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White Lotus
The story follows a young Arizona girl renamed White Lotus. As she ages, she evolves from “a bewildered, terrified slave to a conscious and intelligent revolutionary.” Her orchestrated, yet simple act of standing before her captors on one leg, head bowed like a sleeping bird becomes an often repeated act of nonviolent civil disobedience, an unconventional act in the spirit of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King.
691 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
80 people are currently reading
838 people want to read
About the author
John Hersey
115 books867 followersJohn Richard Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer, earliest practiced the "new journalism," which fuses storytelling devices of the novel with nonfiction reportage. A 36-member panel under the aegis of journalism department of New York University adjudged account of Hersey of the aftermath of the atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, as the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
March 7, 2010
It is so long ago that I read this book that it is past the time that I should do a re-read. However, it is testament to the power that I remember this story so well after almost 40 years. I admit that I was a very young teen when I first ate up the words contained in this story, and maybe with older and more cynical eyes I may not enjoy it quite so much, but it certainly laid a deep impression of a girl with a passion for social justice in the late 60's early 70's.
July 20, 2009
First published in 1965, John Hersey’s “White Lotus” is an examination of race relations. It came at the right time. With the Civil Rights movement and revelations into white America’s historic treatment of Native Americans, Hersey flips the cards.
In the novel, white Americans had become enslaved by the Chinese. We become the subservient race. The story follows a young Arizona girl renamed White Lotus. As she ages, she evolves from “a bewildered, terrified slave to a conscious and intelligent revolutionary.” Her orchestrated, yet simple act of standing before her captors on one leg, head bowed like a sleeping bird becomes an often repeated act of nonviolent civil disobedience, an unconventional act in the spirit of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Her peaceful defiance forces her oppressors to turn away, leaving her alone. Having won a symbolic victory, she reflects, “Looking at the retreating Governor’s back, I have a thought that floods me, at the very time when perhaps I should be giving way to a blessed sense of victory, instead with a fear as puzzling as any I have felt in all my life to now: What if someday we are the masters and they are the underdogs?”
Indeed.
In the novel, white Americans had become enslaved by the Chinese. We become the subservient race. The story follows a young Arizona girl renamed White Lotus. As she ages, she evolves from “a bewildered, terrified slave to a conscious and intelligent revolutionary.” Her orchestrated, yet simple act of standing before her captors on one leg, head bowed like a sleeping bird becomes an often repeated act of nonviolent civil disobedience, an unconventional act in the spirit of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Her peaceful defiance forces her oppressors to turn away, leaving her alone. Having won a symbolic victory, she reflects, “Looking at the retreating Governor’s back, I have a thought that floods me, at the very time when perhaps I should be giving way to a blessed sense of victory, instead with a fear as puzzling as any I have felt in all my life to now: What if someday we are the masters and they are the underdogs?”
Indeed.
April 16, 2010
This amazing book can be taken as a complete, if dark 'post-WW 3' fantasy/invention. But it can also be taken as an incredible, and harrowing allegory in the finest detail for what it must have been like to become a slave in pre Civil War America. Hersey is a masterful writer and this I think is his masterpiece, vivid and stark in descriptions, uncompromising in characterization, riveting in plot. Even if you find it difficult to 'get into' reading 'White Lotus' it will be more than worth your while to keep on. You will certainly have your eyes opened for you by this amazing work of 'fiction'.
September 22, 2007
China wins the 'Great War' and a young California girl is taken by force to China to work as a slave.
The basic premise of Hersey's novel sounds as though it comes from a more recent book, as the trend towards 'alternate history' has bloomed in the last decade. The book was written in 1965, however, when playing 'what if?' games was much less popular. I find it hard to classify this book as alternate history. The story is one of racial injustice and social change, turned on its head in a truly unique way. Hersey's background as the child of American missionaries in China - just like Pearl Buck, his contemporary - lend authenticity to his descriptions of pre-Revolution China. I have always found the story deeply moving. The book itself is out of print, but I grab every copy that I find used to give to friends and loved ones.
