White Lotus

by John Hersey

  We knocked at a double-leafed door. An attendant led us around a folding screen into a spacious chamber, and there, sitting in a carved ebony chair, like a prefect in his yamen, with his hands drooped on the ends of the chair arms, sat a round-bellied white man in a fine silk gown. I noticed—the frill of his hands on the arms made me think he wanted this to be seen first—that he had long fingernails, in the style of idle yellows.

  Ayah, he was lofty! His name, Benign Warmth. He nodded to Mink, squinting with what appeared to be suppressed distaste. I had the impression, when he reopened his eyes, that he was either so nearsighted or so self-centered that he could not delineate us clearly, and that he took what he perceived of Mink’s infirmity for an appropriately respectful cringe.

  Mink said, “This is White Lotus. I thought perhaps…as she can read and write…”

  The superintendent nodded again, his mouth a tight little bag of patience.

  “I thought you might have work for her.”

  “This institution,” the superintendent said in musical tones, “is the charitable good work of certain mandarins’ wives. They are remarkable women, Small Mink.” (Hai! The hog! Using the contemptuous diminutive to a white person!) “They give freely of their time and of their husbands’ money. Let me tell you a story. One day Big Madame Hsüeh” (Hoo! Delicious! The in-between turtle turns around and uses a magnific title for a yellow person!), “wife of Hsüeh Li-fang of the Censorate, a lady of great refinement, came to see me about the refurbishing of our refectory, and I was saying to her” (So! It is not a story about the generous grandam at all, but rather about what he was saying!), “I said, ‘Hsüeh T’ai-t’ai, there is something I want to tell you about the white race. Do you see these children playing in the courtyard here? Do you see that urchin we call Tiger Ears? The one with the devil’s top? Perhaps you’ll say he looks irresponsible. He does. He looks like a bad boy. He is. He is a bad boy, I admit freely. But underneath—here’s the point, T’ai-t’ai, this is something you may not know about the white race—underneath he has a sense of duty. He’ll grow up into a dutiful man, a white man. This is our claim to merit, Big Madame. This boy, this Tiger Ears, knows the difference between yellow and white skin. He needn’t be taught that, because it’s instinctive in him; he understands what the Master meant when he said, “Lizard, do not leap, you will never have feathers.”’ ”

  “Yes, Big Venerable,” said Mink, out of habit.

  After much more of this I was hired at a paltry wage, not for my reading and writing but simply as a servant-attendant. I was to live in the orphanage.

  Having no property, I did not even return to Dowager’s but asked Mink to tell her, when next he saw her, that I would pay the rent I owed her as soon as I earned it; and to tell Rock where I was.

  I was given a slice of a k’ang in the nurses’ quarters. The orphanage was housed in ample grounds: five courtyards, each with its hall and side chambers, verandas and terraces—a jewel of a moon bridge swooped over a tiny pool where goldfish philosophized under floating lily leaves. The beams of the main rooms were decorated in the vulgarly ambitious taste of the late owner.

  The asylum harbored three hundred white children of unknown parentage, all under twelve years of age. Upon their actual or estimated twelfth birthday, a matron told me, they were promoted like young scholars—turned loose, that is, to survive or starve in the chaos of the Capital. For every orphan who turned twelve and was spewed out, twenty other younger ones were at large in the city waiting for admittance. Why so many bastard white children? Because among whites marriage (Dolphin! My husband! Poor selfish Dolphin!) was a travesty—had been ever since the first days of slavery, when marriage had meant merely a master’s blessing on fornication, or his urging his chattels to breed.

  For our three hundred children we had a staff of five matrons and a dozen attendants, all women but for the gate guard.

  Most of my work was, after all my effort to avoid it, domestic labor: sweeping, cleaning ashes from k’ang ovens, passing food in the refectory, and washing bowls and kitchen utensils. But I was at least serving whites, and I had, each morning, a saving hour with the children at play in the courtyards.

