by John Hersey
I hurried through the rooms, checked at each entrance by that room’s policeman, who in each case repeated the admonition of the officer in the hall. “Make no fuss.” “We want no disturbance.” We? Policemen? What unholy collaboration between the famous Forgetfulness Hong and the municipality had I stumbled upon? I grew angry, thinking of Rock’s fat policeman, perspiring and growing more and more “merciful”—yes, Rock had said “merciful”—as he increased the force of his interrogatory blows. The hypocrisy, not the truncheon, must have been what hurt.
Dead silence in these rooms, the boiling room, the chandoo room, the madak room. Here the whites were not pleased. They were haggard, skinny, cadaverous. They seemed overcome by the most painful of lassitudes, at the edge of utter prostration, incessantly yawning as they struggled to shorten the hours until they would have earned enough for a pipe. Their eyes watered and their nostrils dripped. Occasionally a mouth would pull, as if for speech or a groan, but no sounds could be heard.
I found Rock and Mink in the madak room. They were sitting side by side. I saw at once that Rock was not like the others, for there was flesh on his face, and color in his cheeks, and his eyes did not seem to be made of convex fish scales with pin pricks in the centers; Mink, on the other hand, was ghastly thin, pale, and watery. Was Rock simply nursing his friend through a crisis? I suddenly wanted to draw back. Had I made a terrible mistake in coming here?
And Rock had already a certain skill. I saw him diluting purified opium with chopped grass-cloth root and tobacco, and rolling the mixture into pipe balls bound with gum arabic. Perhaps he was happy here, rather than across the hall—this was his first productive work in a long time. Again I felt that I might have been disastrously wrong to come here.
He had not seen me. He looked, now and then, at Mink, and spoke softly to him, apparently murmuring encouragement. The rest of the time he paid close attention to his work; he was accomplishing far more than the others.
Then I remembered why I had come: I wanted Rock back. And no sentiment about nursing his friend, honest work.
I went straight to his seat and spoke his name.
His head spun about, and seeing his eyes close to mine I knew, or firmly believed, that he had been smoking opium with Mink, and suddenly my commands grew bitter and harsh, though the thought of all those policemen kept them to a whisper.
“Go home,” Rock said in a hushed but angry voice. “I’m Rock.”
What did he mean? That he was trying to hang on to the last shreds of himself?
I lost all hope, and with it all control. I tangled my fingers in his hair, and I tugged and let out a wordless caterwaul of despair. Rock could not disengage his thick wrists from the straps in the little gates in the wire mesh, and he writhed from side to side and roared, “Go home, you bitch wonk! Leave me alone!”
A policeman and a yellow attendant were at my arms. They unclamped my fingers one by one and dragged me away. In my horror, outrage, and utter sadness, as I was pulled away kicking and trying to bite the hand that covered my mouth, I had room nevertheless for one startlingly clear impression: Mink and all the other wretches working in the room did not even look up, their eyes remained bleary with the one dim, dim idea—continue with this agonizing labor, for it will lead at last to freedom.
A Walk to Work on a Gray Day
A late-spring morning, yet I felt chilled. I had just set out for the filature. Even in the dimmest pre-dawn light I could tell, from the clothlike weight of the wet air, that this would be a gray day. I saw something bright on the dirty paving of the narrow street—a coin? Could one afford not to make sure? I bent down. I picked it up; it crackled in my hand—the discarded outer scale of a garlic bud. Pungency and filth! Ayah, my poor laughing fellow prisoners in the Enclave! Pellagra, syphilis, bad lungs. Bad luck. Worthless lottery chits. Restless loins, malicious tongues. Rock! Rock! Ai, Moth had approached with such sympathetic eyes, such friendly and gentle eyes, irrepressibly sparkling, however, with her eagerness to see me wilt under the hot blast of her information. “I have news for you,” she had eagerly said.
