White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I stood beside him for some time, then he turned to me. He recognized me at once. “They’ll come down,” he said. He spoke of Rock. “He came to see us. He seems to me to be ready. There’s a wonderful power in that man that makes me want to find him again.”

  The full force of this man’s confidence in his poor fellow white soul struck me, and I had to take a deep breath. Bare-Stick had thought Rock in a dangerous mood, Groundnut had called him “low.” But this man saw some sort of readiness, and strength!

  “My life is empty,” I said, “and I want to work for you.” For some reason I did not say “for the race.” I said “for you,” and perhaps meant “for myself.”

  A Word on a Grimy Slip

  On an unswept wharf at the bottom of the Bund I found him, the white man named Marvel, whom Moth had urged me to consult. His famous flag of bells, making the morning glisten with its fine tinkles, had attracted a crowd of both yellows and whites, and he was ready to commence. Moth had told me there would be feats first, then fortune-telling. Marvel wore ragged coolie trousers belted with sea rope, and his ribs made steps up his bare chest to his bony shoulders. His head was shaved; his eyes flew about for a moment like two bluebottles, grotesquely independent of each other.

  He placed six agate marbles in a pattern on a plank and using three inverted bowls began to shift the marbles in a dazzling confusion of appearances and disappearances; he kept uttering incantations. He held a marble against a winked eye and made as if to strike it with a fist, and—i-ko lang-tang!—the marble was tucked under the closed lid, the orb beneath seemed swollen by the blow; then he held up both arms showing empty coppices of hair in his armpits, whereupon the swelling vanished from his eye and he took the marble from under one armpit, and after it many others—more than had been on the plank—out from both armpits. He swallowed the marbles and excreted them from a nostril, pushed them in the other nostril and drew them from an ear. He swallowed a spherical donkey bell, of a walnut’s size—I could see the lump go down the thin neck among the netted veins—and began to leap, a warrior with a heavy sword, a monkey, a stiff-legged manikin, and with every jump we heard the bell inside him. He made vociferous demands for cumshaw. Then, coughing, gulping air, grimacing, crossing his eyes, turning a somersault, wheezing and coughing again, he vomited the bell. “Ayah,” he cried, slapping his shelved chest with his skinny wickerwork hands, “I’ve lost my food. I’m hungry.” He drew a seemingly endless breath, and all his guts seemed drawn up into his chest, and his abdomen was a cavern—skin against backbone; in this skeletal state he strutted about. Then he exhaled and drew in air deep once more, and this time the bellows in his chest descended to his bowels, and he became a balloon, as weirdly round as he had been concave, and strutted again. Then he took nine porcelain bowls, squeezed one under each arm, held one in his mouth, and fanned three out in each hand, and he whisked in a sudden effortless backward flip head over heels in the air, then flung himself in a forward flip, and not a bowl was lost.

  Coppers splattered on the Bund, and Marvel said he would look into the future for any who cared to know what they were about to do. “Yellows first, whites after.”

  I stood in the long line. I badly needed to know what I was about to do; ever since I had seen Runner I had felt unable to guide myself.

  Runner had welcomed my offer to help him and had suggested two possible courses: I could spread the news of Runner’s “method,” preparing the path at my filature for understanding and eventual enlistments; or I could go and live at the temple and directly proselytize worshippers there, as “sleeping birds.”

  Could I risk giving up my job? Throw away a sure living? Abandon Pigeon, who had trusted and helped me? Did I really believe in Runner’s “method”?

  Events of the past few days, since my visit to Groundnut and Runner, had made me wonder whether Old Arm, after all, might not have the better way.

  A new Municipal Council had been installed, under the chairmanship of a prominent yellow banker, Fu Lin-chia, who believed that the solution to all problems lay in the use of police. A sudden storm of police severity had fallen on the whole city, on Fukien rubbish as well as on the Enclave, on yellows as on whites—but with a special virulence on us. Council Chairman Fu called it Scrubbing Clean.

