by John Hersey
“All right,” I said. “Little Root. Come forward.”
I saw the flush of agony at being singled out spread with astonishing speed across the boy’s face, but I was counting on him, for he was the brightest one, and in him, every so often, I had thought I had seen a flicker of desire, of ambition; and, yes, I was counting on him, not simply to recite well for his own sake, or as an example to the others, but also to raise my own dead-weight spirits that morning.
He stepped to the plank. I had the old book, with its page corners perfectly expressive of intellectual wilt, spread out before me. The boy’s eyes evaded mine, and his hands twisted the ends of the dirty sash of his trousers. He stood for a reluctant moment facing me, then turned his back on me, tilted his face to the sky, took a deep breath, and began to howl, with great rapidity, and in a bawling tone, like that of a mule crying either in pain or in some sort of protest at his own endless muleness, all the wisdom he had memorized: “ ‘If men want their country well ruled, they should first bring order to their families. If they want to be in charge of their homes, they should mend their own deportment. To have good behavior, they should whet their consciences. To repair their consciences, they must be sincere. To gain in sincerity, they should gain in knowledge. To get knowledge requires a study of all things, one by one….’ ” The high-pitched, unchanged boy-voice wailed out these great assumptions as if they were descriptions of aches and pains. Little Root’s memory was sharp; his indifference was massive. I began to feel angry, perhaps with myself, and I ordered the boy to face me and started questioning him about the couplets.
We came to the line kou pu chiao. I asked Little Root to paraphrase it. He began speaking gibberish. Something about moonlit nights, robbers in the streets, a courtyard gate unbarred.
Then the key to the riddle came to me. The proper translation for kou pu chiao was: “if one is not learned,” but the phrase was a homophone for something else a village urchin could more readily grasp: “if dogs don’t bark.” Then courtyards carelessly barred will be robbed! Little Root hadn’t the faintest conception of the precepts that he had, with such harrowing diligence, recorded in his aural memory.
I found myself weeping. Little Root staggered backward, as if bodily affronted by my loss of control. He ran and sat down in his place, himself beginning to whimper.
Soon in command of myself, I made a decision which I suppose had been forming for some time. For days that classic line, “a study of all things, one by one,” had been beating obsessively at the back door of my mind. I left my place behind my desk, and I went around to the children and sat cross-legged on the ground, and I gathered them close beside me. I told them that we would continue with the Tri-Metrical, which I dared not abandon, but that I was now also going to begin to teach them to read and write the names of the things around us. Paper and brushes and inkblocks the upper hand would not allow us to have, I said; dust and our forefingers would have to serve as writing materials. In fact—I spoke with all the gravity I could amass—the yellows must never hear about this part of our schooling.
In the few seconds it had taken me to say these things I had, I could see, stirred my miserable ragged scholars for the very first time. Conspiracy! There was a fire in Old Tiger’s eye, Little Fat had stopped chewing his sleeve!
Within a week the dirty childish fingers flicking the courtyard dust had begun to trace, with a wild assurance, the shapes of names for mud, millet, corn roots, manure, almanac, bedbug, pickled radish, fox….
Harvest of Defeatism
The first flush of tea leaves was more than ready for cropping, but we were obliged to wait for Bare-Stick to finish his own, so he could help us treat our picked leaves. One evening Manager Wu asked Rock when he planned to take in his harvest, and Rock flew into a rage. “You know that’s an unlucky question! Are you trying to conjure me? Take your dirty owl eyes off me!”
Manager Wu shrugged and said, “Ayah, listen to that turtle-mothered hambone! You’d think no one in this valley had ever cropped a tea bush before.”
All the same, Rock had a right, on the level of the paralyzing nescience all around us in the lower hand, to be angry, for he was reacting to an honored superstition, of which Manager Wu was assuredly aware: that a man should never pry into another man’s crops.
At last, one night, Bare-Stick told us he would be ready to help us on the following days.
