White Lotus Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1990

  Copyright © 1964 by John Mersey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1964.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hersey, John, 1914–

  White lotus / John Hersey.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-679-72570-9: $12.95

  I. Title.

  PS3515.E7715W45  1989    89-40134

  813’52—dc20            CIP

  Ebook ISBN 9780593081051

  v5.4

  a

  FOR MARTIN

  JOHN

  ANN

  BAIRD

  BROOK

  my beloved

  sons and

  daughters

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This work is not intended as prophecy; perhaps it should be thought of as an extended dream about the past, for in this story, as in dreams, invisible masks cover and color known faces, happenings are vaguely familiar yet “different,” time is fluid, and there is a haunting feeling that people just like us, and maybe we ourselves, have lived in such strange places as these. It is, in short, a history that might have been, a tale of an old shoe on a new foot.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE • The Sleeping-Bird Method

  BOOK ONE • The Coffle

  BOOK TWO • Hawk Flight of a Hand

  BOOK THREE • The Chalk Circle

  BOOK FOUR • Peace’s War

  BOOK FIVE • Going to the Mountain

  BOOK SIX • The Number Wheel

  BOOK SEVEN • The Lower Hand

  BOOK EIGHT • The Enclave

  EPILOGUE • Virtuous Wisdom, Gentle Hand

  PROLOGUE

  The Sleeping-Bird Method

  “Every Measure”

  I MUST COMPOSE my face and push the fear and doubt beneath the skin. Nothing must show on my face today but white skin.

  All that I have done and known must shine in this act. I am to stand alone out there, a solitary “sleeping bird,” for on this day I have been chosen to make the symbolic individual protest that our movement has found so effective in recent months.

  Our group of whites, about two dozen all told, is huddled on the near side of a large reviewing ground in the capital of Four Rivers Province.

  Across the way is my “roost,” the place where I am to stand—beyond a memorial archway, before the gate of the provincial yamen: a stack of masonry in the worst taste of the new regime’s “popular” style, squarish, pink, false-humble like the bureaucrats it houses, a cartoon in bricks of the obdurate heavy yellow spirit that we whites have set ourselves in this campaign to break for good.

  The reviewing ground is a plain space of unpaved dirt which is as nearly level as anything in this hilly city. A long, low swell of earth rises left of center; to the right the bare clay, mud-cracked and shoe-worn, slopes down to a brick wall.

  Around three sides of this parade area a large crowd of yellows, mostly young and male, has gathered. So far these onlookers are silent. Are they simply curious? Do they know that our weapon is one that will prick their shame?

  A thin old dog whose orange fur is molting out in ragged handfuls slinks along the open ground in front of the memorial arch, its tail between its legs, appearing to think that the crowd has assembled in order to humble a cur.

  This dog reminds me of Grin’s dream, so long ago, of the endless riverlike pack of runaway-hunting dogs on the way to “the mountain” of freedom, and of Dolphin, who became a fugitive shadow, it could be said, in that very dream, Dolphin who failed his kind because of his utter selfishness; he wanted to go alone. Then, looking at the squat yamen beyond the dog, I think for a moment of Peace, standing with legs spread, looking up at that exquisite sculptural palace of power, ice-whited by limewash and the late-slanting sun, at Twin Hills—Peace who failed us because of his inflexibility, the rigidity of his vision. How many traits could I count as causes of failure for whites? No, I must not think in this vein…. My face must show nothing today but skin.

  There is activity at the yamen gate. Some yellow official has come out from within and is talking with a slouching group of gate guards.

  The official, who, though provincial, affects the ultra-plain, quasi-military tunic of the new national regime, modest to the brink of ostentation, starts across the reviewing ground, accompanied by three out-of-step guards. He is coming to us.

  Rock takes me by the arm and edges me, or tucks me, back into the center of our group; perhaps he thinks it best that I be somewhat hidden for the present.

  The official has approached us, and he asks, “Who is your leader?”

  This is the invariable question, and always when perching en masse we used to greet it with unanimous silence, and now some instinct keeps us silent again. I suppose Rock is our leader, but he is quiet with the rest of us. Or perhaps I am the leader today; I remain half hidden.

  “What is the matter? Is your leader afraid to identify himself?”

  Now our silence is becoming effective. Yellow taunters have always been enraged by the solidity, the thick imperviousness, of our silence.

  “I have a message for your leader from the Governor.”

  It is not easy to keep silent at this announcement. I want to shout, “What? What is it?” For we know about His Excellency Governor K’ung of Four Rivers Province. It is precisely his shame that we have wanted to stir by coming here—if he has any. He is my personal adversary for this day. We have heard about Governor K’ung from a distance. He is a former warlord who made an accommodation with the new regime, which accepted him for the sake of immediate stability in Four Rivers Province, and he is said to be a short man with a big belly and a thick neck. What concerns us—me—is his attitude toward the whites. He has publicly stated that the whites were brought here from foreign parts to be slaves; slavery was the
proper station of the whites; through no fault of his they are no longer slaves, but in Four Rivers Province they are to remain, so long as he is Governor, subservient to the yellow population. He has openly flouted the decrees of the national regime, weak and vague as they are, respecting the universality and inviolability of citizenship. In his public speeches Governor K’ung uses the old epithets: “pigs,” “smalls,” “moonlights,” “fogs.” His is the voice of insult, provocation, hatred; a thin veneer of old-fashioned manners covers a hard core of pure hatred.

