White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Duke spoke of the Garden Riot. “There wouldn’t have been any trouble,” he said, “had it not been for your tenant trash—the peasant whites, you know, who flood this city, because they think they can be just as shiftless here as they were down on their tenancies and still make a good living.” Duke was looking at me. Did he know about my life in a lower-hand village? Was he taking his little revenge on me for my having turned my back on him? “Those migrant farm pigs were the ones that caused the trouble.”

  “I’ve heard about the riot,” I said, “but I heard the yellows started it because white prostitutes walked in the Garden.”

  “That’s just the point,” Duke said. “That is the way it started. The problem was that the yellows wanted our prostitutes to walk in the Garden, but only so far. They wanted them available but not obtrusive. There was an imaginary line from the peony beds to the pine grove on the river side of the pavilion—white prostitutes were not to go beyond that line. But your dirty migrant farm prostitutes: they were the ones who had to ‘dare’ to go a little farther. They’re your pushers. Especially the male prostitutes—they were all farm trash, anyway. You don’t have male prostitutes coming from city stock. And if you remember, the actual rioting started around a pair of male prostitutes who had crossed the line.”

  “I see,” I said. I refrained from asking Duke if almost all the whites in the whole Enclave were not essentially of farm origin—as he was, and I.

  How agreeable I was! How eager to please! One thing I noticed here was that these chinkties and would-be chinkties had yellowy intonations, and their speech was largely free of the Enclave’s argot. The Enclave was basically a community of illiterates, and I could see that to be at the top, one must be, or seem, educated. Casually, as I was engaged in talk by Pride, I dropped an aphorism from The Doctrine of the Happy Mean, and ears pricked up around me, and Duke and Pride leaned toward me to catch more of my delightful conversation.

  “Is it true,” a girl of jade-white skin later whispered to me, “that Harlot is the daughter of a big slaveowner?” Harlot had spoken of me as an old “core friend,” meaning from the core provinces and so, euphemistically, a former fellow slave.

  I saw the interest and envy in this girl’s eyes. “Yes,” I said, “it’s true enough. She was the young master’s half sister. So I understood.”

  “Was it an important estate?”

  “Huge.”

  Too soon I felt too much at home. How easy it is, I thought, for someone bitterly poor to change his clothes and modulate his speech and pass as a chinkty. Thinking that, I proceeded to make a gaffe that must have exposed me as an outsider.

  I spoke—and striking a chance lull in the babble of our group my voice clattered out with startling loudness—of Old Arm: for some reason, obscure to me as I did it, I praised him.

  The faces around me slammed shut like the house gates in an alley at an outcry of “Thief!” or “Mad wonk!”

  I saw at once that I had hit the bull’s-eye of social error. These people wanted to hear and think as little as possible about their own responsibilities, if any, as whites; their wheelbarrow was well packed and they didn’t want it overturned.

  Amid the rustling gowns and the sounds of the yellow-style slurping of jasmine-fragrant tea, I thought of Pigeon, and of her mother, drugged on dross opium paid for with Pigeon’s coppers, in their new home, a mud hut in a miniature city of mud huts, the notorious ricksha-pullers’ quarter. How much really separated me from that existence? Could I forget the hovels Rock and I had shared?