At dawn the next morning, Rock took me to Groundnut’s temple, where we burned paper money and incense before the figure—one of those skin-cracked, tattered gentlemen sitting in a row—which Groundnut had quite arbitrarily designated as that of Shen Nung, god of agriculture. Rock traded with Groundnut a half catty of side meat for a string of firecrackers, which Rock took to the tea strips and set off there before we began picking, to drive away evil spirits.
As we started our work, each dragging along a large basket, pinching off only the delicate bright-green new leaves, I thought, with a feeling of deep melancholy, of another first picking, in another crop, with Moth, at Dirty Hua’s, so long ago—the day she told me, framing her pouting face in the foliage between us, about the faraway mountain. Was I any better off now? Was I any more my own agent than then? Was there any mountain to run to from here? Could it be that the fight against the yellows for freedom was so far from won that it might indeed only be beginning? I remembered once having decided, “Only the powerful are free.” I felt just now so weak!
Hooo! This was unrewarding work! What a small volume of leaves came, at last, from each bush!
“Who’s that turtle lurking over there in Ox Yang’s strip?” Rock asked me under his breath.
“He has a white beard,” I said. “I can see the beard when he looks this way.”
It did not take us long to figure it out: Provisioner Lung, spying on his own tenants.
This infuriated Rock. “That’s one devil the firecrackers didn’t drive away,” he said between his teeth.
Provisioner Lung, apparently realizing that we had seen him, arose from a squatting position and came into our strip, cheerily waving his spectacles at us and murmuring good wishes and blessings on our crop.
When he bent over and closely inspected the bushes we had stripped, however, he frowned. “You’re scanting a third of your crop,” he said, shaking his head. “Come here. Watch me. Use the fingernails! Pinch. Pinch. Pinch. Like that, you see? Pinch. Every bit of the leaf.”
“I was told to be careful not to take off too much. They said I’d crimp the buds of the next flush.”
“Hai! The flush will come. Don’t worry, Rock Lui, the flush will come. The point is, this crop is worth something.”
“To whom?” Rock asked with a bitterness that was all the more poignant in being subdued, under control.
Provisioner Lung peered in Rock’s basket and glumly shook his head but said nothing more and walked away along the tea rows.
All day Rock cropped tea in silence. I was low; I did not feel that I was exempt from his anger, which seemed to have spread out in all directions.
Late in the afternoon we returned to the village with the baskets of our crop loaded on the donkey cart that Provisioner Lung had furnished us.
Bare-Stick was waiting at our gate. When we unloaded our harvest, he said, “Is that all? Have you cropped your whole tenancy? Is that all you could get?”
“That’s every leaf,” Rock said.
Bare-Stick said we would never make it on that sort of crop. “Ayah, the turtle!” he broke out in his loud braggart voice—and we understood well enough whom he meant to curse. “My own crop is thin again this time. Every flush, I think, this time I’m going to be able to crop more than enough! But what happens? The bushes shrink in front of my eyes! The bastard leaves get smaller and smaller!”
Bare-Stick had brought with him, rolled up under his arm, some coarse jute mats on which to spread the leaves for withering, and stakes t
o make frames on which to stretch the cloths. We worked until well after dark, by lantern light, setting up the tats in our courtyard and spreading the leaves out on them. Bare-Stick, aware of Rock’s fuming, reacted to it, opportunistically, by flirting with me, and I was so heartily sick by then of Rock’s wordless anger that I, with a feeling of reckless gaiety-in-despair, joked and played with Bare-Stick, leading him on and behaving as if Rock’s silence were his total absence. My behavior did not improve matters, but Rock and I were too exhausted, when our work was finished and Bare-Stick had left, to fight with each other, and we lay down on our hard sleeping platform without eating and without speaking, and plunged into a sleep of bad dreams and groans.
The next day was sunny, and Bare-Stick came in midafternoon, and we took the leaves in baskets in our cart to his courtyard. This was our first sight of his home; it gave me a new chill of despair, a new feeling of living on the edge of quicksand, for it was every bit as barren, as mean, and as raw as our own.
