White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Harlot and I walked home together in the dark. With Moth, who lived for each moment as it came, there seemed no need to fill in the past; now, with Harlot, there were so many questions to ask each other! Had she been Top Man’s woman after I was sold away? How long had she lived in Up-from-the-Sea? Was Top Man’s account of the decay of the Yens accurate? Had she ever heard or seen more of Auntie?…And all my life with Rock to pour out.

  We dealt in fragments—half-answered queries and unfinished thoughts. Indeed, it was the eager and affectionate speed of our exchanges that mattered, far more than their actual substance. We promised each other that we would have plenty of time to delve, that on other days and nights we would tell out each happening to the end.

  Then Harlot asked me, “Have you been approached by a hall?”

  At first this question gave me a stab of fear, as I remembered “The Hall” of the Box River valley, the organ of punishment, vengeance, and yellow discipline.

  “I think there may be an opening in mine,” Harlot said. “There’s a girl named Wood Mist—none of the rest of us can stand her. She puts on chinkty airs—wants us to kowtow to officers as we enter meetings. And then she turns around and cheats at house sparrow! She doesn’t know the fundamental rule of gossip, that whatever you say bad about a person flies like an arrow, with your name on it, to that person; so that we’re always hearing disgusting things she’s said about the very people who are supposed to be her best friends. We have her maneuvered around now to the point of resigning. When she does, I’ll let you know, and I’ll get the others to look you over.”

  The Enclave, I gathered from Harlot, teemed with “halls”—small social circles, of twelve to fifteen members, mostly either all men or all women, who met frequently, transacted with great formality bits of meaningless business of a “charitable” nature, ate a modest feast, and then played various upper-class yellow parlor games. The halls were obviously a force for respectability; as Harlot put it, “We stand for bettering the race—by which I mean, if you stay with a man, you should be discreet if he isn’t your own man, and you shouldn’t shout and be coarse in public places; things like that. We have a list of strict rules. Our motto is, ‘Heart as pure as the carp pool.’ By that we don’t have to be prudes, you know—just not public nuisances! Our hall flower is the persimmon blossom.”

  “What is the name of your hall?”

  “Did I forget to tell you that? Ayah, those filthy cocoons rustle around in my head. We call ourselves the Pavilion of Phoenixes. Isn’t that good and chinkty?”

  “Are you mostly mixes?” Why was I so anxious as I asked that question? Did I hope so fondly that they were?

  “About half, dear.”

  “I’d like to come.”

  The Good Life on a Day Off

  The filature gave its reelers every tenth day off, on rotation, with the option, however, of working anyway to earn extra coppers, and I was determined to take no rest days—but I made an exception of the first that came up, for it happened to fall on third third, the Spring Festival, the annual occasion, in rustic areas, for cleaning graves and walking out to see fruit trees in bloom. How would the city celebrate?

  I was nervous about my extra coppers. On full hours I earned twelve a day, and Rock and I subsisted on seven or eight, and I had coppers hidden in crannies, in matting, in folded clothes, all over the tiny space in which Rock and I lived. I was afraid of thieves; I was, to be honest, afraid lest Rock and the money, both idle, might venture out together in search of entertainment. I proposed depositing the surplus, about twenty coppers, with Silverfinger, the famous white moneylender of the Enclave, who borrowed, too (at interest rates at least better than the yellow moneylenders), and Rock agreed.

  We set out in a mild morning. The streets of the Enclave were crowded—with white shoppers streaming in and out of white-owned stores, lottery-chit-runners, itinerant barbers, street vendors of candied apples and trinkets and artificial flowers, and always, in the offing, murmuring beggars. At the street corners stood yellow policemen, reminders of reality. To my eyes, which in daylight hours for ten days had strayed from the delicate filaments of silk only to peer through steam-fogged air at the two long rows of static figures at their copper basins, this scene danced. The entire Enclave seemed to me to be some great fair or celebration; the whites milling in the streets appeared to be gay and reckless, out to spend, flirt, take chances.

