White Lotus

by John Hersey

  He took me to gatherings of young people in private houses out on Bubbling Well Road, and these seemed to me the most elegant yellow society I could imagine, though I came at last to understand that the women were of the demimonde; a few white girls were usually present.

  One girl who was on hand for a number of these evenings puzzled me, for she seemed white, but her hair was black and her eyes had the epicanthic fold; I assumed she was a mixie. Her name was Snow Peach. She quietly taught me manners and tricks. Then one night it came out that she was white through and through, she had had her eyes “pulled.” She urged me to do the same. She knew a yellow surgeon, a skilled expert in this operation—two tiny incisions, a tug of skin, a suture. One had merely to disappear from circulation for a few days and then emerge remade, so thoroughly changed that with a little make-up you could even thread the needle. “You’d be amazed,” Snow Peach said, “how different the world looks when you get good eyes.”

  I said I would think about it….

  Han had been taking me out for about a month. It was my day off. We stood in the square stone enclosure of the famous Bubbling Well, a ridiculous muddy spring charged with chokedamp gas. It was something to see once, he had said. We returned to his carriage. The coachman, a white servant who never looked at me, closed the curtained door. We were in a dim, private place. Han’s face swam near mine, and he said in the voice of one at the boundary of his strength, “Come home with me.”

  I was flooded with recognition—of the real nature of my aching gratefulness to this sweet man. “Your wife!” I said, giving notice through this protest of my acquiescence, and even, I think, of my yearning.

  “She has gone to Woosung to view a figurine she wants to buy,” Han said. “Anyway, I’ve told you, she doesn’t care.” After a few moments, he added, “We have a number of courtyards.” Another pause and then, “There are such things as locks, you know.”

  I lowered my head. Han rapped on the forepart of the cab; the coachman jumped down and opened the door, and Han said the one word “Home.”

  I caught a glimpse of the white coachman’s face: it was porcelain.

  Han’s home was on Horse Road, near the Loong-fei Bridge. We entered it by a postern gate from an alley barely wide enough to accept the carriage. It seemed that the coachman knew the rules.

  Han led me to a small room in a side court, perhaps a maidservant’s room, with red-papered windows. He barred the door. He wanted to talk awhile. The platform was deeply quilted, a scroll hung on the wall:

  The sun of spring touches the branches,

  Petals open like pale white fans.

  Han took me in the late part of the afternoon, half undressed, and I was overwhelmed. Where was the stereotype at which we laughed in the Enclave?—the yellow man fumbling at his silk underdrawers, unsure of his powers, sputtering off like a silly fingerling firecracker on a short fast fuse. No. Han was not like that; he was deeply sensitive, moreover, to any shame that I might have on account of his color. Before, I had been full of desire; afterward, I was in love, or thought I was—was there any difference?

  We held up our arms, side by side. My white skin was coarse, tiny brown hairs leaned from the great pores; his yellow skin was smooth, close-pored, shiny, delicate. Each said he liked the other’s better.

  Then what was the matter with me? Full of love, I was blurting out some white “secrets.” Yellows play a white person cheap, I said. Then they start asking you questions, and, Han, do you know that you’ll get lies or silence, one or the other, in answer to those questions? Whites don’t like to spill their entrails in front of yellows—do you know that? Because they don’t like to have what they say twisted around against the white race. Whites are always suspicious of yellows, even when there’s not the slightest ground for suspicion, why don’t yellows seem to realize that?

  After that came a surge of remorse—for what? For speaking this way to gentle Han? For giving away what I over-regarded as “secrets”? For having given away much more than that—myself—to this man whose skin was different from mine?

  Hai, was horrible Rock riding my tongue?

  That night Han was possessed to run a tour of the crazy pavilions and courtyards of the Enclave. His interest, as he made out, was more or less sociological. Southern Peony’s naked dances were only the start. Opium divans in the chinkty quarter. Homosexual nests masked as taverns and clubs. An exhibition of flagellation in the back court of an elegant white teahouse: the punisher, a white woman; the punished, a perfectly delighted yellow gentleman. Han took me to such spectacles as I had never heard of. I was wild and proud and took the tour as a matter of course.