The basic premise of Hersey's novel sounds as though it comes from a more recent book, as the trend towards 'alternate history' has bloomed in the last decade. The book was written in 1965, however, when playing 'what if?' games was much less popular. I find it hard to classify this book as alternate history. The story is one of racial injustice and social change, turned on its head in a truly unique way. Hersey's background as the child of American missionaries in China - just like Pearl Buck, his contemporary - lend authenticity to his descriptions of pre-Revolution China. I have always found the story deeply moving. The book itself is out of print, but I grab every copy that I find used to give to friends and loved ones.
November 27, 2017
Absolutely one of my favorite book beginnings and endings. Hersey is a competent writer and the plot of this book is often on my mind. True, there were parts that seemed dull to me, but possibly that was the point- to show the banality and hopelessness that occur within the walls of slavery. I felt so much for the characters and love them for their faults as much as their triumphs. I think a great lesson was taught by switching the role of the slaves to Caucasians (at least that was powerful to me at a young age, being white in a predominantly white nation). People of all cultures and races have been enslaved to varying degrees and no one is immune to it in the future, either. For me, I often saw the Chinese captors as a symbol of many different things (institutions, traditions, etc.) that enslave us and challenge our moral agency as well as our self-confidence. A great study in human nature and the power of the human spirit.
September 18, 2010
I read this book over 40 yrs ago...and I still get inspiration from the image of the heroine standing on one foot along with her co-revolutionaires for hours at a time in protest.
December 30, 2022
This was the last book on my 1965 reading list. So, after two years, I have finally finished that list. (If you want to see the books that I read published in 1965, click on the "books-from-1965" in the bookshelves/tags link above this review.)
White Lotus was an extremely challenging read for me. In fact, when I finally finished it, I could hardly read at all for a few days.
John Hersey takes on slavery and racism in a speculative story. He posits that America lost a war with China and in his very long story, the Chinese (the Yellows) capture American white people and take them off to China in ships to be slaves.
Then he loosely parallels the Civil Rights movement as it played out up to the mid-1960s in America. The main character, a fifteen-year-old girl from a village in Arizona, narrates the story over many years. She is named White Lotus by her first Chinese master's wife.
Hersey goes deeply into her psyche, meticulously following her every thought. She is rebellious and consistently falls for strong but unreliable men. Her sufferings as a slave and then as a free white in various Chinese cities, stand in for the stages of rising out of the degradation of being a slave (all brutally described) to regaining a sense of self and developing concepts of rebellion and non-violent protest. Interestingly, it is Chinese Buddhists who are against slavery.
This is a long book and the 667 pages felt like 2000 pages. Reading it was a process of pushing through unremitting barriers. I suppose Hersey did indeed create in me, the reader, the confusions and sufferings and hopelessness of the conditions of slavery. I was just a bit suspicious about his method because he was reporting on an experience he never lived through as a white American.
He was a reporter first and foremost who came to recognition with his report made into a book, Hiroshima, after it was published in The New Yorker in 1946. Then he turned to fiction. I have read all seven of his previous novels and I will probably read the rest because I admire his inquisitive and imaginative writing about the human condition.
White Lotus was an extremely challenging read for me. In fact, when I finally finished it, I could hardly read at all for a few days.
John Hersey takes on slavery and racism in a speculative story. He posits that America lost a war with China and in his very long story, the Chinese (the Yellows) capture American white people and take them off to China in ships to be slaves.
Then he loosely parallels the Civil Rights movement as it played out up to the mid-1960s in America. The main character, a fifteen-year-old girl from a village in Arizona, narrates the story over many years. She is named White Lotus by her first Chinese master's wife.
Hersey goes deeply into her psyche, meticulously following her every thought. She is rebellious and consistently falls for strong but unreliable men. Her sufferings as a slave and then as a free white in various Chinese cities, stand in for the stages of rising out of the degradation of being a slave (all brutally described) to regaining a sense of self and developing concepts of rebellion and non-violent protest. Interestingly, it is Chinese Buddhists who are against slavery.