  And what a feeling, here at the crossing of Four Rivers Road and Dog Road, at the very heart of the Enclave—what a feeling of white grandeur! There on the corner was the largest white-owned clothing store in all the yellow provinces. An exclusive teahouse, where, they said, you might find one of the three white men who had risen to the yellows’ Provincial Council, or a brace of our foremost white poets, or a famous white woman dancer who could nightly express, with motions of her ivory limbs, all the yearnings of our race. A few doors away, behind a spirit screen carved from greenish jasper, an elegant tavern where the rich white henchmen of the Forgetfulness Hong often gathered to drink millet liquor. And, clustered within a radius of half a li, the white-staffed Enclave hospital; the Moon Garden Compound, made up of former palaces of yellow nobility, now chinkty apartments; the expensive hostelry ironically named Forbidden City; Silverfinger’s establishment; five upper-class temples; and, best of all, the dazzling Good Life, playground of whites rich and poor. Under the skin of this splendor, tucked away out of sight but everywhere easily found, were the commonalty of lottery-chit baskets, shop-back temples, pipe dens, mousehouses, gambling halls, cheap tearooms, one-copper dosshouses, and everlasting puzzle boxes.

  It was I who said on a sudden impulse, “Let’s pass by Mink’s basket and see if he’s there. And maybe buy an outer or two.”

  “Ai, why not?” Rock said. “We’ll never get rich on reeling.”

  The lottery basket was in the rear courtyard of a grease-spattered shop where twisted bean crullers were fried in deep peanut oil and sold, two for a single cash, to the poorest whites—who seemed to be the most avid players of the lottery. The word “basket” was figurative; it stood for a large room where a brass-keyed orderliness was encapsulated within a disarray that must have shaken the confidence of many a poor white chit-buyer. Old lottery chits were strewn everywhere, on tables and floor, in piles and swirls; old notices of drawings were stabbed and hung about the walls on spikes; chit boys sat on their hams slurping tea; players leafed through dog-eared chit-clue books searching for magic numbers. There was a constant chatter of accounts. At the middle of this chaos sat three white men like weasels, sorting, receiving, issuing, conversing with players in melancholy tones, keeping track of every rag and tag, imposing a discipline of mystery, hope, and surety on the entire scene.

  We edged up to one of them.

  “You have a chit boy named Mink with a bad back,” Rock said.

  “Yes,” the basket man said with a courtesy most surprising in such a rat-clerk of the underworld. “He’s one of the wharf boys.”

  “When does he come in here?”

  “Before each drawing. About an hour before each drawing. He plays the chits, too, you know.”

  “I can imagine why.”

  The clerk gave Rock an odd look, as if to question whether Rock was Mink’s provider, whether Rock was after Mink for opium money, whether he should protect his chit boy. But I saw the look fade, as, examining both of us, he saw us for what we really were—specks of dust blown in from the city streets.

  “He may be late today,” the clerk said, “on account of the killing.”

  “The killing?”

  “You haven’t heard? What damp stone have you been under? The whole Enclave is talking about it. Down on the wharves along Whangpoo Creek.”

  “What happened?”

  “A yellow comprador caved in a coolie’s skull with a bamboo mooring spar. Not just any miserable hog: this was one of Old Arm’
s fingers. Named Gentle. The whole Bund and both creeks are in an uproar.”

  “Gentle? What did he look like?” Rock’s question was sharp.

  The pale, long-nosed man, habituated to emotional chit-players, looked down from Rock and began shuffling papers. He had apparently cut off the interview.

  Rock leaned forward and put a hand on the weasel’s shoulder and shook it. “What did this Gentle look like?”

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?” the clerk said—but glancing up again into Rock’s eyes, he evidently saw something that made him turn to his colleague weasel at the next desk and say, “Hai, this dung beetle here wants to know what the fellow looked like who was bashed. Did you hear anything?”

  The second clerk looked at Rock: these men were obviously bored—with their work, with the pathetic white vermin who were addicted to the chits, and, worst of all, with themselves.