  Thinking one evening to talk with Mink, half hoping that he had seen Rock, and to get his advice, I went to his basket at drawing time. I found the place in a state of frigid propriety. Mink was there; his head was clear of opium fumes but he was in a panic. The whole chit lottery was getting a scrubbing, he said, and while this basket had not yet been raided, a police visitation was expected at any minute of any hour. What were they after? Nobody knew. They would come into a basket and rip it apart—breaking into locked rooms, scattering priceless bundles of unsold chits, beating up clerks who were mere employees. The Forgetfulness Hong still paid squeeze to the police. Mink’s fright was for his habit. Where would he get the money for it? Where would he smoke? The police had scoured the Golden Herons—cleaned out the back smoking room, that is; but hadn’t touched the workrooms or the big front chamber. Some people said Old Scrubber Fu was a little on the pipe himself. It was all capricious and mad. Far from getting counsel myself, I ended by urging Mink to go and see Groundnut and Runner.

  On my day off I went to Silverfinger’s to pay interest on my borrowings—loans for gowns that I no longer used. Hai! The lovely palace of usury was shut tight. Six yellow policemen stood guard at the door. A crowd of depositors and borrowers had gathered. There was no disorder. A grim silence hung over those who had entrusted their meager savings to the great Silverfinger—and even over those, too, like me, who had taken and used his money. I asked neighbors why the place had been closed. No one knew. One man whispered, “Old Scrubber wanted those ingots we used to see stacked up behind the velvet curtains. He stole ’em.” The man nodded, as if this speculation were known fact. I had had no love for Silverfinger, nor for Duke, who worked here, and I supposed I was free of my debt now, yet still I felt a shock to my pride, an anger. This had been a white money palace; the shroffs who had issued me loans had been my own kind.

  The next day at the filature I heard an alarming report: the previous evening the police had dealt a beating to Old Arm himself. It was said that a squad of the so-called Special Detachment—being a pack of tall, burly mercenaries from the northern provinces, notorious brutes of the force—had hung about the wharves at payoff time, and, on hearing some sort of minor quarrel among the white coolies, had used it as a pretext to swoop in, seize Old Arm, who had not even been involved in the quarrel, and to administer to him a clubbing that left him unconscious and bruised from head to foot.

  In the late morning a message came along the line of reelers: Old Arm could be seen in person in the filature’s waiting yard during the noon break, for he was making the rounds of the city to display, in his resilient person, the works of yellow brutality.

  Of course I went out to see him. He came round in his wharfman’s rags, stripped to the waist, a mass of black-and-blue welts.

  I felt, and shared, the surge of anger among the women of the filature.

  Old Arm spoke a few sentences to us—a call. His voice was low yet wildly inflammatory. “Why is it you who have to work? Why can’t your men find work? Why can’t your men get jobs, as the Fukien rubbish does, in the match factories, the flour mills, the enamelware works, the paper plants, the printeries, the rubber-goods factories and leather-goods factories, the foundries, the food plants, the cotton mills? Why are our men restricted to housework, ricksha-pulling, and wharf labor? As soon as I am strong again, we are going to begin. Be ready. Do not worry about secrecy. I want the yellows to know that we are coming—with bamboo and stones, and knuckles, and pieces of pipe, and bricks. I solemnly promise to give back every bruise on this body. We know what we want and we mean to get it. Be ready.”

  He hurried off to visit other filatures.


  The Enclave that evening was electrified. At every turn one saw groups buzzing. I myself was caught up in the general air of expectation and excitement. With incredible folly the authorities had made a hero, a near-martyr, of Old Arm; I felt his pains in my body, I felt I had been passive too long, I was restless and angry.

  I went to see Moth. Her tigers were in a half-drunk ecstasy of boastfulness and loudmouthing. They flapped about the tiny compartment, cutting the air with their hands, raising their knees with force; they had engaged to go out with one of Old Arm’s flying squads….

  I was near the top of the line moving toward Marvel. He took only one or two minutes on each fortune. He had put on a scarlet tunic, and he was sitting cross-legged on the ground behind a box covered with a dusty square of velvet; from the box he took an endless series of talismans, bits of paper, magical signs. I saw that for some he waved and kissed a symbol of the nearly forgotten religion of the white God—an ivory cross. He spoke rapidly in a murmur which only the one person seated opposite him could hear.