  One day I observed the “bad” boy of whom Benign Warmth had spoken, named Tiger Ears, and I saw that his “badness” was a state of being, a quality that the pompous superintendent would be quite incapable of tolerating: elusiveness.

  We were playing a form of tag, and I called out once to warn him, “Tiger Ears!” The urchin seemed not to hear me, but I could tell that his unheeding was put on. I swooped close to him and repeated his name.

  He looked straight at me and said, “Whom do you want?”

  “You.”

  “You have the wrong name.” (A glint of excitement was embedded deep in the aspic of his eyes.)

  “What is your name?”

  “White Lotus,” he said.

  This took my wind. I had no idea he had even noticed me. “How did you know my name?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “You don’t look like a girl.”

  “I’m not.” (Indignantly.)

  “White Lotus is a girl’s name.”

  “So? You said it was your name.”

  “You just said it was yours.”

  “You’re confused,” he said, and I was beginning to be.

  Tiger Ears’ elusiveness, I soon found, had a theme. It was that Tiger Ears was not only not Tiger Ears, he was not anybody. He was, accordingly, unknowable, unpredictable, unaccountable, un-punishable; and although he had a round face with prick ears, sturdy legs, chapped knuckles, and wobbly wrists that could belong to only one personage, he was, in sum, unidentifiable.

  He was quick and clever, and I think he had sensed that if he could avoid being anybody until puberty, then, as a white man, he might easily sail through the rest of his life incognito, so to speak, and therefore unnoticed, untouched, and irresponsible. A paradox: In his shrewd and premature assumption of a grown white man’s basic cipherdom he had made himself into a vivid child rather than a nonentity, a scourge to Benign Warmth, who, to avoid trouble with the mandarins’ wives, wanted his charges to be genuine nothings rather than counterfeit nothings.

  In the women’s quarter, the main hall of the fourth courtyard, I shared a k’ang with a matron named Belted Persimmon, “a settled person,” I heard her called one day, a woman who could not have worked anywhere but in an orphanage. She believed, in the face of daily proofs to the contrary, that every human being (even yellow) was good and kind. When some of us laughed to her face at her sentimentality, she put her hands up to her cheeks and wept with pleasure at what she called our wonderful love of life, which produced such happy laughter. She was really a fool! The children, however, flocked to her as chicks to a hen, and most of us were secretly jealous of her spell over them.

  After my exchange with Tiger Ears I talked with Belted Persimmon about him.

  “I wish you could have seen him,” she said, “when they announced the Number Wheel. They’ve set up the big wheel for the selections, you know, in the Board of Rites, only a few streets from here, so we had a lot of chatter about it among ourselves. Tiger Ears has big ears; listens to everything. He was thrilled—wanted to be a number and ride around on a wheel. For days you could only get his attention by shouting numbers at him, and he had the idea that the Emperor was going to win the war with arithmetic—yang numbers were stronger than yin numbers, he said.”

  One of the other matrons, named Hemp Hands, said, “It will take more than an abacus to win this war.”

  Everyone except Belted Persimmon was gloomy about the war.

  The Seditionists of the outer provinces had pushed a force into South-of-the-River Province, and the yellows in the Capital, growing fearful, tended to turn snarling on the whites as being the cause of it all. There had been several ugly beatings. Belted Persimmon rem
ained blithe. “The Emperor’s decency will win the war,” she said. “The justice of his Grand Harmonious Mercy Errand will win it.”

  “Ayah,” Hemp Hands said, “we’ll all be slaves again. You’ll see.”

  The company of such women depressed me. I was lonely. In time the bubbling cheer of the orphans got on my nerves, and I felt as if I myself were under durance within locked gates.

  One afternoon the gate guard came running to the kitchens, where I happened to be working, and said there was someone to see me.

  I went to the outer gate. It was Rock!

  “Come for a stroll,” he said.

  “I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to get permission.”

  “What do you need with permission? Just leave the place.”

  “It’s my food bowl.”

  “Find another! There are plenty of ways to eat.”

  Ai, Rock’s surly face, his frown and hard mouth, lifted my spirits. I asked him how the pigeons were.

