, and beyond the mesh, beyond the girl, I saw the face of a yellow woman staring at me. Then I heard my instructress and the yellow woman, who was evidently a section overseer, talking to each other, and by the time I realized they were discussing me it was too late—some sort of appraisal had been made, and I had not heard it.

  For an interminable half morning the instructress stood back there watching me, sighing, hissing contemptuous instructions, reaching over my shoulders and slapping aside my parboiled hands when I made a mistake, and mending the errors with a dexterity that was itself a rebuke. I felt that if only this brooding lump of disdain, the more cruel in being white herself, would go away, then suddenly my fingers would be cool, they would fly, they would be pincers of perfect delicacy. Instead I grew clumsier, hotter, more tearful, and more fumbling.

  Then, unexpectedly, she was gone.

  I asked the girl, “How long was this seat empty before they brought me in?”

  “Not long.�
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  “What happened to the one who was here before?”

  “She didn’t mend the breaks fast enough.”

  “Was she awkward?”

  “To be sure.”

  “More awkward than I am?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In spite of her guarded answers I felt that this snub-nosed girl, who told me her name was Pigeon, was in truth my partner and even (I had a moment’s fantasy) a co-conspirator in some vague plan for a less bad world.

  After a short time she whispered to me over the hissing of the steam pipes, “Watch out for Old She-Frog”—and the child jerked her head toward the yellow woman, the section overseer, who was at the moment moving away from us up the line of girls’ basins.

  In time I felt able to look around me. Two seats away from me on one side was a nursing mother. Her baby lay on the cinder-covered ground by its mother’s treadle, wrapped tightly in blue coolie cloth, and remaining silent, as if instinctively knowing that if it cried and kept crying the mother would lose her job.

  Once I saw Old She-Frog punish a negligent child, two or three stations from ours, by plunging the girl’s hand in the bubbling basin that she was supposed to be tending. The child not only did not scream; she suppressed any show of feeling whatsoever. I glanced quickly at Pigeon’s bumpy little face, where I saw only a half-formed frown, apparently of concentration.

  Breaks occasionally did occur in the filaments that I was reeling, and watching for them, particularly when Old She-Frog happened to be passing, made me nervous. My instructress had told me that a good reeler would supply a reserve strand to the compound thread within two spans of a break, and she said that an unmended break would produce a thin spot in the thread and an off-shade line in the finished fabric.

  This made me think of the elegance—the glossy perfection, as of the skins of plump washed grapes—of Big Madame Shen’s many gowns hanging in their fortlike armoires in the house in the Northern Capital, and I thought of the night when I had tried on those dresses one by one: how beautiful, how beautiful I had been! And how many years had how many reelers spent making the threads for that one woman’s wardrobe, and for me to have that single hour of radiance?

  For some reason I was suddenly drenched by a melancholy longing for Rock—but for a Rock who was more than Rock, perhaps.

  “Is it always so hot in here?” I asked Pigeon.

  “They can only open the ventilators when there’s no wind,” she said. “The wind would break the threads.”

  At the noon rest Old She-Frog came along the aisle behind the reelers’ basins and stopped at my station, and my heart pounded with fear.

  But she was on a strange educative mission. She had in her hand a “book” of finished thread—a bundle of skeins removed from the reels and twisted into a packet of a certain classical shape. She reached it out to me and said, “I want you to feel the thread you’re making. It is standard Tsatlee, Chop-Three quality. We have every new reeler examine a book of what she is making.”

  Taking the book in my hands I understood why. The silk thread, aggregated this way, was of the purest white color, and it had an iridescent luster, a luminosity, as if it were a source rather than a recipient of light, and it had, too, a body so resilient and nervous that it seemed almost alive in my grasp. I felt, for a moment, a paradoxical surge—of both humility and pride in what seemed a unified emotion.

  But as I passed back the sweet fruit of my colleagues’ work I remembered that the yellow hand into which I put it belonged to a creature nicknamed, in disgust and dread, Old Frog.

  During the afternoon I talked more easily with Pigeon. She was, she told me, the third of seven children born to one mother by a team of fathers—there seemed to have been no exact census of the fathers, none of whom, in any case, was presently in evidence. Four of the seven children now worked, three girls in filatures and a boy, the eldest of the seven, named Little Lizard, her hero, as a sorter of chits in a lottery basket. Pigeon had worked in the same filature, at this very station, for more than a year. How many reelers across from her had come and gone? “I don’t know,” she said, “about a hundred.” Uncomforting round number! Pigeon sniffled constantly; she was outwardly an ugly child, but I was deeply impressed by her stolidity, her inner strength.

  “You must have a number-one mother.”

  “She’s on the pipe.”

  “Who takes care of her?”

  “The smaller ones.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “On the run. We’re always trotting.” Pigeon’s eyes sparkled as she said this.

