Ice Girl in Banlung - 8

In China everyone is safe and happy, Leo said to Ice Girl one torrid day in Banlung, Cambodia.

They sat on an operating table next to a sewing machine and an umbrella.

I cut, you talk, she said. A drop of sweat from her nose landed on a block of ice.

It’s called THE SYSTEM, he said. Brainwashed. You see this in all Asian educational systems. Laconic students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution, which is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic.

Big Brother is always watching you.

Save face.

The fear of public humiliation is greater than the fear of death.

Intention is karma.

Tell me about your life in China, said Ice Girl.

After completing five years of a night soil shit job in the Re-Education Through Labor experience for having the courage to question Authority I visited my family graves in Sichuan. I offered prayers and burned incense. I prayed for strength and humility. Then I walked east. Fortune smiled on me.

I worked as a facilitator at a private business university in Fujian. I faced eighty stone-faced freshmen in a long cement tomb. Desks were bolted to the floor in groups of four. It was a required speaking class. They had year zero English skills. I gave two a test. How are you, I asked a boy. I am 18. How old are you, I asked a girl. I’m fine, and you?

I paired eighty off, boy girl, boy girl. They didn’t like this. They got used to it.

Will someone please share a story.

A girl raised her hand.

The less I do, the less likely I am to make mistakes, and the fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, then I feel no shame.

It’s easier to do nothing, said one clever robot.

Correct, I said, you’ve both expressed the essence of your cultural and intellectual education.

That’s a long sentence filled with verbs and significant philosophy, Ice Girl sang, waving a Blue Zircon reflecting 10,000 things in an elegant universe. Don’t let school interfere with your education. Say more. 

TLC - Chapter 2

Lucky walked to Ankara from Fujian, China in a convoluted adventure. After Ankara he walked to Bursa.

They were invisible cities in a schizophrenic secular Islamic country trapped between past, and future being petrified ossified present on the Phosphorus.

Preparing for strenuous escapades he performed a Tibetan tantric sitting meditation for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three moments and three breaths. In-out. Spiritual awareness. Mindfulness.

My body. My breath. My practice.

Tibetans survived with profound sense of humor and resilience considering fifty+ years of Chinese oppression, genocide and nomadic exile from the Land of Snows.

After walking meditations in Lhasa he wandered south of Chengdu to Shuangliu in Sichuan. He facilitated English, meditation, chess tactics/strategy and how to be more human with eighth graders for a year.

 One afternoon John, a smart Chinese teacher passed him.

“Where are you going?” said Lucky.

“The Office of Morals and Re-Education. I have to copy tracts and texts.”

“Why?” - the dreaded question word.

“I’ve been removed from my class responsibilities. Not enough students passed their semester exam. It’s myduty to teach them. If they fail it’s my fault.”

“You’re a fine teacher. Duty is a heavy systematic responsibility in a dystopian Communist country. How long will you copy texts and tracts?”

“Who knows? Could be weeks or months. Maybe I will die in The Office of Morals and Re-Education writing an incomplete sentence. This is my life sentence. Tragic. The Teacher Performance Evaluation Committee will decide my destiny.”

“Good luck John. Welcome to the system.”

“Thanks. It’s my fate. I need some luck. See you around.”

Your life is a work of art

Editor's note: Chapter 1 excerpt. The Language Company. Enjoy the ride.

Carpe Diem in Ankara, said a reliable narrator, Pluck the day when it is ripe.

Lucky Foot explored a gleaming upscale mercantile atrium filled with bald silver female dummies fronted by glass. Mirrors reflected screaming bored housewives paroled for good behavior pushing pram infants.

He happened into a store with Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian and Middle Aged chess sets - game of Kings. Checkmate, said Mother Death, Beauty’s mother, Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

Black jazz statues played sax, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, drums, and bass. Some of My Favorite Things, said John Coltrane. Blow your cool heart out.

“Good morning. Do you need something?” said the owner.

“Namaste. I salute the light within you. I seek to help others end suffering and misery.”

“Is it a way, a path?”

“It’s the nature of absolute emptiness with compassion. Ultimate truth. Reality.”

“What’s its form? Form an answer. Fill in your form. We live in a world of forms. It’s not the answers we need to know it’s the quest-ions we discover. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Remain curious. Trust authentic fragments. Follow your heart. Grow from it. Anything is possible when you risk everything. Stay open to your true nature as a lotus grows from mud. Form is emptiness and vice a verisimilitude. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please. The quest-ion is the answer. Practice allows everything to wake you up. When you have taken the impossible into your calculations its possibilities become endless.”

“Today is good day to die. Meditate on your death. Celebrate your journey.” He pushed a buzzer. “Someone will bring tea.”

“Thanks. I like establishing impermanent relationships with compassion, trust, generosity and empathy.”

“You’re a dreamer dreaming the impossible dream. Are your needs being met? I suggest you need more direct immediate experience, observation and imagination. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Words escaping the tyranny of memories composed a jazz poem.