I usually valued the walk to work along the Bund. What was it about the first of morning that imposed a hush on the outpouring of workers from the Enclave? Thousands walked along the asphalt towpath, and on the street itself before the row of impressive hongs; in the noonday light this scene was a bedlam of bells, creaking hubs, horns, whistles, gongs, and tongues, but now in the first light the only sounds were the whisper of myriad cloth soles and the gurgling and sucking of the leaden river about anchor rodes and the flanks of junks and the stones of the embankment. None but whites were moving yet. Was it the yellows only who made the noise of the world?
It had been ten days since my visit—the thought of it caused a sudden ache like a fever chill—to the front and back rooms of the Golden Herons.
Had Moth’s two tigers shared in the malice?—certainly that bedbug of an Ox Balls had, with his wrists thrust into opposite sleeves, hugging himself on account of his own inner frost; he had been sitting there, ostensibly waiting his turn at palm leaves with Old Boxer, but I had seen the twinkle!
Surely I had not driven Rock away! I had not wanted to bind him with my purse strings, nor to change him. All I had wanted was no change—for things not to get worse.
What had changed him, what had snatched him away, was the intractability of the yellow power, its inflexibility, its standing there like a great stone wall.
Along at the left, looming as dark solid remnants of the night, were the cavaliers of that wall—the Merchants’ Hong, the Telegraph Hong, the Up-from-the-Sea Club, the Chartered Bank—then to my right on the riverbank the Customs receiving shed; and in the river the trading junks, and (shivers) the opium hulks, named like fighting ships: Monkey, Dart, Valiant, Fair Wind.
What could I do alone? My heart started beating faster, as if I were already putting into pounding feet my sudden desire to run away, to run back to the country village and stand on one leg for Runner and the white race.
Could I work for Old Arm? Could I work for someone Rock had despised?
Here was the hated police-court building—I saw as if on a scroll in my mind the fat, perspiring, “merciful” face—and soon the charming public gardens: glass hothouses with flowers for every season (for sale to yellows), walks (for yellows) under pine trees, artificial bridges (to carry yellows) over pretended rills, and a pavilion for open-air theatricals (yellows only). Charming? It was in these gardens, triggered by an alleged trespass by two white male prostitutes, that the frightful Up-from-the-Sea race riot of six years before had started.
Moth the actress! She comes toward me across the room. “I have news for you.” Gentle eyes, signaling information of a most ungentle sort. Then a long rigmarole about how she has happened to hear what she has heard, seating me, with her, at the opposite side of the cubicle from the two men playing cards. “Hai, White Lotus,” says Old Boxer. “Where have you been?” Ox Balls’ eyes dance. Moth allows time for soakage. I cannot bring myself to say what she wants me to say: Hurry, hurry up, if you’re my friend. She offers me tea, relents, says it: Rock is living on the string with a reeler who has a puzzle-box room on the other side of the park and grounds of The Good Life. Pause. I cannot ask what this woman is like; those purse strings are choking me. Moth says, “I didn’t learn much about her—except they say she has a rather ordinary face.” Moth’s own face looks devoid of mischief, though this last item has had the effect of reddening mine. “Maybe,” Moth adds, by way, I suppose, of intended mollification, “she has something else to offer. A face isn’t everything.” Moth is not smiling….
I crossed Hongkew Creek by the Garden Bridge and started out the broad thoroughfare of Yangtszepoo Road. So Rock had left me to go on a kite string with another woman—giving her, as he had me, the use of his body in barter for food and shelter. Hadn’t he, in reality, been living that way, “on a string,”
with me? But with me this had been too shameful. Why? Because he had not been dependent on me in other times and places? Whereas, starting fresh and frankly with some other woman, this subservience could be stomached? What a revolting power twelve coppers a day could have! My miserable little money power had driven Rock away; yet this other woman had attracted him with money—and something other than a pretty face.
I was just then passing the great cotton spinning mills out Yangtszepoo Road, the locus in fact of the anger of all the whites in the city—for in these wonderful mechanized mills only yellows were hired. Just now only whites were walking past; the yellows went to work two hours later than we. Soy Chee Mills, Lao Kung Mow, I Wo, Yah Loong. Each one with forty, fifty, sixty thousand modern spindles, entirely tended by yellows, who earned thirty coppers a day at a minimum. The Central Kingdom Spinning and Weaving Company: broad roofs, stately godowns. Whites could be hired for less than half the wages of the yellow workers in these magnificent plants—but, as the word went, “It takes two and a half pigs to do the work of one yellow man.” Also, “A white man just destroys machines.” “They’re born lazy.” “They don’t work for you, they work against you.” I felt, almost as a presence walking beside me, Rock’s old anger against these yellow clichés, his ruffian anger at injustice, great or petty. What had happened, after all, to Rock’s capacity for indignation? It had simply raveled like the sleeve of a coolie coat worn too long.