  Governor K’ung is what his province deserves—this exquisite rain-drenched interior area of pyramidal hills which we can see all around, whose profiles are fringed with thin lines of trees; rice land of the Red Basin, once a sea floor, now a rich earth bowl of food. This region is backward, scandalously backward from our point of view, for the white farm workers are still held in an ill-defined state of villeinage—their bondage consisting not in legal arrangements but simply in a millstone poverty that they haven’t the strength to lift off their backs. The worst of this thralldom is the vileness of the yellows toward our starving whites: Governor K’ung in his genteel nastiness mirrors his yellow populace. This is the valley of hate.

  The official is angry at our utter silence, which he sees as sullenness.

  “Excellency K’ung wishes to state that he will take every measure to prevent agitators from outside his province from causing any trouble here. Do you understand the phrase ‘every measure’? Excellency K’ung knows your plan—to station a single so-called sleeping bird on public display. Excellency K’ung will not allow such a display. He forbids it. Please understand that any overt act on your part will constitute deliberate disobedience of his commands.”

  The official wheels away and returns to the yamen. His progress across the reviewing ground brings a half-humorous cheer from the watching yellows—they’re glad something is happening.

  We are quiet for some time after the official has gone out of earshot, then suddenly everyone in our party is talking at once.

  Several of our group feel that we should call off the demonstration; I hear one man say that going through with it would be too dangerous for White Lotus, for me. Another advocates at least a postponement, taking time to work out a new technique, a surprise, some twist that would catch the Governor off balance.

  Deft, our theorist, speaks. He is a man of slight stature, with a delicate chin and a receding hairline and flashing eyes which give an appearance of conviction and force to the words that tumble out of his moist little mouth. He says that we can’t withdraw, we can’t postpone. This would be the first defeat we’d ever suffered. We’d be giving in to a show of force that so far consisted only of commands. Besides, we’d be giving in to the worst yellow man of all those whom we’d attempted to impress.

  Rock agrees to this but says that he feels that a man, not a woman, should take the risk of this demonstration. He volunteers his own person.

  Deft says, “No, that’s wrong. A woman offers a far greater reproach to violence, or to a threat of it, than a man. It would be a mistake to send a man out now.”

  Rock does not press the point. I think he believes that Deft is right. He has made his gesture of protecting me.

  Through this exchange our friend Chang, pressing at our shoulders, has been studying the matter, peeking often at Rock to see where the man of action would jump.

  Chang is a yellow youth who is on our side. He is one of a growing number of young yellows who in their zeal to help us, activated rather than paralyzed by shame, have begun to attach themselves to us, taking risks with us and often embarrassing us with their complex motives and naive suggestions but also, in a few cases, and Chang is one of them, bringing to bear an underlying sweetness and generosity which, no matter how perverse its innermost origin may have been, lends us comfort and moral force when we face their so far untouched fellows. But at this moment Chang disgusts me.

  A food vendor has just come to us, a white man, who carries on the ends of a shoulder pole a strange little kitchen in two parts—a cylindrical wooden canister at one end, which serves as a pantry for raw foodstuffs and utensils, and, at the other, another cylinder, this one of metal, containing a charcoal brazier and a boiler of deep vegetable oil. On a spike that leans out over the hot oil are crisp bean crullers, newly cooked.

  The vendor is excited; he knows by hearsay what is about to take place, he will be a witness for the local whites—for no whites besides him have dared to come out to watch here in this province where brutal intimidation is still the rule.

  Is it my imagination that makes Chang’s demeanor toward the vendor, as he buys a cruller, different from ours? We whites are easy and direct with the man; good-hearted Chang, it seems to my eyes, is at a great remove as he takes a cruller in its wrapping of crude paper and drops a copper in the hawker’s hand. His air is patrician, accustomed to servants, white servants. He snaps at the cruller with beautiful teeth, his lips are drawn back in a kind of snarl to keep them from being burned by the still-hot cruller. The vendor is already dismissed from his mind, not a man but a convenience.

  Whereas, by contrast, the vendor lingers in my mind as I nibble without appetite at a cruller that Rock has put in my hand.

  The vendor is one of those ragged creatures whose wild appearance should not be unsettling, for there is nothing mad or ascetic or haunted about it; it is a matter of calculation. His quilted coat is leaking dirty cotton, and his hair is long and matted. The man is cheerful. In his present excitation, he is inclined to talk too loud, laugh too hard. I am to be a sleeping bird for the yellows’ shame, but he shames me. I feel in his filth a crafty deference to those who buy his wares—and this means, for the most part, to yellows. I am at one with him because we are both white, and I am sorry for him because he is poor, but I am also angry at him because he wants to be filthy; he knows that in this province it is good business for a white to be a low, beastly man.