  On days that followed I loved him, or thought I did—and what would be the difference? He, too, was surely in love with me. The signs we spoke of—melting touch, pangs seated in the chest.

  We walked along the upper Bund on another of my days off, oblivious to the honking and shouting, and into the Garden. There we walked arm in arm, our heads inclined together. I remembered the stage, when Gull was teaching me the yellows’ tongue long before in the Northern Capital, at which I suddenly stopped translating and began to think in the new language; so, now, I found myself beginning (with caution, and in spurts) to accept Han as a man, rather than as a yellow. Then (in other spurts) Rock’s damnable quarrelsome state of mind took hold of my head, and I was white rather than a woman. Now in the Garden we were very close, man and woman.

  But as we walked on the shaded paths I began to feel a vague undercurrent of uneasiness. I could not have said at first what was wrong. Could it have had to do with Han? It seemed not, for he was squeezing my hand and murmuring. Yet I felt somehow on guard.

  We crossed a pretty arching bridge over an artificial stream. I looked back along the way we had come, and I saw four young yellow ragbags—Fukien rubbish for sure—with their eyes on us.

  Then I realized with an instantaneous clarity what was wrong. We had crossed the line, from the peony beds to the pine grove on the river side of the pavilion, beyond which white prostitutes were not supposed to walk.

  The four men were close behind us, and they had begun a kind of muttering which seemed ominous. Han, besotted with me, seemed to be unaware of their presence. Their remarks became audible and unmistakable: they were addressing Han.

  “Did you ever hear of the riot, brother?”

  “Keep to the river side of the line, you crotch crab.”

  They rushed forward and tore Han from my side. I saw the look of amazement on his face before I turned and ran for a policeman I had seen near the theatrical pavilion.

  I told the policeman a yellow man was being attacked by four robbers up beyond the bridge.

  The policeman looked me over and asked me what I was doing in this part of the Garden.

  I thought with despair: What use for a white woman to say she is not a prostitute? I wept and said a yellow man was being killed—wasn’t he going to do anything about it?

  Slowly he started along the path. I could not bear his deliberate pace, and hoping to speed him up I ran ahead.

  When I reached the place, Han lay unconscious on the ground, his face bruised and bleeding. The four men were fleecing his purse and exploring his garments for secret pockets. At the sound of my footsteps they straightened up.

  “How about a dip of fish?” one of them said to me through gaping teeth.

  Another said to his companions, “Who goes first with her?”

  The policeman came around a curve in the path. The rubbish did not run away but stood ground, and soon I saw why. The policeman sided with the roughs, chiding me with scathing coarseness of language for having crossed the line. The fun seemed to be over; the four hoodlums sauntered off. As Han recovered consciousness and sat up, shaking his head, the policeman bent over him and told him roughly to keep out of this part of the Garden with white whores; then he, too, left.

&nbs
p; Somehow Han seemed just then immensely more valuable to me than ever before.

  “We Will Catch Up with the Lids”

  One evening when I arrived home from work Bare-Stick was in the courtyard of our puzzle box waiting for me. I took him up to my cubbyhole. He sat cross-legged against one wall.

  What had my times with gentle Han done to me? I saw Bare-Stick now as prickly, dirty, oafish, and disgusting. Would Rock seem that way to me, too?

  “Where is Rock?” Bare-Stick asked.

  “Why should I care?”

  “I wish you would tell me.”

  “The last time I heard,” I said, “he was tickling the mouse of a plain-looking woman who lives beyond The Good Life.”

  “I know. I found her. He’s not there.”

  “Then you know more than I do. So why do you come to me?”

  “I thought he might have run back to you.”

  “What makes you think I’d let him?”

  “You would, that’s all.”

  To hide my reaction to this, which was inwardly an angry grief and outwardly a blush, I turned away and went to the crude box that served me as a chest and pretended to look for something in it.

