White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The moment I appeared at the door the two tigers, Old Boxer and Ox Balls, stood up and began to mince about, greeting each other over and over with dandy manners; then they pretended to notice me for the first time, and they approached me with a flood of caricatured chinkty affectations and effusions.

  “What a sweet moon-dragon pattern on your gown!”

  “You look the soul of health!”

  “Ten thousand years of happiness!”

  “What delicate hands, my dear!”

  Ayah, the bastards. Had they seen me going out one evening with my powdered hands?

  I passed off their teasing with as good humor as I could. “I eat well, thank you,” I said.

  Moth questioned me with wide eyes about my adventures, but the company was quickly bored with the topic of someone else’s good fortune, and talk turned to other matters.

  Round Knees was playing up to the tigers. The street-waterer was a timid man who submitted himself every day to the most painful of physical labors, hauling a water cart, as a donkey might, through the Enclave’s alleys. He apparently envied the tigers’ untrammeled spirits, and he put on, to try to impress them, a disenchanted manner. He scoffed at the very things he seemed, when he was not with them, to believe in most. He was a frequenter of temples, a believer in magic, a respecter of yellow power, but in the tigers’ presence he made the sounds of a fierce cynic. But the tigers only abused him. The more he tried to please them, the more cruel they were to him.

  “Have you heard about the Bird Priests?” he asked his heroes.

  “Your fingers stink of temple incense punk,” Old Boxer said.

  “No, this is really funny. This is a pair of hairy country priests—just came to the city a few days ago. They’ve rented a shop-temple and set themselves up. I heard about them and went to see them. It’s something to see. You really should go. They have the back courtyard of a cloth-shoe shop on Third Smaller Lane off West-of-the-Mountains Road. You go in there, and the place is filthy—they have some old cracked and dusty images, but the point is, the courtyard is full of birdcages with their doors open, and there are scores of birds flying around one of the priests—on his shoulders, on his head. Buntings, pipits, larks, shrikes, cuckoos, ousels, crakes, stints. Every kind.”

  I could hold myself back no longer. “I know them! They come from my old village. One is called Groundnut—a thousand-year friend of Rock’s.”

  “I don’t know their names, they’re just the Bird Priests. That’s all anyone calls them.”

  “Have you heard what they did in the country?”

  “Yes, that’s the real oink of it!”—the heart of the joke, he meant. He turned to the tigers. “They tell a story about how they led the poor farm hogs in their district against their landlords by having them pretend to be birds! And it worked, too, they say it did. They got what they wanted. By pretending to be birds. Did you ever hear anything so funny? Ha-ha-ha-ha—human birds! To frighten the lids! And now they’ve come to the city to show us poor pigs in the Enclave how to fly—something like that. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

  I saw that beneath the street-waterer’s “real oink of it,” beneath his gargle of mocking laughter, there was already some hope that the Bird Priests’ magic might work here in the Enclave.

  The tigers had begun to hop around flapping their long sleeves, cawing like crows and singing, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

  On the Chits

  I yearned to see Groundnut, and I thought often of those sapphires of calm in Runner’s eyes, but I could not bring myself to visit them. I did not even know where Rock was! I could never have swallowed loss of face to the extent of admitting such a thing to Rock’s old friend. I found out exactly where the Bird Priests’ shop-temple was, and several times I skirted near it, and once I went so far—heart hammering—as to ask the price of a pair of shoes I did not need in the shop in whose rear courtyard Runner and Groundnut housed their birds, their cracked idols, and their burning idea.

  In the same furtive way I flirted with seeing Mink but avoided it, too. I was now heavily on the chits. The interest Silverfinger charged for the money I had borrowed for gowns suitable to my life with Lacquerer was so burdensome that I wanted to pay off my debts at one stroke, if possible through a single sunburst of luck. I traded at Mink’s chit basket, but I went there only in the evenings or, on my off days, at hours far from those of the drawings, when I believed he would not be there.