  My turn came. I sat in the dirt. Marvel never seemed to look at me; his eyes were hooded and veins stood out on his forehead. Fumbling and handling his shabby charms, his wonder objects, he began speaking to me in a babble, giving me by his clairvoyance one astonishment after another. “Your filature…I see that you want to stop reeling, you will stop reeling. You are not alone, child. The bruises were shocking, you have seen signs of worse—bamboo—a broad back. You miss someone, you search for someone. A long absence. You will work for the race….”

  I felt as if I were being rushed along by an irresistible wind. My chest ached, and I thought I would sob. For the race! Yes! I would work for my white brothers and sisters, and for the one I missed after a long, long absence. That wild wind roared in my ears. My eyes filled up as if smarting from its cutting force.

  Marvel took a small square of paper from his covered box; a pen and inkblock were beside him. He wrote a character. Blinking my blurred eyes, I saw it. It was “temple”! Had he divined that I could read? After writing the character he struck his foreteeth with the fingernails of his right hand three times, and said, “The sun rises bright and large. This paper will banish doubt and misfortune. From my mouth I will spit true fire. In my eyes are steel darts. I call on the god of the pig. Who guards the temple? When the spirit enters the eighth quarter the answer will come. Place five copper coins in my right hand. Take this paper. Walk twenty steps to the northeast and swallow the paper, and you will know what you must do.”

  I paid him and I did walk twenty paces in a direction which I thought to be northeasterly, but when I looked at the paper in my hand it seemed trivial and grimy to me; I could not put it in my mouth. I knew, anyway, what I must do.

  A Comb of Mud Cells

  I moved to the temple. I moved that very evening. Groundnut, who seemed to be in charge of the practical affairs of the shop-back, gave me a litter in the windowless storage space where odds and ends of ritual and housekeeping were kept—bundles of incense punk, stacks of paper cutouts of cash and sacred symbols, brooms, buckets, baskets; and I lay there warmly clothed, for the first time in my life, in a sense of self. This was the first room I had ever had to myself! This was the first important decision about my life that had not been forced on me; I had made a choice. But what about Marvel, with ribs like winter branches and his piercing mind? I told myself, at this distance, that Marvel’s “clairvoyance” had all been mere observation or coincidental guesswork, that he had known me for a reeler by looking at my hands, had guessed that, like many reelers, I had seen Old Arm’s bruises and yearned to work for the race—he could not guess how; his word “temple” had probably come from an assumption that I was, like the rest, superstitious. Yes, I told my newly seen self, I had chosen: I had decided what path to take!

  Runner had received me, too, with a delight that made me feel I was a separate and valuable entity. He showed me every corner of the temple, every birdcage, the idols, his own room, the watchman’s cubby by the postern gate where Bare-Stick lived. Bare-Stick hugged me with impressive sincerity; he had been doing the temple cooking and was very glad to see me.

  As I lay on my litter, full of myself, I began to wonder where Runner would lead me after all.

  Runner was disturbed by what he had heard about the storm Old Arm was stirring up. He was opposed to Old Arm’s blustering hints of violence, mainly because he felt that the use of violence would be a hopelessly dangerous means of trying to get what we wanted, for surely the yellows would not only overpower Old Arm’s flying squads and strikers and “spontaneous” rioters; they would as well punish many an innocent and still docile white. Besides, Runner was being unduly rushed by Old Arm, who was starting his campaign too soon; Runner wanted time to gather forces for a trial of his method.

  And now the ebb tide from my sense of myself to self-indulgence was streaming fast, and in the name of wanting to help Runner I made a decision that filled me with such selfish delight that I laughed out loud in my own dark room.

  The next morning I told Groundnut (not quite daring to tell Runner) that I must do some personal errands that might take all day long; once these were taken care of, I would be able to settle into wholehearted work at the temple. Ai, I thought, I have a surprise in mind for you priests!

  I hurried along the Bund to the hemp wharves, and there, as I had hoped to do, I found Mink peddling lottery chits.