We began to roll the leaves by hand on well-worn wooden rolling blocks, crushing the flesh of the leaves and freeing the pungent juices. Bare-Stick’s wife, whom we had frequently seen at the well and at the temple, helped us. The braggart’s wife was partly deaf, and she was obviously strong-minded and shrewd, though perhaps rather stupid. Broad-cheeked and broad-mouthed, she was ugly and at the same time fresh-looking, or restless. Her hips were too wide, she waddled; Bare-Stick had said she was pregnant, but that did not show.
Perhaps to punish me, Rock opened up to her, babbling senselessly about the past—about the “fun” of avoiding the campaign at the Yellow River, and the “thrills” of the Number Wheel riots. I had a feeling he was somehow mocking himself, in his utter discouragement.
The rolling took us several hours, and then Bare-Stick fired the leaves in his oven, and when we were finished—again, long after dark—Bare-Stick said we had a small crop, but well cured.
We carried it home in our cart, and we found Provisioner Lung waiting for us at our courtyard gate. Hai! He was not going to let us hide part of the tea before he took out his percentages! He looked in our baskets and shook his head in the same glum way as before, in the strip. When the weighing and dividing were done, he said, “I’m disappointed in you, Rock Liu. I thought you would do better for me than this.”
“How could I have gotten more? Could I have begged the bushes to give more?”
Provisioner Lung said, “You asked me to furnish you with a larger tenancy. I can’t do that on the basis of this showing. What I would be glad to do, Rock Liu, is to increase your credit. I will lend you one half of my share of this crop, which you can sell in the tea exchange, against an additional ten per cent of your food crop, plus an extra ten per cent of your next tea flush, some part of which I will make available on a similar loan….” And so on and so on, far beyond the point where I could follow him, weaving a glistening spider’s web of credits, loans, percentages, rebates, forfeits, advances, shares, penalties.
Later, when Provisioner Lung had left, Rock sat on the edge of our bed, and his tongue loosened; he talked to me for the first time in many days. It was as if a sluice had been opened, and a flood of defeatism poured out.
“Maybe we came to the wrong place, baby. This place is a real pig wallow. These hogs around here—your friend Bare-Stick!—they’re rolling in stupidity. Bare-Stick! What does he know how to do, except to shout? Does he think the whole world is deaf, just because his wife is? Look closely at him: He has no courage. Can’t think ahead. He knows tea inside out, but what has he made of himself? That courtyard of his! Hooo, baby, the white man out here has been held down so long he can’t get up. I tell you, these hogs haven’t a chance. They’re just no good. Ah! Sometimes I think white is evil. We’re in it with the rest of these imbecile pigs. We’re no better than the rest of them, and we’re right in the pen with them. We’re just as spineless and stupid as they are, and we’re never going to get out of the wallow. Ai, baby, the yellows are smarter than we are, that’s the trouble. The white man hasn’t a chance!”
What could I say, whose need it was, and inclination, too, to agree with him?
A Decree on a Scroll
On a dry-sky autumn day, some weeks later, one of my little scholars, Old Tiger, was reciting to me from the Tri-Metrical. Mechanically he sang out the lines. There was a sharp knocking of hardness on hardness, and I sent Little Root to the gate to see what it was. Old Tiger howled on. Little Root swung the gate open.
Before I could see what or who was outside, Little Root came running toward me, a hand at his mouth. He veered around the end of my plank desk, and as he hurtled toward me he cried out twice, “The Hall! The Hall!”
At that, all the other children arose from the dust and ran around the desk and threw themselves on me. Those who could not directly grasp me by the waist or legs reached through for a grip on my gown. They were whimpering and senselessly babbling. How often they must have been sent to bed with a threat of visitors from The Hall if they didn’t behave!
And now three men were standing inside the gate. Two, in peasant gowns, wore ferocious warrior masks, and the third, in more elegant clothes, had on the mask of a wise Emperor of old times, with huge black brows and a long white beard. I saw that they had great old swords in their yellow hands.
They came across the courtyard. I did my best to silence the terrified children.