  As to the chits, Moth was my monitress. I knew the fundamental rules of the drawings—that each day two double-digit numbers were drawn, the first an “outside” number of two digits, on which the odds were low, the second, “inside,” valueless unless paired on a chit with the day’s “outside” number, and so carrying much higher odds—but Moth introduced me to the entire mythology, the cult, that had been built on the chit lottery: the symbolism of animals and flowers and birds connected with inner and outer numbers, the chit-clue books exploiting this intricate set of images, the “books of dreams” which related the stock nightmares and wish dreams of poor whites to the symbols on the chits, the seedy seances of “number-spirit women” who for fees consulted various occult authorities for predictions on proximate drawings, the ways of studying the techniques of the drawings themselves for guidance in buying chits, the cultivation of clerks in chit baskets who happened to have tongues, the superstitious sweetening of the white mandarins of the chit lottery by contributions to their various race causes. Ayah, it all kept us busy if it did not make us rich. We won just often enough on cheaper numbers—two-to-one and four-to-one on single digits (“outside-outsides”)—to feel that the big strike might be within early reach.

  For me there was an added, private magic in the chits: On the day when I made my hit I would also get Rock back.

  An Innocent Stroll

  But now the strangest event in all my life took place: I fell in love, or thought I did, with a yellow man.

  I met him—his name was Han—at one of the chinkty receptions to which Lacquerer took me. He was, at first, simply present, in a chatting group, behaving with reticence and dignity. The party was for the poet Earthclod. Han modestly advanced the view that Earthclod’s work was too imitative of that of Fu Tun and Chao Tsu-ping, two “modern” yellow poets who happened to be in fashion in Up-from-the-Sea at the moment.

  This criticism by a lid of our white guest of honor was received in our circle with a frosty silence, but I, who hadn’t the slightest basis for judging the worth of the comment, admired Han’s forthrightness, at least, and his refusal to be intimidated by the suspicion with which his very presence at the party must have been greeted. I had felt this suspicion myself on seeing yellows at these receptions. What were they doing there? Were they merely watchers? What was it in us at which they wanted to peek? What did they have, as we said, on the other side of their fans? What were they really after? I remembered the pilgrim who had conducted me from Dirty Hua’s to the mountain: “I am ashamed.” Did these guests want to atone for something?

  Then Han was talking to me. I felt at first that I wanted to shield myself from the reflector-lantern gaze of this yellow man, and I was painfully self-conscious at having been singled out by him. Was everyone looking at me? Lacquerer, as it happened, drifted away—was this a rebuke?

  Han was at my side for only the briefest time, and he was quiet and friendly, though I thought that I was aware of constraint and hesitancy on his part, which I could have read as signs either of a sensual eagerness held in rein or of insincerity.

  On the whole, I told myself, the encounter was faintly unpleasant for me. Lacquerer said nothing about it, after all, and may not even have noticed it….

  One evening shortly after that Lacquerer took me to the Silver Pavilion, a peculiarly white institution, an amusement house open only at night, where tea, wine, and cakes were served, and where brief entertainments were offered, ranging from readings of verse by yo
ung white poets to the nude ritual dance of the famous Southern Peony. Among wealthy yellows, who set such a value on modesty that their women used a kind of drop cloth to cover their bodies even while making love, these dances seemed a pagoda-peak of perversion, and the Silver Pavilion, though deep in the Enclave, was much visited by parties of upper-class yellows on the sniff for sensation. And Han was there that night. Indeed, when Lacquerer and I were first led toward a table, I saw him, seated with yellow friends several tables away, watching me; then when we were placed, he arose and made his way to us. He greeted me with elegant manners and, unaware of his shocking rudeness, quite ignored Lacquerer. His eyes glittered with messages I was unprepared to decode. Lacquerer good-humoredly asked Han to sit down, which he did, in an empty chair that he pulled from another table. No sooner had he settled himself than a white magician appeared on the stage, to cymbals, and we could not talk. During the performance Han was sitting close to me, and I felt that he was leaning toward me, pressed by the intensity of some powerful obsession; he was like a child in the openness and awkwardness of his yearning. I was conscious of the radiating heat of his arm close to mine. I had strange, confused feelings, and wondered, above all, “Why me?” As soon as the magician had finished, Han arose, bowed blushing, and left us.