  Patting some of our volunteers and muttering words of encouragement, then lifting a new batch of cooked crullers out from the boiling oil, one by one, with a bent wire and hanging them on the spike, he seems to want to linger with us. But we have finished eating, and the lure of money takes him away.

  From a side street, parting the crowd and coming out into the open area, several bands of policemen appear, and they begin to stroll about the reviewing ground by twos and threes, unmilitarily, like chatting philosophers. To keep whose peace?

  We do not trust them. Everywhere our movement has gone, rumors have accompanied us: that the quiet pose of the sleeping birds is false, that a great bloody rebellion is in the making, and that someday, in some demonstration, a signal will be given—perhaps one of these human birds will flap its arm-wings—and then all over the country the whites will flash weapons out from under their clothing and attempt a terrible slaughter. We tell ourselves that these rumors are a product of our effectiveness, yet they disturb us. They fill us with dread of an opposite violence, a fear that one wrong accidental gesture by a sleeping bird, perhaps trying to regain balance, flinging out an arm in what might be taken for a signal—“Begin now!”—might cause the yellows to descend on us to cut down our eloquent reproach by an even more eloquent, because unanswerable, knife edge. So the appearance of armed policemen in increasing numbers at our perches is no comfort to us.

  The yellow crowd, however, reacts in a mischievous, inverted way to the arrival of the police. The many idle young yellow men begin to jeer—at the police. Is this because the police are so casual, so ill-disposed, as it seems, to take strong measures? Or is it a case of young men in a crowd responding to a show of authority which they may think directed against themselves? Or is it simply boredom, fun, anything for a moment’s entertainment? I cannot think that any of these interpretations is good for us—or, on this day, for me.

  I have been chosen for this solo task today because in earlier group perches I hav
e shown endurance. I have been thought stolid; some have called me courageous. If I have been courageous, then courage is quite different from what I had always thought, for it must be something less than pure self-possession in the face of clear danger, it must be compounded of misgivings, anxiety, confusion, desperate and sinking efforts to master one’s doubts, and even uncertainty as to the meaning of one’s actions.

  I am physically tired. I suppose I will be able to manage the long perch; something takes hold of me when I adopt that stance, an inner strength, so that I do not feel wearied by it, awkward though it is. But today I am tired. We have had a long journey upriver by steamer. For the first part of the trip we whites had the run of the vessel, but on reaching the border of North-of-the-Lake Province, passing into this province, Four Rivers, we were firmly ordered by crew members to proceed to the filthy stern quarters, under the rattling steerage chains—familiar to Rock and me from our hopeful trip downriver, so long ago it seems, to Up-from-the-Sea. Not being able to see where we were going, only knowing of our progress by the constant thumping of some huge engine bearing and by the chatter of the rudder chains—this blindness made our trip exhausting. But even worse: the sense of outrage, of frustration, the wondering whether we would ever get anywhere with our painfully gradual methods.

  Still, we have come a long way since that afternoon at the match factory. The Sleeping-Bird Method caught on after that with brushfire irresistibility as the one means we had in our power to disturb the yellows, to push the yellows, to shame the yellows into grudging change. It was so simple, so pure, an invention of genius by Groundnut’s hawk-eyed friend, the priest named Runner: merely to stand on one leg, like a bird settled on a perch for the night, helpless as a sleeping bird, in a large flock of sleeping birds. It worked. For some reason this gesture reached to the very roots of the yellows’ conscience, obliging them to face up to the intolerable conditions of our lives, wringing their guilty souls with that sweetest of all Buddha’s teachings, “Harm no living creature.” For as sleeping birds we seemed at last to have forced ourselves on their minds as vividly living creatures. At first the drive was confined to Up-from-the-Sea. We got jobs. We broke the back of the printeries; then papermaking, rubber goods, and enamelware fell. We began against cotton weaving. We were helped, it is true, by the unrest of the yellow workers themselves and the instability of the central regime. We perched precisely where the yellows were on strike. We began to hear that the Sleeping-Bird Method was being used in other cities, and our movement began to acquire theorists, strategists, organizers, a bureaucratic endoskeleton—and to the outlying provinces Runner began to send emissaries. We heard from a great distance that five thousand sleeping birds stood all one day in the plaza, where elephants once guarded the passage, before the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City in the Northern Capital; and the regime must have wilted a bit with shame at that, because we began to hear of those vague proclamations on the nature of citizenship which were “for” us. Those documents, however, did not produce change in themselves, and our first reaction to them, of triumph and delight, shaded soon into a realization that we would see no real change that we did not bring about by our own efforts. Indeed, in the outermost provinces, in the backward ones like Four Rivers, we found that the secret police of the central regime, its “open” militia, and its high judges were playing an ambiguous game, making public declarations that seemed to support us but behind doors making agreements and judgments that tended, in the old phrase, to keep the pigs in the pen. This was the time when our movement seemed to be bogging down in a vagueness of its own, and this was when Rock, at that bicycle-wheel plant at Hankow, invented the individual protest that we have been using ever since: one sleeping bird standing alone.