  “Some pig was in here saying the fellow was built like a dock bollard. That’s all he said. That’s all I know.”

  Rock was now agitated. “That’s the one! I know that turtle. I’m glad they gave it to him!”

  The clerk with whom Rock had been talking was, to all appearances, back at work; the second weasel, who had given the description of Gentle, was looking up at Rock. Rock was red. The third clerk asked the second, “What’s going on?” The first weasel gave out a low whistle, forced out through the generous gap between his two front upper teeth, and in an instant a half dozen chit boys, who until that moment had seemed almost inanimate, crouching in a corner and against one wall with bowls of tea and a quilted pot, some fishing at their teeth with straws, were suddenly erect and picketed in a circle around Rock and me. The clerk with whom Rock had been talking arranged the papers on the table before him with a deliberation like that of a weighed judgment; then he stood up and walked around to the cluster of men, and the circle of chit boys opened to let him in. The pallid basket man barely came up to Rock’s collarbones.

  “What did I hear you say?”

  Rock, I could see, was in one of his furies that might, at any moment, become all too rashly articulate, and I pulled at his sleeve and said, “Come on.”

  “Not so fast,” the rat-clerk said who had started out so politely. He faced Rock. “Repeat what you said.”

  “What’s caught in your throat?” Rock insolently asked.

  The clerk stood in silence a long time, then said in a voice of such studied calm that its trembling seemed deliberate, “We don’t allow any remarks in this basket about Old Arm or any of his people.”

  And with that the circle of chit boys, enclosing us more tightly, began to move toward the door, and Rock, who could count, simply turned his back on the clerk (and on me), and walked out as though by his own will, as though the cordon of disreputable toughs were nothing more than the circumference of his own splendid personality. I tagged along behind like a sheep.

  Outside, gnawing at a bean cruller, Rock was ready for a wild time. I couldn’t tell whether he was elated by the news about Gentle or was merely responding to the first excitement he had had since he had lost his job on the wharves. He proposed that we go to the amusement grounds called The Good Life.

  “I have to go to Silverfinger’s first,” I said, and I spoke firmly, because I knew that if I failed to lock up the extra coppers at once, they would all go off like a string of firecrackers before the day was over.

  Silverfinger’s Provincial Money House was the pride of the Enclave—soaring flights of column and beam, coruscating panels of lacquer and semi-precious stones, subtle screens and hangings, and glimpses of silver ingots and of cylindrical parades of copper coins! It was all a vision that might have floated like dream smoke up from the richest reaches of the Model Settlement, yet it was all right there, solid and palpable, in the white Enclave, and it was the lair of a white money-prince. With this opulence Silverfinger had hit upon a valuable hypnotism: in his halls poor whites felt vicariously rich at the very moment when he was fleecing them.

  Shuffling on our hushing cloth soles across the polished stone floor toward one of the usury tables, we almost bumped into a huge white man who by his conceited bearing, his beard that had been thinned out to resemble the scraggly growth of a yellow elder, his silk gown with the nacreous sheen of a sunset on still water, appeared to be closely connected with all the money in this palace.

  His glistening balloon back had scarcely been revealed when—thunder in my ears!—I recognized him. He was Duke, once the Matriarch Yen’s Number One Boy who had decided I would not do as a miserable seamstress!

  I ran to him. He recognized me, I could tell, yet he looked down his nose at me. “White Lotus? Hrrrmm. Ah, yes. One of the field slaves. I remember, I remember.”

  Ayah, Top Man had been right. What chinkty airs! Now Rock was standing at my elbow, breathing through his mouth like a stupid tenant—on purpose, I felt, to express some sort of inside-out hostility. Duke looked down at him as on a flea.

  Angry, I found that my own tongue was unbridled. “We saw Top Man,” I said. “He told us you were here in the city—said you’d grown grand. He said you were a lick-spit for the Forgetfulness Hong.”