  The third time we met, Han came across the room to me like a hurled stone, again, and he seemed feverish. “I have to see you,” he found a chance to whisper to me. “Meet me at the Three Kingdoms on Foochow Road tomorrow night, at the first-quarter gong.”

  I nodded and quickly assured myself that nothing but curiosity had led me to accept.

  I was curious, and I was in spite of myself thrilled. To go to the Three Kingdoms, fashionable among the upper lids! I thought: Han must see me as special; it seems he would not be ashamed to appear there with me.

  But one thing I had forgotten, as I discovered on my way to meet Han the next evening: to walk to the Three Kingdoms I had to pass the Golden Herons, the opium tavern in the back rooms of which I had found Mink and Rock. Suddenly, when I saw those lacquered picnic scenes beyond the crimson columns, I had a vivid impression of Rock’s face, as it might have reacted to the disclosure that I was going to meet a yellow man in a yellow eating house. Then my reaction—shame copulating as ever with defiance!—as I heard myself murmur out loud, “Rock, Rock, you turtle, you’ve done this to me.”

  Only with the greatest of efforts could I haul myself past the mouth of the alley leading to other alleys that led to the pigs’ gate of the Golden Herons. Could Rock have been inside?

  Then I was with Han. Here, on his own ground, his demeanor was calm; his fire seemed ashes. Was he disappointed in how I looked, away from the mysteries and perversions (as he doubtless saw them) of the Enclave? On my part, I hardly noticed him for glancing around.

  Hoo! I had arrived! This was what the chinkties mimicked. Linen brocade on the tables; booths with beaded cords obscuring the openings. O-mi-t’o-fu, I was to be served by a yellow man. I was to be served by a yellow man. I was to be served by a yellow man.

  We were seated in a booth. There was a tightness in my throat, and I put my hand in Han’s. My emotion, having to do with the waiter, with how the yellow waiter was going to abase himself before me, struck Han as a tribute to himself, and I saw that he was perhaps slightly let down and further cooled by this, having possibly hoped for much greater difficulties. I was soon composed.

  With respect to my race, Han was a proud liberal. One thing one had to say about Up-from-the-Sea—said he—was that there was no social problem as to color. It was wonderful that a place like this made absolutely no fuss about serving whites. (I did not say, as I might have, that he was making quite a fuss about the no-fuss. Was it in the very nature of yellow liberalism to be insensitive, since its mission was to call attention to injustice and to itself? And to its own virtue; also its refined taste? Would I have shrimps with a Cantonese sauce? Bean sprouts with tarragon?) But as we went along I found Han sweet and easy. There was a steadiness about him….

  Then I realized: I had never since childhood been in any relationship but one of subservience to a man who was, or seemed, in control of his own destiny. Yes, he was rich indeed, for he could afford to be definite. Assurance, generosity, and arrogant tactlessness! The care of such a man made a woman (white-skinned) feel both relaxed and wary.

  Ai ai, Rock, you turtle!

  Then came the first of the savory dishes, and at once I noticed something peculiar—as Han, it seemed, did not; at least, he said nothing about it. Instead of serving the courses in common bowls from which we would both help ourselves, the waiter brought separate bowls of each food for Han and for me. I let the matter pass. Probably just a question of form where mixed parties of yellows and whites were concerned. How I was looking forward to this feast in the famous Three Kingdoms! I tasted a nip of the sweet-mustard pork….

  Pfoo! My tongue curled and shriveled. The sauce? Was this what the yellows called delicious? I tried the shrimp. Hai! Hai! The same knife-edged stringency. The beautiful egg roll: the same foul fire.

  Then I waked up. It was salt. All my dishes were steeped in salt. There was no social problem as to color. A place like this made absolutely no fuss….

  “What’s the matter?” said Han.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat, eat! You don’t come to the Three Kingdoms every day.”