One of the peasant-warriors stood awkwardly before the desk, as if ready to recite, and asked me, “What do you teach these shoats?”
“I teach them humility, reverence, and gentleness.”
“What texts?”
“We are struggling with the Tri-Metrical.”
“What else? What others?”
“That’s all, Venerable,” I said. I hated myself for spending that honorific so cheaply, but I was very much afraid.
With a peremptory gesture the peasant-warrior before me commanded the others to conduct a search, and the children and I remained in breathless silence while the men did their thorough work. I heard our locked chest broken open inside the house, and the sounds of things being overturned and smashed.
While the men were combing the courtyard, I caught a glimpse of the Emperor-face in profile, and I saw, under the beard of the mask, another separate white beard, and a familiar one at that. O-mi-t’o-fu! Provisioner Lung—and taking orders from a yellow peasant! These visits, then, I deduced, were far from impromptu, far from spontaneous. They were made, surely, at the command of a dark organization which, cutting across the yellows’ own social structure, must keep even themselves in awe and dread!
The rooting about having been finished, the spokesmen stepped again to the desk, and he said, “We will have an examination. Who is your best pupil?”
Frantically I tried to think which of my pupils had not the quickest mind but rather the toughest fiber, and I settled on the thin urchin named Little Fat. I patted him on the head, and when he looked at me, first in surprise at being designated brilliant, and then in realizing fear, I said, with love, “Do your best, Little Fat.”
He stepped around to the other side of the desk, chewing his sleeve. The peasant-warrior said in a far louder voice than was needed, “BEGIN!”
Little Fat turned his back on the terrifying specter, threw his face up, and, with veins standing out on his forehead, his shaved crown, his temples, and his neck, he cried out, as if summoning distant help:
“Man at birth is good;
Men seem alike but differ…”
Little Fat had recited only three or four lines when the spokesman shouted, “Enough! Turn around.”
The boy, his eyes like full cups of hot tea, turned slowly toward the apparition.
The peasant-warrior roared, “Crouch down and write in the dust with your finger ‘mud brick.’ ”
I saw Little Fat shudder, as if indecision had momentarily rattled his wits, t
hen he said in a shouting voice, almost as loud as the masked man’s, “I don’t know how to write, Venerable.”
Oh, my Little Fat! You heard me call the man Venerable! How proud I am of you!
“Crouch down and write the word ‘pig.’ ”
“I can’t write, Venerable. I tell you, I can’t write I We study only the Tri-Metrical here! We play games and study the Tri-Metrical.”
Little Fat was beginning to cry, for evidently he had reached the outer border of his courage; but the appearance on his face was of vexation. The visitor was precariously close to losing face. He turned, spoke quietly to the Emperor-Provisioner and the other peasant-warrior, and the three men left.
It took Rock and me the better part of two days, in times that we could ill spare from the imperatives of our lives, to clean up or repair the wanton breakage the men of The Hall had accomplished in their swift search—and we could not fix the chest, the front face of which was badly splintered; Rock would have to scavenge, perhaps for months, for a pair of cedar boards with which to remake that box.
On the third morning, while my children were again reciting, there came another knock at the gate. So solemn were the children’s faces at the sound that I decided to go myself.
Manager Wu stood outside, holding in his hand an official scroll tightly wound onto a pair of wooden spools.
Following the forms, I invited him in for a cup of tea, but he was brusque, and even angry, and he said, “You broke your promise to me. You told me you would confine yourself to the Tri-Metrical. You have made the entire lower hand of this village eat loss.” And with that he swung his right hand, as if with a magician’s flourish, and the scroll licked out full length from one of the spools. It hung there, trembling slightly with Manager Wu’s agitation, for me to read.
It was, quite simply, a decree from the district yamen, citing the authority of a law which predated the Seditionists’ War by a decade, and which prohibited any education whatsoever for white children: to the effect that any schools that may have been established within the district for the purpose of teaching white children were hereby pronounced illegal, and were to be closed forthwith by the proper authorities.