This is a long book and the 667 pages felt like 2000 pages. Reading it was a process of pushing through unremitting barriers. I suppose Hersey did indeed create in me, the reader, the confusions and sufferings and hopelessness of the conditions of slavery. I was just a bit suspicious about his method because he was reporting on an experience he never lived through as a white American.
He was a reporter first and foremost who came to recognition with his report made into a book, Hiroshima, after it was published in The New Yorker in 1946. Then he turned to fiction. I have read all seven of his previous novels and I will probably read the rest because I admire his inquisitive and imaginative writing about the human condition.
September 23, 2014
One of Hersey's two great masterpieces, and not far behind "The Wall," which is his best novel. He knew the importance of character development, and I have never encountered a novel that does it better than these two. That means that the story will move too slowly for some while he takes his time to really let us get to know them, especially White Lotus, the main character. At the end, you may feel as if you are being forced to say goodbye to some friends. As others have noted, Hersey's own background, which included growing up in China for a while, allows him to give the story a solidly authentic feeling, and the "there but for the grace of God go you" message to those who opposed the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, when this book was written, was brilliant, especially when one considers that revisionist history was not used so much as a fiction style in that time.
On a personal note, I will also confess that this book has left me wondering about my own reactions to it. Why does this book move me more than accounts of real life slavery such as the accounts of Frederick Douglass? Is it because this novel is better written, or maybe because a female narrator draws more sympathy out of me? Possibly, but I have to wonder if maybe the book is so good that it actually exposed some racial bias that I didn't even admit or realize. Yes, this novel is really good enough to raise questions like that.
On a personal note, I will also confess that this book has left me wondering about my own reactions to it. Why does this book move me more than accounts of real life slavery such as the accounts of Frederick Douglass? Is it because this novel is better written, or maybe because a female narrator draws more sympathy out of me? Possibly, but I have to wonder if maybe the book is so good that it actually exposed some racial bias that I didn't even admit or realize. Yes, this novel is really good enough to raise questions like that.
October 7, 2019
read for the theme - reread a favorite.
I never re-read a book because there are just too many I haven't read but I have always wanted to re-read this one. The last time I read it was in the 10th grade, 31 years ago. Although it is not quite how I remembered it completely it still has the same effect on me. Slavery could have happened anywhere at any time to any race. We are all just humans and need to treat others as such. Violence never accomplishes as much as peace. Sometimes silence screams more than words. I have always tried to live my life seeing people as all equal even down to and especially the people that have the "dirty" jobs no one else wants to do. I'm sure this book has a lot to do with that.
I never re-read a book because there are just too many I haven't read but I have always wanted to re-read this one. The last time I read it was in the 10th grade, 31 years ago. Although it is not quite how I remembered it completely it still has the same effect on me. Slavery could have happened anywhere at any time to any race. We are all just humans and need to treat others as such. Violence never accomplishes as much as peace. Sometimes silence screams more than words. I have always tried to live my life seeing people as all equal even down to and especially the people that have the "dirty" jobs no one else wants to do. I'm sure this book has a lot to do with that.
May 7, 2013
Read this more than forty years ago, but I recall it vividly. It is the story of a young girl taken as a slave to China after a war in which the US was defeated. Seen from her perspective, the reader experiences her life as a slave (much like what a black slave might have experienced in pre-civil war times). Very powerful novel with profound overtones of the civil rights movement of non-violent protest.
June 16, 2009
Every bit as good as "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "Huck Finn", "The Grapes of Wrath" or "The Scarlet Letter"! A dark and defiant book.
February 19, 2017
“I began to see religion as a suit of clothing...covering naked barbarity...(p)iety and cruelty were mask and face (p. 385 of the Alfred A. Knopf [© 1965] first edition I just read).”
And this is true in John Hersey’s harrowing account not only of religion! Piety masking cruelty is apparent in almost every aspect of the lives of these white slaves following another ill-defined Great War in which China emerges as the victor — and America, the loser.
