Books like White Lotus

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.