  “I have another man now,” I said, in case Bare-Stick might get impulsive ideas of taking Rock’s place in my life and making me happy again.

  “So I hear!” Bare-Stick said, with a rising inflection of sarcasm which suggested that he knew I was going with a yellow man.

  I turned back to Bare-Stick and with forced cordiality changed the subject. “How are you living?”

  “I work for Runner and Groundnut.”

  “I heard they’d come to the city. Is Groundnut eating well on offerings?”

  “He’s changed, White Lotus. You wouldn’t know him. Ever since the beginning of ‘the method.’ ”

  “Method?”

  “ ‘Sleeping birds.’ ”

  “Are they really serious about all that?”

  “Runner is serious, ai, he’s serious. Look, White Lotus, you know there are—how many temples in the Enclave—five hundred? Every shading. Buddhism, Taoism, Lamaism, Confucianism, and all those cults—Californian Amitabhaists, White Red-Hat Sect, all those. Four fifths of them have crawled into shop-back holes. There’s not one of those holes I’d choose over Runner’s. The reason I like it, and so many poor hogs and sows like it, is that Runner makes us feel that we have found a future, a possible future. The place is dingy and small, like the traps where most hogs live; we’re at home with Runner—his serene face! Beggars swarm there: Groundnut welcomed them to begin with, and Runner has given them hope of a new life. A lot of your friends”—that sarcastic tone again; he’d heard of my chinkty nights; who could have secrets in such an envious, gossipy city?—“would make fun of the place, because they’d belong to one of those ornate temples that used to be mosques, and the Moslems who sold it to them on mortgages charge ten thousand taels a year interest, and your friends will be paying off for the rest of their lives for their fancy temples.”

  “I have no concern with any of that,” I said. “I want results here and now, not when I come back as a water-buffalo cow next time. I know, the shop-backs are supposed to be the woman’s world. There we can knock our heads on the bricks to the proper idols and get rid of stealing, adultery, palm leaves, the pipe, puzzle-box quarrels, husbands who don’t come home, cheating in the market, dirt, fleas, lice, fighting with one’s man, drinking, backbiting, whoring—every evil stink and sore and grunt that makes us white people seem like pigs. Only it doesn’t work that way, does it, Bare-Stick? The evils run the streets all the same, the yellows go right on using us. Groundnut used to say, ‘Keep them ignorant’—meaning his own people. I don’t trust priests.”

  “Groundnut doesn’t say things like that any more.” There was a stupid sincerity on Bare-Stick’s face. “Runner keeps saying things to encourage us, and Groundnut says them now, too. ‘The race is advancing.’ ‘We’ll catch up with the lids.’ ‘We must be better than they are in their own terms.’ But Runner can’t just promise, he has to have a plan. He has to fight the job line, and he has to fight our being shut up in the Enclave, but at the same time he has to tease and prod and criticize the whites themselves for their laziness, their slackness, their lumpishness, their not caring. It’s not easy. You tell people they’re lazy and they turn away to some other more flattering hope.”

  “The idols only lull them all the more,” I said.

  Then Bare-Stick gave me a start. “Rock has been to see Groundnut.”

  “He should. They’re old friends.”

  “He came once. I didn’t like the stare he was wearing—same look as before he inscribed me. But Runner wants to find him again. They want his help. They’re looking for strong men.”

  “To be birds?” I asked on a derisive note.

  “Maybe. Would you like to know someone else who has been to see us? Old Arm himself. Look, he warned Runner not to start any sleeping-bird demonstrations here. Think about that! What does that mean?”

  “Perhaps it means that for men to act like birds is silly, in a city.”