  “I’ve left that fat yellow bitch,” he said. “I have a hole here in the Tartar City. When can I see you?”

  “What do you want to do, Rock—stretch my crop so I can steal rice for you?”

  “Not a bad idea!” He smiled; a sudden thaw.

  We arranged to meet on my next rest day.

  Rock

  He came early, while the city’s myriad crows were still shouting to each other the astonishing news that another day had dawned, and when I reached the gate he said, “Hurry! Something to show you.”

  “But this is my day off, this is my day not to hurry.”

  “Wait. This will interest you.”

  When we set out, he said, “First I want you to see the hole I live in”—though this was not the main sight he meant to show me, he added—and at a pace which gave me a stitch in my side he took me to it.

  He had called his new place a hole, and it was just about that—less a residence than a burrow. In the western part of the Tartar City, in a crowded region of stables, abattoirs, carters’ inns, and mat-weavers’ shops, stood an abandoned lamasery now serving as a warren for too many whites, and Rock’s room was a former cell of a monk: a man’s height squared, without a k’ang or even a chest. The floor was dirt, the light was dim. Camels were tethered in the courtyard, and a heap of Mongol imports lay under perpetual guard—salted carcasses of sheep and of a species of deer with twisted horns; bales of felt; vats of butter which tasted, Rock said (having stolen some from under the guards’ noses), like cheese and rancid suet mixed.

  Rock asked me to brew a pot of tea on a little tripod brazier he had, and in the half light we acted a domestic scene—sat and sipped with nothing to say. Rock brooded; I waited for him to make some move. But he wanted nothing more just then of me than tea, it seemed, and when we had finished he jumped up and led me out.

  He would not tell me what we were going to see. When I asked, he opened his eyes wide and round, as a juggler would who was about to set a pair of plates spinning at the tops of slender wands.

  Here was Rock as we walked: a big man, keyed up, pumping shallow sighs out of his chest; with a tuck in his upper lip which was like a little purse for sneers, in case he might need to spend one in a hurry; muscles for a certain squint, expressive of suspicion, of skepticism, around his brown eyes, so often used as to have formed tiny ridges and wrinkles which also served for ambiguous smiles; deep lines around his mouth that seemed to have come from biting back hasty words.

  We came to a crowd that had clotted all the way across a wide street, both yellows and whites, and Rock wedged a way into its center, pulling me after him.

  And there, deep in the open yard of the Board of Rites, I saw on display, right where it would soon be put to use, the big wheel itself, the Number Wheel.

  Even before I could look at it closely, I felt the stretch of tension in the crowd. Rock must have felt it, too, for he had a noisy spell—spoke and laughed in tones that were surely provocative to these yellows with parched eyes.

  “Off an elephant cart,” Rock said with that metal burr on the edge of his voice.

  The wheel was indeed enormous, and it may well have been taken from one of the elephant-drawn land vessels in which the Emperor had used to voyage to the Temple of Heaven. Three or four mandarins were walking back and forth on the platform on which the wheel stood, evidently trying it out. The metal tire had been removed from the perimeter, and it appeared that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small slits had been cut into the wheel’s felly, and the mandarins had wedged little bamboo slabs, like gate chips, into the notches. After a while they turned the wheel, which rolled heavily on its supported hub, and the bamboo slabs made a whirring noise against a pointer, or stopper, at one side, and we could see that when the wheel ran down and the whirring ceased, the pointer lay against one of the slabs: this would be some man’s number, and he would be chosen for the war, when the selections began.

  Up to this time the wheel had been imaginary, legendary as it were, just an idea, just words in announcements and a thing for us to talk about. But there it was! Varnished wood, scores of spokes, a huge circle. This was the wheel the yellows throughout the city considered a threat and an insult, and seeing its actuality, seeing the mandarins rehearsing its use, seeing one of the grandly dressed gentlemen on the platform put a hand again to one of the spokes to start it up, hearing the whirring, the yellows here in the street became, as we could feel, sullenly furious.