  By midafternoon I realized that, although it would take a long time for me to become truly skilled, I was going to pass muster as a reeler, for I had sharp eyes and reasonable dexterity, and I began to relax. Soon I was chatting with the women in the neighboring stations. Aural acquaintances! I could not study the faces of these women, because the single requisite of reeling was a fairly constant and intense concentration on the strands before one’s eyes, yet from their voices and from what they said I had clear pictures of them: Left was sturdy, overblown, genial, but lacking in self-love and constantly half apologetic and half begging for agreement; Right was also physically rather powerful but a put-upon personality, rude, self-centered, and unkind.

  They and I, as they and their neighbors and all the reelers, no doubt, were also doing, passed the time “riding our tongues to the palace”—taking out our frustrations in talk. We talked of the Enclave, of Fukien rubbish, of chinkty snobbishness, of Old Arm’s coming Give-Us-the-Rice campaign, of puzzle-box landlords, of Old Frog and the invisible management of the filature, of prices and rents and fares, of our unemployed men, and of the only foods that whites could buy: culls and windfalls, honeycomb gut lining and tail bones and feet and maws and hocks, fruit with livid bruises and greens with limp and brown-edged leaves.

  The day was too long. Pigeon, who must have started walking to the filature from home, wherever it might now be “on the run,” at least an hour before dawn, had begun, by the second quarter of the afternoon, to sway on her feet, and though she was skillful at keeping her fingers out of the boiling water in her basin, they were dead white and loose-skinned, and her face was blanched, and her clothing appeared to be soaked with perspiration.

  I, too, felt finger-wrinkled and damp from the steam and heat, but in my case weariness took the form of complacency, an easing of vigilance, and before I knew what had happened, I was suddenly the object of a torrent of scathing abuse from Old Frog. I had only four strands going onto my thread! Old Frog could see this from beyond the wire netting, from beyond Pigeon’s back! She began to ask me cutting questions. I did not answer; I made myself too busy to answer. And I thought of Peace, in the great prizing barrel in the tobacco shed, when the young master had asked him questions about the work he was doing—and how he feigned a jaw-sagged and stammering stupidity. I could not pretend here to be an idiot, because that would surely cost me my job; but I could follow the same principle—safe silence.

  The storm subsided. I tried to redouble my attention to the tiny spider cables, but my eyes began to fog and burn; my fingertips were numb.

  At last, at last, merciful dusk closed down the filatures, and in my place in the long line of reelers filing out I soon had eight thrilling coppers in my sweaty palm!

  The air outside was like the edge of a knife.

  One of Two Consolations

  On my third day at the filature, before the opening whistles in the dim light of dawn, in the waiting yard, I found myself suddenly engulfed in an embrace by a sputtering woman who, as I momentarily drew back in her arms, appeared to be yellow. Horrible! A yellow she-ram, lurking around this pen of white ewes? I fought to get away from her.

  Then it came through to me that my assailant was Harlot of Gaza! Top Man had said she was somewhere in the city. Ai, sweet mixie friend from long ago! No
w it was I who hugged.

  How we babbled! She worked, it turned out, for the same filature as I, but not as a reeler; she was a sorter. All she had to do, she said, was to eliminate doubles—cocoons made by two silkworms at once—and pierced cocoons and those that were too tawny or malformed. I did not speak the thought, but I wondered if she had stepped up to this obviously privileged job on the strength of the yellow blood she owned. As the day lightened and I was able to search her face, it seemed to me that she did look more like a yellow woman than she had in her slave rags on the Yens’ farm.

  “Have you gone through the needle’s eye?” I asked her. This, or “threading,” was our euphemism for mixes’ posing as yellows.

  “Do you like my hair this way?” she answered. “No, I only thread sometimes at night.”

  We laughed together at this, but there was constraint on my side, and at once I wondered, with a flick of annoyance at myself, whether this holding back might have stemmed from envy. Did I want to be yellow, or at least a little bit yellow? I could certainly be excused for wanting to be a sorter.

  The whistles, usually so welcome, were hateful that morning. We arranged to meet at the hong’s outer gate and walk home to the Enclave together that evening.

  I was light-fingered and clear-eyed all day, for the sight of Harlot had raised my spirits. Moth and Harlot, my dear consolations from the past! I decided during that day, as I thought about them, that it wouldn’t do to try to bring them together. They wouldn’t get along—and besides, I wanted each of them for myself, for different sides of myself! It seemed to me that Harlot was perhaps the more important to me, and perhaps precisely because of the tension in her between the advantages and disadvantages of being a mixie. She was more complex than Moth; one part of her could become a priestess, one part was grasping, one teased, one was selfless and capable of self-denial, one grieved at the tie with the master color, one took advantage of it. Moth was more spontaneous, impulsive; shallower; more simple fun; and more dangerous to one’s man—or, on second thought, was she? Could she not be forgotten by a man as easily as he could be tilted onto her hip bones and shoulder blades? Two tigers at once!