  I moved about in the elegant crowd with Harlot and Pride, studying (often asking) who these people were. They were petty officials, customs clerks, tax collectors, government messengers. They were managers of yellow Moslems’ shops within the Enclave, bookkeepers, shroffs, messengers, recorders. And some were “slugs,” as the more cautious and less well-to-do whites referred to employees of the chit-lottery syndicate and of the pervasive Forgetfulness Hong. Thus our high society—parasites and underlings to the yellow world. How haughty some of them were! Having frequent touch with wealthy yellows, our bona fide chinkties had learned to mimic the mannerisms, the gestures, the graces of the true lights of the yellow world. But this I quickly saw, too: any white person could learn these moon-terrace tricks, and in the chamber were many sweet-mannered people, especially girls, who were not proper chinkties. The hands told all. Real chinkties had “clean work” and soft hands. Girls who reeled for the filatures put make-up on their hands, to hide as well as they could (and as I had not known enough to do) the reddish boiled hide of their fingers; but a close look was enough to detect the counterfeits. So I had not needed to speak of Old Arm to reveal myself as an interloper. Yet even the shams were accepted and honored if they had a certain over-all style; not what one did but how one did it set his rank. Modest clothes; a light patter about the game of house sparrow but ignorance, real or feigned, about another game, vulgar palm leaves; avoidance of the loud, high cackle (“Will they eat me?”); attendance at the accepted temples. Woman-beating, desertion, bastardy (except where yellow semen had swum astray), sweeping the street for rice from slit bags—Hooo! Never! It all struck me as pathetic, yet I acted my part as hard as I could. I amused myself by trying to work out the hierarchy. At the very top, by repute, were two chit-lottery “princes,” a certain prominent tax collector, a family said to have inherited a fortune in cotton from a by-the-way yellow father, and two manufacturers of fans and hairnets. I supposed that below these standouts, government couriers were nearest the top, for they had affluence and stability—their income was steady, their conceit impenetrable. They wore uniforms; that was a stunning advantage. Then bookkeepers and clerks were very high; they were indeed “clean,” they had to be literate, they enjoyed financial credit at their own shops. And down, down, down, the route from this room—to wharfmen, ricksha boys, chit-runners, and, down down dizzy down…to those who put their wrists through the tight slots in the wire mesh at the opium-cooking benches in the back rooms….

  Rock was at my mind’s elbow all the time, and I saw that he had the wit to be able to take his place anywhere he wanted up and down this pyramid. Why was his drive to move ever downward? I could not help giving him the benefit of doubt: Was his the only honest way?

  Ai! How long did it take me to realize that a handsome boy had adhered to me? His smile was like a theft from a silk purse: clever, swift, rewarding. He entertained me, for he was at least cynical. He was quite frank in telling me he was “a Hong man”—in other words, that he worked in some way for the Forgetfulness Hong. A slug. His name was Lacquerer.

  He took me off to a side pavilion, where we found cushioned chairs beside a once prim little rockery that was now dusty, cracked, plantless, and carpless.

  “ ‘Forgetfulness,’ ” he said, “is not in the sense of absent-mindedness but rather of sweet oblivion. The Hong sells dreams. Chits, vixens, the pipe. All those things that lie on the far side of the mirror. As you know, whites can’t organize into real halls or gangs; our slugs are lone wolves. There are ten here tonight who are the biggest men in the Enclave. Hai! No! I’m not one of them. I’m just a little nuisance. The big ones are race men, or want to be. They want to advance the white race—without jeopardizing their own position.” Lacquerer knew I was a stranger, a novice, but he did not condescend to me. He spoke to my curiosity. Perhaps he saw possibilities in me beyond the simply sensual; I saw that he saw the latter, at any rate. He dangled new activities before my gaze. “The parties they have—not at all vulgar. On their tables you’ll have Peking duck and sharks’ fins and pomegranates. They go to the races—I mean at the Race Club, the lids’ Race Club. Horseback riding. Endless games of house sparrow. They have summer compounds up at Kuling. Scrolls, classics, instrumental music. And they also collect good-looking women—not vixens. The fast girls who work in some of the chit baskets. The best and the prettiest. Easy-times—some of them here ton
ight.”

  Ayah! How much was swiped suddenly from the silk purse with a beaming smile!—a hint that with respect to the best and prettiest girls at least, Lacquerer felt himself the match of the biggest Hong men of all.

  Why should this surprise me? Conceit was far more common currency than copper among hogs. What hackles were to a rooster, conceit was to a yellow-ridden white man: an illusory show of being huge, fierce, and dominant.

