Chinese history teacher goes home - TLC 7

Leo’s history teacher wrote in her journal - Ah, what a marvelous summer. I don’t make much money you understand so I use it wisely. Family is everything. To avoid relationship clashes of dynastic proportions I shelled out $200, a third of my salary for a round-trip train ticket home. After paying the university an exorbitant rental fee for my drab, cold apartment plus electricity and water, I had enough left for soggy onions, fresh spinach, tofu, rice and oranges.

Home is where the heart is. Well let me share a little advice about that. Singing the blues life's way of talking, I lugged my broken suitcase, guilt, shame and duty home to hearth and kin. Whew.

I am overwhelmed by the heavy burden of my family's expectations. After fulfilling my academic responsibilities meaning pass everyone or face dire consequences as ordered by university authorities whom or who will, for the sake of Social Stability and Harmonious Educational Reform Committees remain faceless, nameless and totally obscure, I escaped my prison sanctuary.

Train stations along the way were packed with migrants, laborers and prostitutes without a wing, hope or prayer. Mothers and fathers formed concentric protective circles around solitary children to prevent thieves. Stolen kids are a huge underground economy. People pay $3,500 or more for a boy. Princelings. They have high value in our new economy. Stealing, shilling, selling, buying children is how life works. Life is cheap here.

Accelerate baby production comrades, exclaim Stalinist loudspeakers.

It took twenty-two long, tedious hours sitting in hard seat with three transfers before I reached my province bordering North Korea where, across Time’s river, twenty-four million free starving people ate grass as liberated women scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes sang:

Hail our Great Leader!

Speaking of work, I need to run. My past is chasing me. I must help mother with cleaning, shopping and timeless chores. If I don’t perform my filial duties she may threaten to sell me to a marriage broker. I live in perpetual fear. I’ll return to my artificially inseminated alter-ego teacher existence next week. After reporting back for duty I will file another illuminating report. Thank you for your attention.

The Language Company

Making Money in China is Glorious - TLC 6

Living once in an old Shanghai neighborhood Lucky was surrounded by millions of peasants surviving in a paranoid zoo. Heavy metal doors clanged closed on night hinges. An adult admonished a child. Authoritarian accusatory commands were consistent simple and direct.

“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.

The Language Company
 

       I am pregnant. My family threw me out. I shamed them. This is my self criticism.

TLC - 5

“A human life in China is worthless,” said Leo, 14, born in a Re-education-Through-Labor Reform Camp in Hubei. His mom worked in the empty university library.

After school exploring forested hills on mountain bikes Lucky and Leo shifted gears where the rubber met the road. One day they stopped in an old quarry to play in dirt.

It was an abandoned country, an abstract concept.

They stood in a deep excavated canyon. High dirt walls bordered by pine, evergreen and blue sky wore sharp deep gashes after machine teeth gouged down dirt. Workers harvested red clay for imperial jade tombs at the university where 15,001 students struggled to survive in a harmonious society. Students hiding from recycled Mao-styled uniformed security guards mastered eating, texting and casual sex.

They stood at the bottom of a bottomless pit.

“Everyone is a spy,” said Leo.

“How did you surmise this theoretical fact?”

“Life is my teacher. It’s our 5,000-year history plain and simple. Their job is to keep an eye on us. Think about it. We have too any people here and so, to monitor our behavior, attitudes and thinking, they recruit students and teachers as spies. Informers. Minders. They’re paid with passing grades or cash. My father was an informer during the Cultural Revolution. It’s Darwinian logic, evolution of the species. Survival.”

“I’m not surprised. This was common through dynasties. Perpetuate control and authority. The Central Party created a climate of fear. Husbands reported wives. Wives reported husbands, sons and daughters. Daughters and sons reported fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles. Concubines reported lovers. An evil cycle.”

“Yes,” said Leo, “evil is a myth. Everyone is a charter member of the Big Ears Sharp Eyes No Mouth Society. Our generation of informers and spies make good money. Knowing their place they keep their mouth shut to survive. Creativity is my meditation. I meditate on the comic, the absurd. Don’t take life seriously. It’s too short. If you laugh you last.”

“Thanks for life lesson #5.”

Lucky shared writing-living suggestions with eight new Chinese teachers. Make your characters want something right away, even if it’s a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of life need water from time to time. It’s your job to create conflict so the characters will say or do surprising and revealing things, educating and entertaining us. Characters change/grow. Kill your darlings. If a writer can’t or won’t do that they should get out of the trade. A writer is a hustler.