  But the fury was static. Nothing changed in the crowd. Small clumps formed, chatted in murmurs, dissolved, re-formed. We found ourselves at one point in a group of about a dozen whites of both sexes. Some of the white men were joking about the wheel under their breaths.

  When we had listened for a while Rock said with ill-suppressed vehemence, not trying as hard as he might have to keep his voice down to the range of the white circle, “We all should go and fight. It’s our war. It’s about us. It’s shit-mouth cowards like you,” he said to the last speaker, “who have us where we are.”

  But Rock, you gave a fake name to the registrars! I remembered Rock’s and Groundnut’s sarcasm about the Mercy Errand—but I recalled, too, the tremor of voice underlying their jibes—the hidden attachment to the Emperor’s grandiose professions. Hope for freedom! Mockery of hope! This was the horrible double knot with which we were always bound. The yellows called us simple, but nothing could ever be simple for us, nothing could be unitary. Idealism and foul reality; hope and hopelessness; trust and suspicion; self-reliance and humiliating dependence—every thought, every act, every desire of ours had its own reciprocal lodged in its heart. Was this the source of Rock’s quarrelsome posture? Were these what attracted me to him—the altruism couched in his selfishness, the honey in his bitterness, the pity in his anger? The pulls between the Peace and the Nose in him, the Gabe and the Dolphin?

  I had a flurry of my own with him: about Groundnut. This was odd. We stood around talking, as the yellows also did. Whir. And again, Whir. The glistening spokes revolved and slowed. We stood talking. The yellows’ anger was constant, and nothing seemed to change. The yellows themselves were chatting, as the wheel revolved and revolved, winding something up in all of us.

  “What about your friend? Is he still with Dowager?”

  “Groundnut? He has to stay in that neighborhood—the beggars’ league.”

  “I can see your leaving Dowager. Could you just walk out on him?”

  Bang! Off went Rock’s brass cannon! Friend? What kind of friend was Groundnut? He would steal the toenails off your toes.

  Whir.

  I was beginning to know this quarrelsome Rock, and I said quietly, “The way you say that makes me think you’re sorry you left Dowager’s.”

  Well! Such fireworks! Groundnut was no friend—a cheap parasite; and worse. Qualities for which everyday adjectives would not suffice, and which could only be bounded by the vagueness o
f obscenities.

  Then: “And what do you know about friendship? Didn’t you just walk out? You didn’t even come back to tell us you were leaving. You sent Mink. I’ll wager you haven’t paid back a copper of what you owe Dowager.”

  I had not. With little to spend money for, I was saving most of the pittance I earned. I felt myself blush, because I had just about decided not to honor my debt to Dowager. I justified cheating her of the principal by the fact of her having demanded a cheating interest.

  But I saw what Rock was doing, and I quietly persisted. What had estranged him from Groundnut?

  Rock calmed down and told me that their break had come one night, in a violent argument, when he had tried to persuade Groundnut to stop being a beggar. With an air of put-upon decency, Rock said he had tried to make Groundnut see that begging strengthened the yellows’ hands against us—that in his daily disguise Groundnut was living proof of the yellows’ view of us. I sensed something hollow in this report, something held back, but with a sudden feeling of boredom I decided not to pursue the quarrel any farther.

  Now, at the height of a whir of the wheel, I got a jolt.

  “Come and live with me,” Rock said.

  So this, rather than tea, was why he had wanted me to see his monk’s cubicle! I looked at his face. I cannot say that it was broadcasting any messages of deep emotion. He looked as bleak as the sky.

  “I have a good solid food bowl at the orphanage,” I said.

  Now his feeling came tumbling out—abuse. I heard the singing of the wheel behind his sharp talk—mixed up with it. Where was my spontaneity? Why did I behave like a slanthead? Why couldn’t I just do whatever I wanted? Why did I have to calculate everything—forty per cent interest here, just like Dowager, and forty per cent squeeze there, like the beggars’ league?

  I must admit he got under my skin—under my sensitive flea-pierced white skin; and I descended to: “What if staying in the orphanage is exactly what I want?”