I tried to imagine Old Arm’s coming demonstrations against these fortresses of yellow economic power; tried to imagine a revivified Rock taking part. A stone in his hand, a yell swelling the veins in his neck. The picture would not come clear.
Then I was in a torment of blaming myself. Why had I been so prudent, so hasty about finding work myself? Why hadn’t I been able to live more in Moth’s slipshod mode, letting each day bring what it would? Rock could have done something: he might have kept his self-respect by sneak-thieving, or pimping, or becoming what I had determined he should not become, a true tiger to live by wits and for laughs, often hungry but seldom bored and never ashamed.
It had been I who had wanted to live by the grubby yellow pattern: earning, saving, climbing; when I knew that whites could never, as we put it, “reach home by that path.”
How could I reproach Rock, who had a so much freer soul than mine, for wanting to live as a man, a white man?
And now the filter beds and pumping stations of the Up-from-the-Sea Waterworks, managed, crewed, maintained exclusively by yellows. The I Wo Waste Silk Mill. Dan Too Oil Mill. Grand, capacious, modern; for lids only.
I would go on the lottery. I would get a chit-clue book. Water Spirit’s Sister Flies to the Moon. I would change my ways now…. Perhaps I could buy chits from Mink; perhaps he would be able to tell me….
And at last a kind of petering out of civilization: mat sheds along one side of the road, dirty shops on the other; a view of willow trees, tilled fields. Yes, the sky was gray, sullen, and stuck. And ahead marched the grim parade of filatures.
Then at the side of the road there was a strand of fragrance that made one’s mood take off, like a finch off a branch into the sunlight: of sweet chestnuts roasting over a charcoal brazier. I went over and bought a copper’s worth, my breakfast and my lunch. A group of little basin girls was clustered around a pair of tomboys who were—as if grown-up tiger men—having a mock-earnest match at boxing, their fists like little half-opened tulips. Reelers, cracking the chestnut husks and biting into the too hot, mealy meat, were greeting each other with garbled, full-mouthed noises, and with the never dying cheerfulness of white working women.
A chestnut warmed me. I began to feel more alive…. I must go across to one of the booths over there and purchase a chit-clue book…. But Harlot! There was Harlot!
She was buying a cup of tea, for a cash, at one of the roadside booths. I hurried to her; she put down her tea bowl and embraced me with her always overflowing warmth. I bought a bowl of tea, and told her about Rock’s having left me.
“You have to have a man,” Harlot said. “Right away! And I’ll help you find one, dear. You want one with some money. That scum like the one you had—they’re always restless. Look, there are plenty of white men in the Enclave who can give you a good time—in the best places, too. We’ll find you a man, I promise you, White Lotus, and a real chinkty one, at that.”
When we had finished our tea we walked on toward the waiting yard of our filature. Harlot pressed her promise on me; she really intended to settle me with a man like her own. “He never runs with other women, he really doesn’t. All right, maybe hell curse at me and slap me if I give him reason to; but he won’t grouch when he’s sober, and he simply wouldn’t think of putting my life in danger in any way when he’s drunk. He never carries a knife or anything like that. Hooo! He’s too lidsy for anything so vulgar. You should see the clothes he gives me. Very quiet, very good taste.”
“Where does he get the money?”
“He’s a tax collector in the Enclave, works for the municipality, and for the Forgetfulness boys on the side, I guess—though I don’t ask questions.”
“But if he takes such good care of you, why work out here?” On that stress of mine I put a load of feeling about the filatures.
“Ayah, darling, don’t you see? I’d lose my self-esteem if I didn’t work. I mean, I just couldn’t hang around him all day long. He’d dump me in a hurry.”