  How could I help comparing Lacquerer with Rock? Rock in his less subtle way was conceited, too; my folly and crime had been to try to pluck his hackles one by one. Rock on his downward path was honest, for he would not give the yellows even the satisfaction Old Arm was about to offer them, of showing them his feelings in a big way: until he could show them to some effect. Whereas this Lacquerer was smooth—meaning, totally lacking in any feelings at all, beyond those a baby has when he wants to take suck or to void his inner pouches. Lacquerer, I could guess, was one of those white strivers and strainers who wanted, more than harmony of soul, a “best and prettiest” woman, a fine home with scrolls, brocade, brassware, cloisonné, horn-sided lanterns, who wanted to be tended by servants of his own, who wanted to be an “old comfortable”—who wanted to be excellent by outward yellow standards. I could guess further that Lacquerer did his buying in the Model Settlement; would prefer suffering humiliations from yellows to trading in an Enclave store owned by whites, where the merchandise, he would say, was “imitation.” He was the ultimate snob: he had contempt for the reality of himself. And with all this, he was beautiful, charming, quilt-warm, and equipped with teeth as square as house-sparrow tiles.

  As a matter of interest, I questioned Lacquerer about Old Arm.

  “Hai! What a swindle that one is. He pretends to be a race man, pretends to be a ragged wharf coolie: but, ai, he has satin fingertips. I haven’t seen him tonight, but he comes to most of these receptions, White Lotus—expensive clothes, all from Lin Yi, that’s the big yellow tailor on Soochow Road. And where did he get his money? He’s sold out just like all the rest of them—this famous rice-bowl campaign will be a farce, the yellows know every move, he tells them. But what’s disgusting is that he didn’t get the money for the Lin Yi gowns from them; he sold out to them for bean sprouts. He got all his money by milking the poorest whites—his own wharf men. It makes an honest Hong man like me sick to my stomach to see the way some of the best people at these receptions kowtow to him.”

  Almost Top Man’s very words. So this was the chinkty line about the race hero. I wondered how much of this venom was justified by truth. I trusted Rock’s instinct about Old Arm, but his was a far different concern.

  When we returned to the main chamber, it was much more crowded than it had been.

  “It must be almost time for Dogtooth to come,” my young man said, and he began to point out personages. “Look I There’s Honey Lung—she’s the second daughter of the Lungs who have all the cotton money. There’s your Old Arm. The short one with the shaved head. In the green gown. And over there, the tall osprey with the beard—that’s Printer Wu, the first white man to be put on the Provincial Council. The poet Earthclod. Silverfinger—there. And look, Old Churn—he’s the priest at Ta Kuan Miao, the temple where all the ‘best bacon’ goes to worship. And there’s Southern Peony—you’ve heard of her—she does Annamese ritual dances at the Silver Pavilion, with no clothes on.”

  “Isn’t that a lid with her—or is it a mixie?”

  ‘That’s a yellow man, one of their mighty mouse-hunters—but don’t worry, White Lotus, he’ll pay taels for peach pits. The money will pour out of his ears, and he’ll get nothing. Southern Peony is clean, she’s kind of a race heroine for it—famous for leading them on. Her nickname among the Hong men is Dying Wind: as soon as the yellow kite gets up, she sees to it that the wind gives out. They never know the whole Enclave is laughing at them.”

  I was astonished, on looking around, to see numerous yellows in the crowd, both men and women; they seemed to be onlookers, they had come to watch us be ourselves.

  A murmur, a clamor. The storyteller had entered the hall. We saw the crowd parting deferentially, and Dogtooth made his way to the raised dais of a heron veranda leading off the main chamber. There he turned to the crowd and waited, a hand on one hip, for silence.

  Dogtooth’s face was itself like one of the myths that, I had heard, he often told: a tight-packed assemblage of supra-life-sized entities, scooped and split and time-smoothed, as it were, out of hard old beliefs. Grossly ugly in repose, it achieved, as soon as it moved with his speaking, a mesmerizing beauty.

  He first made an announcement, in a flat voice: “A true story of our people.”

  Then he began his narrative in a deeper tone. “Once, long ago, in the bad time, there was a strong white man who slaved in South-of-the-River, as tall as a gate, with matted hair in seven braids, and with a scar like an inch of surprise over his left eye….”

  I began to tremble. Peace! The story of Peace’s rebellion! How would he tell it all? All: the soot-blackened smithy; riding the mule-towed canal barges to the city to enlist men; the brilliant banners, the trail of goat droppings up the steps to the beautiful yamen; the secret meetings by the waterhole—Dogtooth seemed to know all those things, all, all, and he swept me, with the others in the room, along on a great stream of emotion.