Prophetic? In his Author’s Note, Hersey says not. (“This work is not intended as prophesy; 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.”)
But Hersey published this book in 1965 — which is, if memory serves, roughly the year in which I first read it — and what could he have known or foretold about the state of things in 2013?
It was Hersey’s Hiroshima, which I read and reviewed earlier this month, that convinced me to give White Lotus a second reading. Hiroshima is indeed a book that “(e)veryone able to read should read.” White Lotus is not. If I needed to read all 683 pages to arrive at that conclusion, I must confess that it was only the inertia of the story’s initial conceit that propelled me to do so.
Is White Lotus badly written? Hardly. Hersey is an eminently capable writer. Perhaps it was only my struggle with his choice of names reflecting character (entirely in keeping with the Chinese way of doing things, which Hersey — born and raised to early adolescence in Tientsin, China — would’ve been entirely conversant in). Juxtaposed to real actions and characters, this becomes both confusing and ultimately annoying over the long haul. Perhaps a randomly chosen example — of which there are hundreds if not thousands — will help to clarify my objection:
“One day while we were walking I had a thought. ‘What about Bad Hog?’
Rock had forgotten all about the fighting cock, he started as if he had been poked with a cattle herder’s prod. ‘We must go and see that turtle Groundnut’ (p. 452).”
Is White Lotus — as Hersey suggests in his Author’s Note — really “an extended dream about (our own) past”? I’ll let you reach your own conclusion from these three (dare I say eerily familiar-sounding) examples:
“Then I realized — and the recognition gave me anger rather than relief, demoralized anger, degrading anger — that the yellows had no interest in the hurts that whites gave whites (p. 545).”
“Perhaps it had to do with the exaggerated, automatic closeness a white person felt with any other white whom he had ever known; we were all fellow members of a league of underdogs (p. 556).”
“‘Every white man for himself, I say, but it takes work. And I don’t know whether your typical white scum can ever bring himself to work hard enough. He’d rather sit around and listen to Old Arm and dream about great days to come…’ (p. 589).”
It would be unfair of me to dismiss—or even judge—this work in any way if I failed to note that when Hersey the journalist makes an effort to be Hersey the stylist, his talent is evident—as I believe the following description of Shanghai (in the brain and person of his mouthpiece character, White Lotus) will make abundantly clear:
“CITY OF WONDER! City of modern times! For three summer winter days we lived on the coppers in Rock’s leather pouch, in ease, walking about. This great port of ocean commerce, seated on a curving riverbank, Up-from-the-Sea, was a far cry from the Northern Capital. In the prosperous part of the port, called the Model Settlement, were buildings that loomed up from the ground two and three stories high and even, in the case of some of the vast white-walled mercantile hongs along the Bund, laminated skyward five and six floors! Enormous crimson or black characters, names and claims, on hanging signs. Globular electric lamps on brackets out from shop fronts, sparkling polyhedral lamps with tassels of crimson cord hanging down. Tea shops, their upper faces adorned with storytelling woodwork, carved, lacquered, and gilded. Shops of healers of sick rich men, stocked with ginseng, angelica, licorice, and powdered deer antler. Pawnshops—hope for thieves! Caverns of grass cloth, silk, satin, brocade, and embroideries whose intricacies whispered in sybaritic tones of the ruined eyes of a generation of white needlewomen.
“And the traffic, the crowds bustling for profit! Two-wheeled conveyances drawn by white men: rickshas, everywhere. And on the thoroughfares named for provinces and for other cities, several of the smoke-breathing, glistening motorcars of which we country tenants had heard but distant superstitious rumors. And thousands on thousands afoot, whites mingling without fear with yellows (pp. 553-554).”
You could do far worse than spend a week or two with John Hersey’s White Lotus. As we all have only one life to lead, live and give, however, I suspect you could also do far better.
RRB
8/27/13
Brooklyn, NY
And this is true in John Hersey’s harrowing account not only of religion! Piety masking cruelty is apparent in almost every aspect of the lives of these white slaves following another ill-defined Great War in which China emerges as the victor — and America, the loser.