Kind of Blue, 1959 by Miles Davis. Modality.

 “Everything I do is an experiment. Traveling meets my genetic needs. I love weird. It’s a long strange beautiful trip. Life is an amazing beautiful messy test. It gives us the test first and lessons later. In my life I become we: many people. We face opportunities and challenges. We bring luck to people like you. People we meet and never see again. It’s ephemeral. We help strangers help themselves through levels of suffering, hardship, deprivation, letting go and developing courage. 

"Becoming. Throw in passion desire thirst and existential bliss with humor. Humor is the key. No shame, guilt or humiliation. No regret or fear. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am a dreamer with controlled imagination. I see you have knives. I need one to cut through fear and ignorance.”

 “Fear is blissful ignorance. Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is necessary to grow. Travel allows you deeper penetration. Travel makes you. There are not many things you need to remember during your visit to Earth. Please have a look-see.”

 “Our life is a work of art and life imitates art. Art is easy. Life is difficult. Clouds know me by now.”

“You don’t say.”

A cabinet displayed Swiss Army knives with cool tools for cool fools. 

The Language Company

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Unpleasant facts are littered through TLC like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Creating field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos since 2004.

He showed up to sit for a spell nurturing positive relationships in the long now.

Accompanied by Humor and Curiosity he helped students speak English with fluency minus their illusions of fear and phobia's relatives:

Fear of taking a risk.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of peer ridicule.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of starvation.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of abandoning a manuscript by Zeynep entitled TLC.

Fear of accepting responsibility for their choices

Dear of accepting the consequences.

Fear of letting go of old conditioning. Shadows.

Fear of being alive and real. Growing.

Fear of_______. (Your free choice)

Lucky, Humor and Curiosity observed parents, schools, and religions fostering passive acceptance, fear, indifference and rote learning teacher-centered systems. It was all about passing exams, not learning how to be more human and think for your self.

Status quo. Sheep mentality. Blend in. Questions are forbidden.

Authority washes your brain daily.

Zeynep, his young genius friend in Bursa, Turkey taught him about life in her totalitarian country. I say what others are afraid to say. Anxiety is a chronic national problem. Adults here are good at two things, eating and fighting. Dissent is terrorism say our corrupt manikin authority figures.

Leo, the Chief of Cannibals revealed dystopian China. I spent years carrying word shit in a Re-education through Reform Labor Camp for questioning Authority. Everyone here belongs to the Big Ears, No Mouth society.

Oh the shame.

Rita, the independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung shared stories about Khmer culture and Cambodian history. We've had twenty years of hopelessness. We breed. We work. We get slaughtered. Poor people see education as a waste of time and money. Rice comes first.

I dream I am a free person in a free country.

A seven year-old Vientiane kid explained Laos. I develop my authentic character with critical thinking skills, gratitude, abundance and wonder as an independent individual.

If you want to do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly, said Zeynep. You either let go or get dragged along. 

Awareness. Mindfulness. Compassion.

It's not about people buying this book, Zeynep said. It's about people reading it.

Amazon Kindle and Paperback

Zeynep the heroine genius.

shame sings

My name is Li Bow Down.

I am in charge of the Tibetan Monastery Re-Education Through Reform with Severe Consequences pogrom program. My masters called me out of retirement.

I was playing mahjong, screwing concubines and enjoying Fujian tea with friends at the Shanghai-FreeLand resort. Authority ordered me to get my old ass back to Lhasa and take care of THE problem. Back to the future.

They gave me a fire extinguisher to douse flaming monks. Ah, the ignobility. Fire is the essence of life.

Here’s an uncensored image of what we do to people in the program.

Li put an image on a table.

See this woman, he commanded. She is denouncing her family, friends and most important, herself in public. We are big on shame. We are the masters and they are the puppets.

“Shame on you!” yelled 1.7 billion puppet people.

“Shame! Shame! Shame!”

This is one of our more popular and effective methods of creating a harmonious society. It works wonders, because if memory serves me correctly and it does, mind you, serve me well, we’ve been coercing people for 5,000 years. Pick your favorite dynasty.

We used to put them in wooden stocks with their crimes painted on paper necklaces and parade them through town. They confessed. We call it self-criticism (samzen) re-education and reform. Big buzzwords. They were denounced in public. Talk about blatant social disapproval.

Now we just shoot them down like dogs in the street.

Maybe you think I am joking, making this up. Well, I didn't make it to the top of the Commie scrap heap by bowing down to big nosed foreigners telling me how to maintain control in Tibet and keep the monks and serfs in line.

As you know because I say so the peaceful compassionate monks in Tibet provoked the armed, young, naive, scared People's Reactionary Liberation soldiers on March 10th in Year Zero.

The rest is history, well, not real history because we rewrite that when it suits our propaganda purposes.

It’s easy and convenient.

Life is cheap here. More tea?

History is the symptom. Humans are the disease. Mark my words.