Harlot fortified her promise by asking me to come to her puzzle box that very evening after work.
I had tender feelings all day toward my little basin girl, Pigeon. Her family had had to move again—into a mud hut at the edge of the ricksha-pullers’ area. But she seemed to be quite without distress; her eyes were lights in the steam. She had grown fond of me, and we laughed that day as if our miseries were hilarious.
On the Far Side of the Mirror
Harlot lent me a gown and took me into a world that was new to me. We were going to a reception for a white storyteller, the famous Dogtooth, she said, in the chinkty district, among the upper-class whites.
Walking from Harlot’s puzzle box through the evening streets, we came to a subtle dividing line, where the strolling crowds abruptly thinned out, the street-facing walls became more imposing and were tipped with fragments of glass to ward off burglars, and a thick hush, which was somehow genteel, unreal, off-white, like a mountain mist in a painting on silk, hovered over the neighborhood.
We arrived at our destination—the Moon Garden Compound, whose many courtyards had once comprised three palaces of yellow nobility, all three premises now girded by a single wall. Here the “best” whites lived, Harlot said: there was a waiting list ten li long of whites who were rich enough, but perhaps not “nice” enough, to get in.
I wondered: Were there so many wealthy whites?
We were questioned at the gate by a guard, a white man in a uniform patterned on that of the yellow municipal police.
Harlot said that we were going to Old-Third Kung’s party for Dogtooth.
The guard saluted us with the full honors of an old-fashioned bannerman’s salute—the drawing and shooting of a nonexistent crossbow: left foot slightly advanced, seat well protruded, aim taken, a pull of the imaginary trigger pump, hind foot briskly closed up, right arm swung out and held in an attitude; all done with a superb swagger.
As we walked through the quiet courtyards, with potted fruit trees, marble lanterns, tiny soaring bridges, Moth said, “There are sure to be some unattached men on the prowl. Keep alert.”
Sounds of a subdued camaraderie; a glow of an open door. Then we were plunged into a hall with brilliant beams and a crowd of beautiful people. Harlot had me by the hand. As we moved through the press of guests, many nodded to Harlot, or fluttered at her; I saw that she was known and liked. There were numerous mixies as young and as pretty as she.
A man coming toward us greeted Harlot with yellow
formality—a bowed head and peace-pumping fists. Harlot’s face flushed, her eyes gave gifts of open pleasure. Ai, this must be her man! She introduced me: his name was Pride. I was surprised. He was middle-aged and dewlapped, and his head was shaven, and when he turned to lead us to his circle I saw three fat-creases at the back of his neck.
I had another surprise in store for me: I saw ahead that Duke was in Pride’s group of friends. Hai! What was thought of him? This encounter might mark me for good in the chinkty quarter. Should I claim Duke effusively for an old friend, or should I pretend I had never seen him before?
Duke took the choice away from me. He knew Harlot, of course, and bowed to her, and when I was presented to him by Harlot’s friend, Duke spoke to me as to a stranger: not to freeze me, I quickly realized, but simply to erase my past as a field slave from this brilliant chamber whose society could not tolerate thoughts of such lowness—though there may have been a deal of it in light disguise around the room. Duke was, indeed, cordial to me, and he allowed not the slightest suggestion, on his part, or admission, on mine, of the chasm in rank that had once separated us. Perhaps he played his game too well; he raised his eyebrow in a stiff signal of willingness to flirt. I turned away, thinking of Rock spitting in Duke’s footsteps on Silverfinger’s highly polished stone floor.
People stood around chatting. Tea bowls were passed.
Hooo! The attitudes of these people! When they spoke about race problems, they tended to blame all the woes of the caste system not on the yellows but on the low standards of behavior of the poor whites. A pretty girl on their own social level was spoken of as having jade-white skin or, in the case of a mixie, ivory; but the common whites of the Enclave drew the scornful epithets invented by yellows: pigs, moonlights, smalls, fogs, whitewashes, tuskers. They criticized the bizarre clothes of tigers, the raucous noises made by wharf coolies, the shame of hogs on the pipe.