Write like you’re dead. Someday you will be.

Ah the drama - the unfolding play observing sensational phenomena. 

Entertainment is alive and well in Asia. It’s the entertainment capital of the world. Keep them stupid and happy. Children of all ages stay amused by cell phones, Lose Face social sites and the idiot box. They surrender their consciousness. Watch TV. Miss the show.

 “Keep your hand moving,” he said to lazy Chinese robots. “The hand is directly connected to the heart. You are pure sensation. Be an anarchist. Take risks. Take a line for a walk.”

As a foreign language barbarian wearing a Tang Dynasty five-clawed red dragon, yin-yang symbol, a rising Phoenix and a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains he witnessed emperors screwing concubines inside Forbidden Cities with red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams wove silent abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss. Manifestations of superior phenomenal detective analysis and forty questions of the soul redlined final exams.

“We know so much and understand so little,” Lucky said.

“I don’t understand a thing. People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said Leo. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’” Hear ye, hear ye.

 

Blue eyed ghost

Yes my dear friend it is true, or at least as true as can be for he has returned to the beginning - and this is where his small tale begins.

Rickshaw bells and heavy groaning green and purple pedicabs propelled by thick-legged men prowl through humid traffic air. No one sees him. Everyone stares at the ghost. They are oblivious to his existence.

He walks along a broken cracked sidewalk past hammering men. They build a six-story high extension at the high school. Cement mixers, bamboo scaffolding, emaciated men haul crumbling red bricks. Dancing their future immigrants sing in the rain.. The developer drives a shiny black Benz.

Streets are congested with yellow bulldozers, lorries loaded with dirt and salvaged steel pig iron, City Boat blaring bus horns, small red cabs, and tired students trudging to lessons inside cold cramped cement caverns where teachers arrive late, and leave early after smashing wooden sticks on desks to get their attention; men pedal carts of large blue plastic barrels full of leftover restaurant slop for village pigs and children splash water. It is all play on the streets of dreams.

He passes weathered women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Girls mop cement passageways from dawn to dusk.

Dutiful daughters sweep floors or laconically stare at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent, hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.

This is the entertainment capital of the world.                   

He passes tables of retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured rows of strategies as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes paint the city’s rising dust as a ghost they never imagined dances by, an apparition in their wide eyed wonder.

He speaks the language of silence and this comforts them. His inability to articulate passion and suffering is because, like you, he is a witness, a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s garden in another incarnation where he trusted you to understand.

Meaning of meaning was obscured by cloudy anger, fear, desire, ignorance and attachment as you waved him away.

You cast him into deep water where he replenished his spirit. His meditation on motivation and intention was clear as he passed through. 

Blend In - TLC 4

“You have a criteria for beauty,” said an austere Chinese university teacher-mother in an apartment elevator going to ground zero. “You should just blend in.”

She was petrified like 1.7 billion of being singled out, purged, tried and executed or sent to the countryside and re-educational brainwashing for expressing bourgeoisie ideology in a harmonious Marxist society.

Her paranoia meant no one dared talk about June 4, 1989. No one whispered about freedom, human rights or democracy. Their collective hardwired brains were wiped clean by Big Brother.

“I’ve learned,” she said, “to keep my mouth shut unless I’m eating fast before starving thieves steal my food or laughing to myself at the stupid laconic narrow-minded ways of our leaders. They are old despotic men. They sit behind blood stained teak desks imported from Burmese dictators. They chop seals and devour dolphins and whales with malice. They swallow tiger bone extract for sexual potency and wash it down with bear bile. Silence is our golden mean. My husband works in a distant province. He has a mistress named Orgasm. No money, no honey.”

She cried silent tears, raised her son and wrote life lesson plans. “By the book,” she screamed in silence facing eighty comatose students scrambling for a pass. It fell incomplete.

“Sixty is heaven and fifty-nine is hell,” said a thin girl in a freshman speaking class. “My parents will kill me if I fail.”

“What is your dream?” said Lucky.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.”

Her naive honesty surprised him. “What is a waif?”

“You know, a homeless person existing on the street. Living on their wits with silence and cunning, like a mercenary, assassin or literary outlaw. Authentic experience. A free person has courage. They take risks. Not taking a risk is a risk. They don’t live off state handouts in a broken down system filled with graft, corruption and nepotism. They overcome suffering and hardship and deprivation. I mean a real person with dignity, self-respect and courage.”

Seventy-nine others failed to grasp her awareness and honesty.

“You are wiser than your years.”  

The Language Company