Prophetic? In his Author’s Note, Hersey says not. (“This work is not intended as prophesy; 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.”)
But Hersey published this book in 1965 — which is, if memory serves, roughly the year in which I first read it — and what could he have known or foretold about the state of things in 2013?
It was Hersey’s Hiroshima, which I read and reviewed earlier this month, that convinced me to give White Lotus a second reading. Hiroshima is indeed a book that “(e)veryone able to read should read.” White Lotus is not. If I needed to read all 683 pages to arrive at that conclusion, I must confess that it was only the inertia of the story’s initial conceit that propelled me to do so.
Is White Lotus badly written? Hardly. Hersey is an eminently capable writer. Perhaps it was only my struggle with his choice of names reflecting character (entirely in keeping with the Chinese way of doing things, which Hersey — born and raised to early adolescence in Tientsin, China — would’ve been entirely conversant in). Juxtaposed to real actions and characters, this becomes both confusing and ultimately annoying over the long haul. Perhaps a randomly chosen example — of which there are hundreds if not thousands — will help to clarify my objection:
“One day while we were walking I had a thought. ‘What about Bad Hog?’
Rock had forgotten all about the fighting cock, he started as if he had been poked with a cattle herder’s prod. ‘We must go and see that turtle Groundnut’ (p. 452).”
Is White Lotus — as Hersey suggests in his Author’s Note — really “an extended dream about (our own) past”? I’ll let you reach your own conclusion from these three (dare I say eerily familiar-sounding) examples:
“Then I realized — and the recognition gave me anger rather than relief, demoralized anger, degrading anger — that the yellows had no interest in the hurts that whites gave whites (p. 545).”
“Perhaps it had to do with the exaggerated, automatic closeness a white person felt with any other white whom he had ever known; we were all fellow members of a league of underdogs (p. 556).”
“‘Every white man for himself, I say, but it takes work. And I don’t know whether your typical white scum can ever bring himself to work hard enough. He’d rather sit around and listen to Old Arm and dream about great days to come…’ (p. 589).”
It would be unfair of me to dismiss—or even judge—this work in any way if I failed to note that when Hersey the journalist makes an effort to be Hersey the stylist, his talent is evident—as I believe the following description of Shanghai (in the brain and person of his mouthpiece character, White Lotus) will make abundantly clear:
“CITY OF WONDER! City of modern times! For three summer winter days we lived on the coppers in Rock’s leather pouch, in ease, walking about. This great port of ocean commerce, seated on a curving riverbank, Up-from-the-Sea, was a far cry from the Northern Capital. In the prosperous part of the port, called the Model Settlement, were buildings that loomed up from the ground two and three stories high and even, in the case of some of the vast white-walled mercantile hongs along the Bund, laminated skyward five and six floors! Enormous crimson or black characters, names and claims, on hanging signs. Globular electric lamps on brackets out from shop fronts, sparkling polyhedral lamps with tassels of crimson cord hanging down. Tea shops, their upper faces adorned with storytelling woodwork, carved, lacquered, and gilded. Shops of healers of sick rich men, stocked with ginseng, angelica, licorice, and powdered deer antler. Pawnshops—hope for thieves! Caverns of grass cloth, silk, satin, brocade, and embroideries whose intricacies whispered in sybaritic tones of the ruined eyes of a generation of white needlewomen.
“And the traffic, the crowds bustling for profit! Two-wheeled conveyances drawn by white men: rickshas, everywhere. And on the thoroughfares named for provinces and for other cities, several of the smoke-breathing, glistening motorcars of which we country tenants had heard but distant superstitious rumors. And thousands on thousands afoot, whites mingling without fear with yellows (pp. 553-554).”
You could do far worse than spend a week or two with John Hersey’s White Lotus. As we all have only one life to lead, live and give, however, I suspect you could also do far better.