  “Don’t mistake me, I admire Old Arm. I like an aggressive race man, one who has no fear of the lids. I don’t care what his motives are, or whether he takes money, or likes chinkty mice at night. Our white leaders are like the yellows’, they’re men, they’re human, they want position and power, and maybe they want squeeze and cumshaw, and maybe one or two of them even make a big swindle out of race. We have so many bad leaders—I mean manipulators. Silverfinger—he’s supposed to be a big race man. Boasts about how he picks the yellows up with his little bamboo chopsticks. ‘Make your lid feel he’s a big man’—this is what Silverfinger says—‘and you can pick him right up with your chopsticks.’ I don’t care how ‘bad’ our leaders are, if they’re really strong, too, if they can get something for us…. But Runner is different—he’s pure, I really believe he’s pure. I didn’t like the way Old Arm came in there with a squad of his bullies to tell him not to try his method here in the city. Only one thing I liked about it: It showed that whatever Old Arm had heard about Runner had made him take Runner seriously. Very, very seriously.”

  What moved me so about the way this big, clumsy, wonk-witted man talked? Was it the mentions of Rock? The stirring up of so many memories? I could not help saying, “You’ve changed too, Bare-Stick.”

  “Working for Runner fills you with a feeling of closeness to all the ragged, miserable, louse-bitten men and women who come in there to kowtow and to watch the birds and listen to Runner talk. You feel like one of a big society, a secret hall, of sufferers—and that makes you stop worrying about your own face. About your own endless eating of loss in front of the lids.”

  “I have to get ready to go out,” I said, suddenly wanting to cut off this talk of sufferers. “I have to change my clothes.”

  Bare-Stick rose to leave. “If I find Rock, do you want me to tell you where he is?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s out of my life.”

  When I met Han, later, he asked me at once why I had been weeping.

  When Time Would Not Stop

  Han took me to the races on one of my off days. Imagine the thrill I felt when Han’s coachman pulled the carriage off Bubbling Well Road in to the stately gateway of the Recreation Ground, the sacrosanct demesne of the highest yellow society, and the armed gate guard, responding to the casual salute Han gave him—a tap of his closed fan on his oyster-gray silk skullcap—called out to my escort, “Pass in, Elder-born Han!”

  We were early. It was a good form to be early, Han said. The coachman put us down at the steps of the Race Club pavilion, and we began to stroll about the vast grounds. Young yellow bloods greeted Han, and one asked, “Where have you been keeping yourself?” The sky was a brilliantly polished vitreous bowl. I was wearing a new Lin Yi dress that Han had given
me, and I felt the envious eyes of Han’s friends on me. Surely I was at the pinnacle! How could a poverty-stricken white girl be carried any higher? To think of the number of yellows who would never worm their way inside these walls! Han held a parasol to shade me from the sun; the Recreation Ground seemed to be a wild-flower bed of brightly colored parasols. “The Archery Club,” Han said, pointing to a pavilion we were passing. “And there’s the Swimming Bath. The Kite-Flying Grounds beyond.” This last he said with a twinkle in his eye, for I had told him what kite-flying meant in the hogs’ under-language; we shared many darkened-room secrets! “There’s the Fireworks Stand: we must come some night to see the display: they hold it at the black of the moon. That pavilion belongs to the Walking and Talking Club. I’ve never joined. They have an artificial wilderness, beyond there where you see the cypresses, and they walk around on sand-covered paths. Truly. Does it sound absurd? Ayah, it’s frightfully serious.” I was aware of Han’s boyish pride, both in me and in being able to show me these yellow wonders. “The free grounds, outside the racetracks and between these various clubs, where you see the low fences—they’re allotted by the Recreation Trustees to the many foot-shuttlecock and stone-tossing clubs of the young gentlemen in the hongs.”

  “Strange,” I said, “the gents playing at poor men’s games.”

  “They believe in keeping fit,” Han said. “You should hear them, sometimes, at the best receptions, rehashing their boring games. By the hour. They remember every detail.”

  It was nearly time for the first race, and we sauntered back toward the Race Club. Hai! There was Harlot in the crowd! Not with Pride but with another, younger yellow. I saw her eyes on mine, yet she showed nothing. I began to lunge forward, thinking to call her name; she looked away. Then I realized: She was threading the needle in broad daylight. Her skin was exquisitely made up, yellowed. I thought, with a secret laugh: More power to her!