  “Top Man—a syphilitic shroff. He’s trying to grow grand.” Then Duke was annoyed with himself for having reacted to my jibe, and he wanted to shake us off before he lost any more composure and face. “Excuse me, we’re being rushed off our feet. There seems to be a mild money panic on account of the killing.”

  “Why a panic?” Rock asked, and Duke could not turn away from that skeptical voice with a ring of elation in it.

  “Some of this white scum”—Top Man’s phrase!—“seems to be afraid that Old Arm will break loose with his rice-bowl campaign.”

  “Why should that cause a panic?”

  “Because thin hogs scare easily, that’s all.”

  “While fat hogs get fatter.”

  “That is correct,” Duke said, now in command of himself.

  I could see Rock’s perverse high spirits dancing in his eyes, as he said, “What will we find in our rice bowl when Old Arm gets it for us—Silverfinger’s chestnuts rolled in deep-fried lottery chits?”

  Duke became white as wall chalk and he said almost in a whisper, looking to right and left to see if anyone might have overheard what Rock and I had been saying, “I’d advise you pigs to watch your tongues. You’re talking”—Duke’s vehemence grew—“like lids.” Duke turned and walked away.

  So this was Old Arm’s moral blackmail—anyone who was against him was against the white race.

  Rock spat on the polished stone floor in Duke’s wake, and, deciding to spend our money rather than save it, to put a punk fuse to our miserable little string of coppers and let them make what noise they could, we left.

  At the geographical center of the Enclave, The Good Life lay close also to the seat of its paradoxical good cheer—for as the fecund horse and donkey breed the sterile mule, so poverty and misery in the Enclave often produced together a hybrid without a future: a powerful stubborn exuberance. We had it that morning. Entering the amusement ground through its ornate gate, we saw before us every facility for spending our coppers and our shallow joy: a wide park, a jubilation of new-decked trees and brick-edged paths spreading out lavishly in the vitals of the congested Enclave, a water-lily-lidded lake, a games ground, a temple, and a large octagonal hall, The Good Life itself, where at any hour of the day one could watch boxing, theatricals, magicians, jugglers. Over this area thousands of whites teemed, and all of them, whether splashing with sculling oars in sampans on the lake or shouting at pitchpot or kissing on the ground in the shade of trees or simply strolling arm in arm—all of them seemed, like us, to be in the throes of bursting good humor. Among the yellows in this city the overriding urge was not, as it had appeared to be in the Northern Capital, to become learned and influential; it was frankly to grow rich. But what with the job line w
hites could never begin to mimic, or even to caricature, this yellow ambition, so whites had learned to live for the present moment. If there were any thoughts for the future, they were fantasies of reincarnation in some other form than that of white human beings. This day’s hair decoration, this day’s bad joke, this day’s crackling of the bed mats under the struggles of a dalliance, this day’s millet cake, this day’s sight of a prestidigitator pulling an endless string of colored pennants out of his mouth—these were all that a white wanted.

  We bought some peanuts and watched some boxing in the great hall, and I had a picture in my mind of the Drum Tower Boys “boxing the board” in a faraway marketplace, long ago, and of Nose spinning with me in his arms; I responded to this memory not with melancholy but by guffawing like a prostitute at the slambang match here in The Good Life, and clutching tight at Rock’s arm.

  Then we floated on the lake. There were so many sampans hired out that we could scarcely move, and for a time we hung alongside another boat, wale to wale, and talked with a pair of young lovers. They were adolescent and outwardly hard, and they had a revolutionary zeal; they thought that after this killing Old Arm was going to turn the world on its ear. Rock was twenty-four years old, and scoffing he seemed middle-aged alongside these little urban fanatics, to whom nothing had ever happened. The beardless boy grew angry, fancying that Rock was challenging not so much his radicalism as his manhood, and even his very whiteness, and he tried to push off with a commotion of waves, but Rock laughed at him because we were in such a press of boats that he could not put any water between us.

  Later, at the food stalls, we bought some bean curds and a bottle of raw wine, and Rock grew noisy and playful.