RRB
8/27/13
Brooklyn, NY
April 26, 2015
I found "White Lotus" while weeding my library. It was an old book, but its plot was was too ironic to let it go, considering the current economic and political situation between China and the United States. In this book China wins a Great War with the USA and makes white people slaves in China. This was not Hersey's intention, but it was my reason for reading it. I was going to read it as a hipster and then chuck it.... but no!
Though this was an epic novel, a common genre of the 1960's, "White Lotus" was much more. It was an allegorical novel of slavery, especially the African-American experience from capture through civil rights. It is purely fictional, but it could be a historical novel. it is long, but it needs the pages to develop the story fully. Hersey condenses hundreds of years into a decade. His language is rich and the character of White Lotus is well developed. The story is universal of any group who has been exploited and denied their rightful place in society. This book is worth reading. It is timeless. I made a new book cover for it and will put it back on on the library shelf. I hope to entice other readers.
Though this was an epic novel, a common genre of the 1960's, "White Lotus" was much more. It was an allegorical novel of slavery, especially the African-American experience from capture through civil rights. It is purely fictional, but it could be a historical novel. it is long, but it needs the pages to develop the story fully. Hersey condenses hundreds of years into a decade. His language is rich and the character of White Lotus is well developed. The story is universal of any group who has been exploited and denied their rightful place in society. This book is worth reading. It is timeless. I made a new book cover for it and will put it back on on the library shelf. I hope to entice other readers.
February 21, 2008
(3½ stars)
Part of it was just brilliant, but a couple of pages less wouldn't have hurt. It was additional bad luck that the reading of it collided with fatigue stemming from a new job.
Nevertheless, I am really glad that I finished the book - it certainly was worth the effort.
I'm going to be really lazy and just refer to Michael's review. :)
Part of it was just brilliant, but a couple of pages less wouldn't have hurt. It was additional bad luck that the reading of it collided with fatigue stemming from a new job.
Nevertheless, I am really glad that I finished the book - it certainly was worth the effort.
I'm going to be really lazy and just refer to Michael's review. :)
July 18, 2017
This is one of my favorite books and worth reading again and again. It's a timeless story about the awesome power of quiet resistance.
April 20, 2020
Five stars for when it came out in 1965, but thankfully 2 stars 55 years later. If you read the other Goodreads reviews you will see the impact this book had on people who read it then. If you read the Hersey profile in the New Yorker (August 31, 2016) you will understand the impact Hersey had on journalism and on American's understanding of their time. In 1965 Hersey was able to force understanding, empathy and civil rights activism with a story about a white village girl, captured, enslaved and transported to a foreign land. I found the first 100 pages focused on this part of the story to be compelling. The next 500 pages or so, narrating the experience of the slave does not have the force of works written later and which had, in my day, the impact that White Lotus had on its reader in theirs: Roots--read at the age many of the reviewers read White Lotus; and recently:
Homegoing; Between the World and Me; The Book of Night Women; The Souls of Black Folks; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; March.
Homegoing; Between the World and Me; The Book of Night Women; The Souls of Black Folks; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; March.
August 20, 2017
Hersey's brilliant allegory puts white Americans into the shoes of an enslaved people, so they can try them on for size. In the aftermath of a 'Great War' the former US has been conquered by the Chinese. A young Arizona girl, renamed White Lotus is the focus of the narrative. Through it, we see her develop from a bewildered slave, to become a conscious and intelligent revolutionary, whose simple and elegant non-violent protest becomes a movement which ultimately bewiders and ultimately terrifies her oppressors, so that they must turn away, shamed and defeated.
White Lotus' 'victory' reflects the philospophies of Gadhi and Martin Luther King Jnr, and reminds the reader that the victory of the opressed over their masters, also paradoxially frees the oppressor from their inhumanity.
Hersy's novel is now over half a century old, and still relevant and powerful. Recommended reading in the face of recent events in a divided and confused USA.
White Lotus' 'victory' reflects the philospophies of Gadhi and Martin Luther King Jnr, and reminds the reader that the victory of the opressed over their masters, also paradoxially frees the oppressor from their inhumanity.