  Mink looked sick. He was thinner than ever, his face was greenish, he perspired, he kept wiping snot on his sleeve. He told me in a weak voice that since the scrubbing of the Golden Herons he had been having great difficulty finding pipes, and had only been able to smoke irregularly; he was in pain, and was afraid.

  I said I needed his help. I wanted to find Rock.

  What a sunburst on Mink’s gray face at those words of mine! It was as if I had offered him some magical salvation, some swift cure—or, indeed, a pipe.

  “Ai, we’ll find the turtle,” he said. “We’ll go to his ricksha concessionaire. But I have to get rid of these chits first.”

  “I’ll help you sell them. Give me half.”

  And I did very well as a chit-vendor, too. One almost never saw girls running chits, and I suppose I was a novelty for the wharfmen. I flirted with them and made them feel that my chits would open the way to mysterious pleasures. I sold twice as many as Mink, even though he had his regular customers. We were done long before the noon drawing. Mink carried the cash to the basket, and then we were free.

  Rock’s concessionaire was the Swift-as-Seasons Company, which had its grounds on Horse Road—a large walled lot capable of holding nine hundred rickshas, where, when we arrived, there were only a dozen vehicles, disabled with broken springs or shafts, or bent mudguards, or flat tires, being worked on by grease-streaked white mechanics, while across one half of the lot clotheslines were strung on which hundreds of ricksha coolies’ company coats were being hung out to dry by white washerwomen running back and forth from huge laundering caldrons.

  We went to the concessionaire’s office, a shabby mat shed where two hirers and a half dozen cashiers, all yellows, sat swilling tea; along one wall were the cashiers’ cages where the pullers turned in their fares and drew their percentages.

  One of the hirers thought twisted Mink wanted to work as a puller, and he broke out laughing. He flapped a hand toward Mink and said, “Get out, man. We don’t hire grasshoppers.”

  Mink said with flesh-crawling humility, “We want to find one of your pullers, Old Good. Where can we wait to meet him when he comes in?”

  “They don’t come in till dark. And some don’t come in then.”

  “We can wait. Where would you like us to wait?”

  One of the cashiers spoke up. “What’s this turtle’s name you’re looking for?”

  “Rock Liu.”

  The cashier turned to one of his colleagues. “Rock Liu? Isn
’t he one of the ones they took the tin from?”

  The second cashier said, “That’s right. Last week.”

  The first said to Mink, “He doesn’t work any more. They took his license away. You won’t find him here.”

  I said, “What did he do? Why did they steal his bowl?”

  The hirers and cashiers all laughed—at the note, I suppose, of indignation in my voice. Then the hirer who had first spoken to Mink shrugged and said, “Police.”

  Out in the street we decided to go all the way to the rickshaw-pullers’ mud village on the long chance of finding Rock there. We had a two-hour walk, through a wide district of middle-class yellow shops, past the many splendid plants where yellows could work and whites could not—printeries, foundries, factories for small goods—and through a respectable residential section; until at last we crossed a creek and, penetrating a thick screening hedge of clumped bamboo, we came to a scene of squalor and desolation that froze my heart—a great plain where, it seemed, a crowd of creatures had encamped while waiting permission, or opportunity, to become human. There were hundreds and hundreds of mud huts like the earths of dirty foxes. No streets, or even alleys, marked off this swarm of hovels. Paths of packed dirt led every which way. Scraps of salvage, broken tiles, bits of corrugated tin, rotten boards—the huts were patched and bandaged with whatever might be found or stolen. Worry-ravaged women and filthy half-naked children were to be seen working and playing.

  And so we began what seemed a hopeless task—finding one soul in this great comb of mud cells. We began to ask. Rock Liu? A man called Rock? Head after head shook us wordlessly away. I thought once of Pigeon: her home was one of these huts, her family lived here, she slept here in this hell at night—and how cheerful, how responsive, how sensitive, how steady she had been by day! Who was sitting at the basin opposite her now? Did she miss me? I felt a pang of guilt at the way I had used her that last day and then abandoned her.