  But soon I began to have queer feelings of riding two carts at once: Dogtooth’s and my memory’s. All the pictures were there in Dogtooth’s singing, booming account, yet everything was, or seemed, out of focus. Could I say for sure that his tale was wrong and my memory was right? Perhaps I, just as much as literary necessity, had distorted the reality. Perhaps what he was telling was “truer” than what I now thought had happened.

  But Dogtooth’s road and mine diverged more and more. What was wrong? Had I been so blind to happenings all around me?

  Ayah, what power in Dogtooth’s narrative! I found myself wanting to believe him, deeply aware of my own fallibility. The crowd was with him; I wanted to be with them.

  Suddenly, as he came to the eve of the war itself, as Peace made scythe-swords and the last recruitments were reported, I realized what was wrong: Dogtooth had left out God—the old God with a white face, the visions, the prayers, the secret names. Dogtooth’s was a story of men alone rising against men, of lonely human courage, hope, loyalty, and love—and, in the end, of mere human betrayal. There was no hurricane at the end of Dogtooth’s story, no lightning, wind, rain, flood. There was no abandonment of the white man by his white God. Dogtooth’s story ended with the treason of their race of True and Brass, Ma’s slaves, who had informed their master of the whites’ plans, so that a yellow force had come, rather than an all-obliterating storm, and scattered the rebels.

  At first I was overcome with uncertainty. Had it turned out that way? Had there been only, perhaps, a light rain that night and such confusion in our hearts and minds that we who were there had seen the end all wrong? The crowd in the hall was swarming toward Dogtooth. I saw tears running down white cheeks. Yellows who had come to watch wore quizzical smiles—at the emotionalism of these pigs? And by chance I saw, for an instant, the face of Old Arm—blanched, pale, not at all carried away with feeling, for Dogtooth’s version of Peace’s rebellion was surely a kind of warning to Old Arm.

  I pretended to have entered into the heart of the story. I made a show with Lacquerer. When the fuss died down he asked me to sup with him the following night—I had a man, if I wanted him. He did not take me home, for it was understood that I would be embarrassed to show him my poor circumstances.

  In my room, on my mat, now seeing Dogtooth’s story as a parable of caution, an artful chinkty warning to Old Arm, a yellow man’s errand beautifully run, but then again thinking my memories deluded, the “truth” revealed in art, and my whole past in doubt, I lay in an agony of conflicted shame and defiance. Then later, when I was calmer, I ended by being mi
ldly glad that I had a man of sorts and something to do ahead. Thus I felt, dozing off, irresolute. Could I believe my own view of anything that had happened to me?

  An Arrival

  I began to lead two half-lives. I was a reeler who lived in a puzzle box on the edge of hunger; and I was a guest in the parlors of the somewhat rich. By day I cooked my hands in a brass basin; by night I whited them with a talcum of maize starch dusted on a base of scented sheep fat. By day my tongue rolled the poor-white argot; by night I quoted the literary masters. I had two kinds of friends: Moth and her tigers and their set; and Lacquerer, Harlot, Pride, and, for the tarnished side of my pleasure, even such pompous fools as Duke.

  Lacquerer continued to be what he had seemed at first; entertaining. He offered me much—good food, good times—and asked for little. He took my body now and again (a kind of rent I paid for an illusion of living among “the best people”), but his demands were mild, even perfunctory, a matter of form. He was a cold, ambitious slug. I saw that he wore me as a sort of decoration; my not-bad face, my clothes, which improved under his guidance (after I borrowed rather heavily from Silverfinger), and especially my education, which was better than his—made me a passable facet of his conceit, and a tool of his desire to be one of the more splendid polite criminals of the Enclave. I didn’t mind. He opened doors for me.

  All I thought I really wanted was to have Rock back. I told myself that in going with Lacquerer I was simply keeping from being alone. But was I beginning to like the chinkty life?

  Lacquerer did not require my company every night, and one evening I went in my work clothes to see Moth and her men. The street-waterer from upstairs-lower-right-front, Round Knees, and his girl, Trumpet Flower, were also in Moth’s compartment.