Hersy's novel is now over half a century old, and still relevant and powerful. Recommended reading in the face of recent events in a divided and confused USA.
July 31, 2020
The story has stayed with me for a long time, so perhaps I should consider another star. What brought it to mind recently is the Portland protests. The basic plot concerns white Americans enslaved in China. The US had been destroyed by war and was reduced to small enclaves, the Chinese would swoop down and gather slaves as needed.
The part of the plot that came back to me in a rush was when I saw the Athena of Portland. In White Lotus the protest movement started by the white slaves used the one-legged stance of the crane. The protesters would gather in groups. Stand on one leg, fold their arms and stand silent in vulnerability.
When Athena stood in front of the DHS mercenaries and performed asanas naked the scene in White Lotus came flooding back to me. The stark honesty of vulnerability in front of power can be devasting.
The part of the plot that came back to me in a rush was when I saw the Athena of Portland. In White Lotus the protest movement started by the white slaves used the one-legged stance of the crane. The protesters would gather in groups. Stand on one leg, fold their arms and stand silent in vulnerability.
When Athena stood in front of the DHS mercenaries and performed asanas naked the scene in White Lotus came flooding back to me. The stark honesty of vulnerability in front of power can be devasting.
October 8, 2022
This was a re-read from many years ago. I don't remember finishing it the first time. I searched for it remembering that it reversed the roles of slavery with whites as slaves and blacks as the ruling class. But it is actually the Chinese who are the ruling class, who import white Americans to China as forced labor. It's fiction and an interesting exercise to contemplate what it would be like. Well written and believable with a woman protagonist. The casual way he writes about her being raped more than once is disturbing, but overall it was a worthwhile read as an intellectual and emotional exercise for a white guy.
July 10, 2021
I read this book many, many years ago...long before I ever considered writing book reviews. And yet, images from this book have remained with me for over forty years, surely a testament to the author's skill in rendering a fictional reality so clearly that it remains indelible. Most people who have read the book remember White Lotus standing on one foot, eyes closed, a sleeping bird. I remember her terror and despair as she felt worms crawling from her rectum down her legs. Hersey captured her misery perfectly. I guess it's time to read it again.
March 6, 2019
I read White Lotus in 1968 right after finishing Hiroshima as a class study book in high school. I was so moved by it that I tried to convince the teachers that it should be required reading in the curriculum! My suggestion was not appreciated and to this day I’m not sure if it was because I was being presumptuous to even suggest it or if it was because the political/racial/gender issues addressed were just too hot for the time!
December 6, 2020
A teen girl, together with her Arizona village, is enslaved and sold to the Yellow World, where she is named White Lotus. Her story as a slave in an alien world is harrowing, and an examination of race relations, culture, and economic clashes. If Martin Luther King Jr. had lived here, he would have stood on one leg. White Lotus's story will stay with you for a long time.
April 24, 2025
I am fairly sure I read this in the 60’s. This time I didn’t think too much of the story. Although set in a future time it so closely parallels the slave trade in America that I had a hard time thinking it was taking place in China. I also found it overly long and took too long to get to the end which was actually a let down.
January 19, 2017
Loved this book. I read it when it first came out in the 1960's when I was a teenager. I could not remember the name of it and I was searching the internet trying to find it and finally did. I'll be rereading it. It was a beautiful and powerful story that is still relevant today.
September 4, 2018
I read this long, long ago, when I was a teenager. I don't really remember much, except that I really enjoyed Hersey's writing.
January 31, 2019
One of the most impressive books I ever read.
March 8, 2020
I first read this book as a young girl and have not looked at slavery the same since. Nearly as moving as Hiroshima.
December 18, 2020
Incredible writing, character development and vision. If I had read this book any other time in my life before or after the debacle of 2020, I probably would have rated it 5 stars.
March 9, 2023
One of those books i definitely would like to revisit again. What a powerful and compelling read.
May 4, 2023
Read this book in the mid to late '60s and it continues to haunt. Should be required reading for all racists; perhaps finally making them understand "there but for all that is holy go I."
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