i am a fake person
selling a fake reality
to fake people
where the sound of speech
has no alphabet
creativity has no rules
said a Yangon crow
the end of the world
is down a long labyrinth
without a center
filled with staring voices
a blind man on a train
clicking clacking to Pan Yar Lan
uses a bamboo staff
carries a cup
staff signals pressure
walk slow
trembling through life
blind
Yangon primary students.
Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.
They connected dots forward.
Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.
Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery. They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.
A voice was missing. Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and Ankara dummies in display windows.
Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.
Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' glazed befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.
Laughter is perfect survival therapy.
After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus. It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.
“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”
“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.
TLC
“Get in. The night is here. It is late. You have to fold the clothes. You have your homework for school. You have to clean up after dinner. You must study harder. Harder. Harder. If you fail your exams we will lose face. Shame will haunt us forever. You will become an unemployed migrant exploring Invisible Cities with Italo Calvino seeking your future in a grain of rice.”
High-heeled staccato music accompanied a young woman escaping her family. Muted whispers drifted through narrow concrete canyons as her heels faded.
An elevator door opened on the 11th floor of a 5* international business hotel. Employed on the management team Lucky stopped talking to accountants Shiva and Vishnu.
A beautiful twenty-year old Chinese in a white dress clutching a small black purse stared at a scuffed marble floor. Small puddles of rainwater collected around her red shoes.
She raised her face from the ground. Deep dark brown rings circled old, tired, fearful eyes hiding her heart’s knowledge. Revealing her soul. There was no place to hide, no magical cosmetic to conceal the truth of everything she knew and feared. The woman and stranger instinctively sensed each other.
Passing through she realized a temporary ethereal truth. She pressed another number. Doors closed. She went up to the room of a Taiwanese businessman who would savage her until daybreak.
Finished performing her duty she folded hard earned hard currency into her purse after a long hot shower. She took the elevator down. Gliding through revolving glass and brass doors she passed her shimmering reflection in dark Japanese restaurant mirrors and negotiated gray steps to Nanjing Xi Lu.
Her brown eyes collected one million serious adults in blue industrial worker uniforms practicing Tai Chi with controlled balanced concentration. Every methodical movement had meaning. Dawn’s collective breath forming mist surrounded her red shoes skipping through shadows.
To dance is life.
Neon billboards shouted: Making Money in China is Glorious!
Women in a dreary cement walled neighborhood demanded something at high decibels. Feed Me. A motorcycle roared past. A bike bell rang a sharp corner warning. Two women negotiated vegetable prices, cool days and their children’s fate.
Their syllabus adjusted musical interludes and surreptitious encounters in dark corners where sexually repressed couples groped for meaning away from surveillance cameras.
I am pregnant. My family threw me out. I shamed them. This is my self criticism.
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