my silent resignation

My sister set up a hair salon business in a tourist temple town. It fell through. Salons are a dime a dozen. Thousands of undereducated poor girls from distant provinces can’t/don’t read or dream. They cut. Do their nails. Digit phones.

Staring at mirrors is their fate.

Some moonlight as beer girls and hostesses. Where is Mr. ATM? Who’s going to save me they cry wearing gloss in the dead of night masking their eternal loss. Unspoken questions and starvation seek short-term financial solace.

My sister put me to work with a niece washing clothes. In reality I am a happy slave. I have my sister, food and a safe place to sleep. I make some money. An Australian girl gave me a scooter. I dress nice.

My sister started selling massage service. If I meet a good man which is rarer than verbal speech I let him touch me because I trust he’ll take care of me. Short term.

I need help.

Massage has no emotional connection. Touch and go. I have the power to say NO. I have a 5th degree black belt.

I’ve killed more men with silence than you can imagine.

I tell aggressive idiots they can get laid somewhere else. Go find a beer girl. Flash your cash honey.

I do all the washing, ironing and massages. I make small tips. My sister pockets the money. She sits around admiring herself in mirrors, playing with her daughter and talking rubbish on her cell.

I am a voiceless voice of quiet resignation. 

Frame life

"The frame is like life. Life too only provides certain opportunities.

Film is like a square of life, it has the same boundaries.

I think film is more honest, because it owns up to being a limited space.

Life pretends to provide more opportunities, that's why it's a bigger lie."

-Fassbinder

brainwashed

One day it happened that a senior female Chinese university student majoring in English found the courage to say, I don't speak-talk English. My English is poor.

I have no self-esteem. I am too shy.

I am afraid of losing face if I make mistakes in front of a foreigner.

My parents, peers and teachers in socialistic group-think (Oh, George Orwell, where art thou?) reality taught me, or perhaps a better word is brainwashed me into believing, heart and soul that if my English isn't perfect I shouldn't try, especially in front of foreigners.

I’ve learned the less I do, the fewer mistakes I make and the less criticism I face.

I feel safer. I am a robot.

Autonomy and independent critical free thinking are anathema in my comfortable world.

On the other hand, give me a cell phone and I can set world records for text dial-a-log.

Especially when I am sad, lonely and bored.

I know people in the West use the Internet to seek information. Here it’s about entertainment.

I love chat rooms and the TV idiot box where I can give away my consciousness.

Peter Matthiessen - May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014

"In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky . . . This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. "Do not be heavy," Soen Roshi says. "Be light, light, light - full of light!"
 - Peter Matthiessen
commonplace

"The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day."
 - Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard  Read more…

Peter Matthiessen

Sign language

He comes to me in the heat of the day. I welcome him with my dark eyes gesturing a fingertip on lips...quiet. We share the present. My passion is deep and strong. My language - a smile, brown eyes, calloused hands, worn fingers and rolling sounds whisper: 

time

relationships

secrets

fear

family

passion

laughter

sadness

a heart

I dream traditional ignorant silence kills everyone, the others. Truth is a powerful weapon. People are afraid of truth. When I express truth I don’t have to remember what I said. I say what others are afraid to say.

I am an anarchist, a linguistic magician.

Speaking, living and realizing truth with beauty entails risk. If you want to do amazing things you must take amazing risks. Daring is not fatal. I am truth incarnate. I am an objective mirror, free of dust.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh. Fingers on my lips. I am secretly engaged to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family. He works for an NGO here. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and unconscious rescuer. Fat chance.

I come from a poor rural village. I was the last of eleven children. I am 28. I came here with my sister, 32. She got pregnant by a married New Zealand man. She had a daughter named Moaning Lisa. She pretends to be married. It’s all show here. He sends her a monthly handout, pays the electricity. 

When I dance I am alive.