  “That’s just it. I’m too excited.” I reached a hand out for his again—this time I was mobilized. I would not let myself be surprised again by deep feeling. I sat and watched him eat. We talked. He was a nice man. He asked shy questions about my life, and I decided to tell him the truth: I was a reeler, I worked ten hours a day, my man had left me.

  I determined not to ask Han, “Why did you invite me here? Why do you go to the Enclave? What are you searching for among white people?” I remembered meeting a young prostitute in Moth’s compartment one evening, a hard white child, Snow Pollen, who said with numerous curses, “They”—meaning her clients—“all ask, ‘Why do you do this? Why are you a whore?’ They ask the question after they have given it to you. They never ask before.” I felt a delicate tension in Han. He was not a ruffian. He told me that he was the second son of a textile merchant. His father and his older brother were men of great force; there was no room for him in the hong. He had wanted to be a scholar, but in the commercial society of this city, scholarship was felt to be effeminate and backward-looking. His parents had arranged a marriage to a girl of “good family” but bad blood—she and her kin all had warped jaws; she was interested in amassing a collection of T’ang Dynasty sculptures and did not mind what he did. Ai, I was wary, I saw how my friend Han was building a picture of a man starving for understanding, sympathy, fondling. He was putting out his gossamer net.

  Yet something strange was happening to me. I was coming to know a yellow person, as I had never known one. Always I had seen yellows as if from below—with perhaps a helpless child’s uplooking foreshortening: balloon legs, tapering torso, little head aloft. I had at last become, I realized, thoroughly insulated from the yellow race. I lived in the Enclave and worked in a row of white women. Old Frog at the filature was the only yellow I saw in all this city as a human being, and even she seemed a kind of mechanism, an instrument of the plant for which I worked and she policed. Yes, the only yellow role I really knew with intimacy was the police function.

  Now I was being offered new intimacies. Han was a person. When he spoke of himself as a son he was already no longer part of the institution of yellowness. His father was a fiercely acquisitive man and had no patience with a son who was pale and stayed up all night reading Water Margin, sometimes called All Men Are Brothers. Han told me about the morning when his father, ready to go off to his hong, had found him with the novel and had become enraged.

  A carriage was waiting on Foochow Road for Han, when we left the Three Kingdoms, and he took me rid
ing in it. He grew quiet and pressed his upper arm against mine. Once I felt his palm on my thigh. His hand began to move, and I lifted it off and away. That was all; he took me to the edge of the Enclave, and we got down, and he walked with me partway to my puzzle box: but not beyond Dog Road, for that would have taken him into a crowded area where it was not quite safe for a yellow man to be seen walking after dark with a white woman.

  As we parted he asked me to join him again the following evening: He would meet me in his carriage at the Bund, across from the Telegraph Hong.

  Now began a series of adventures which for me were all new. Han, touchingly infatuated, gave me glimpses of yellow life. He showed me the Settlement, both its night side and, on my days off, its sunlit streets of shops—a glitter of curios, a hong where lacquered coffins for the very rich were made and sold, a display of scrolls with paintings of mist-touched mountains that could only loom in gifted dreams. Little surprises: he gave me one day a pet live dragonfly leashed by a thread to a wand, its blue veins breathtakingly netted in its iridescent lantern-paper wings. Hai, he bought me a purse the shape of a fat little tiger in the shop where Top Man was shroff; Top Man, sad white snob, seeing that I was with an upper-class yellow man, came fluttering out of his cage to attach his recognition to me. Han took me to Chang Su-ho’s Gardens, where we rode the water chute and watched the cyclists racing, and late at night fountains of fireworks sprayed the sky in what seemed an effort to hang new sparks in the highest constellations, the Bushel, the Mansion, the Throne of the Five Emperors.

  In all this time Han treated me with utmost respect, never touching me except shoulder-to-shoulder as if by accident when we rode in his carriage, and I became filled up with an emotion which I confused with gratitude. He (yellow) was so kind to me (white)! He (man) was so considerate of me (woman)! I suppose my murmurs of thanks began to be touched with a slight scent of venery, but at first I did not realize any such thing.