Marco's Future

Early one morning Orphan and Elf jumped on the local Vomit Comet bus from a rural village to Quanzhou.

They rolled through green Fujian foothills and lush farmland. Men worked oxen in rice paddies. Woman lugged baskets of greens and califlower to market. Children burned plastic trash along the road. Half-finished new rising middle class brick construction projects littered the landscape. The bus stopped. People crowded on. 

45 minutes later they reached the town. Maybe it was a city or a large village. The bus station was packed with peasants, sellers, noodle slurpers, and hustlers among grateful masses. 

They walked through a maze of alleys into the old heart. The heart is a lonely hunter. 

On a sidewalk a man hacked at a fawn selling fresh cuts. People scrambled to buy fresh meat. A woman pedaled past selling yellow carnations. A boy ran pulling a kite. A girl fed her sister. Women scrubbed clothes. An old man smoked in shadows.

At a venerable tea house made of bamboo in a shaded garden surrounded by jasmine they met Marco Polo.

I am on my way West along the Silk Road, he said. I don't know it yet but I will meet Kubliai Khan and stay with him for 3 incredible years. Maybe around 1271. We will play chess together. He will show me his plans to conquer the known world.

Orphan said, Such a grand adventure. We come here every weekend to explore and meet fascinating people and world travelers like you.

Elf said, Yes, and we know a Chinese fortune teller at a pagoda. He's excellent.

May I meet him, asked Marco. Sure, said Elf, Let's go.

They traveled through twisted, convoluted mazes and discovered an enormous pagoda. Red, yellow, golden roofs curved into blue sky. Five-clawed yellow dragons holding white pearls curled corners. Men, woman and children burned incense, mumbling prayers. Red cloth covered Buddha statue faces. Not ready to see. 

There he is, Orphan said, pointing at Confucius behind a table.

Marco introduced himself, What is my future.

Confucius asked Marco questions about his birth date, place, and family lineage. He opened a big brown book with faded yellow pages. He ran a bony finger down lines. He spoke in tongues, Among other adventures you will be imprisoned in Italy. You will tell your stories to another prisoner. You will be famous.

I only told half of what I saw, said Marco, smiling, scrawling notes. Elf made an image for historians.

Chinese Factory School #8

Good afternoon students. My name is Mr. On. It rhymes with song, gong, long gone.

It is 17:10 p.m. If it was 18:01 p.m. I would say good evening, however it is still afternoon. It is late in life. Class will meet twice a week for two hours. Show up on time, do your assignments and be prepared. Nothing more, nothing less.

We are gathered here today in the glorious Chinese Communist Party People's Appliance Factory #8 to begin our basic simple English lessons. Your supervisor informs me that you are here both by choice and chance. You have the choice. This is your chance. Am I clear? Do you understand me? Choice and chance. 

Now. I know. Most of you have been working since early morning in the factory. It is the end of another long mind numbing grueling tedious day on the killing floor. English has brought us together. You face unique and amazing challenges to acquire a foreign language. To use said target language with meaning. To hopefully become fluent. It will require your undivided attention, focus and electrical energy. 

You will practice speaking, reading, listening and writing. These are the four basic skills. Writing and speaking are active. Reading and listening are passive in your learning process. 

Learning occurs in the context of task-based activities. In other words you learn by doing. You do and you understand, as we say, said, did, done.

We will cover, in exhaustive detail, four important appliances and their English A/C D/C lets see connections. They are: washing machines, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens. 

These machines are now essential in everyone’s life. You know this because it is your job to put them together. It’s like English, putting words together makes a simple sentence. Some have meaning and some are gibberish. Many words are useless idiomatic semantic syntax which is not the same as personal income tax.

Open your head, heart and mouth. Eat English.

a Fable

There is an old fable about a bird and an ogre telling his daughter where his soul lived.

“Sixteen miles from here is a old gigantic tree. Around the tree are tigers, bears and scorpions. On top of the tree is a huge snake. On top of the snake’s head is a small cage and inside the cage is a bird. Inside the bird is my soul.”

hello big brother sings FaceLost in china

losing face in china is a state crime

punishable by death

Myths suggests that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined.

Myth has been defined as truth trying to escape from reality.

A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories of created religions based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths.

They are in every place and no particular place.

stormy monday

They call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday's just as bad...

I stepped outside of myself and witnessed a blind man walking down life’s street. You breathe in. You breathe out.

Neither of us had seen each other before. Dressed in rags, he stooped under a torn shouldered bag. He had no left hand. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff.

In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle. Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide eyes.

I remembered. If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. A blind man crossing a bridge is a good example how we should live our lives. Enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in humble existence. He scraped his staff against shuttered shop steps. He massaged a long concrete wall. A beggar sat in rags made from boiled books. His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him. 

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!” 

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.” 

“This is my space! Pay attention. Keep moving you fool.”

“Sorry to bother you. Maybe you’re a little sad, angry or lonely? Maybe I can help you.” 

“What! Are you completely fucking crazy as well as blind? I have no wife, no children, no parents, no friends, no home and no job. I live here hoping people will take pity on me.”

“I see. I know the feeling. I’m on my own. Maybe we could work together, be a team.”

The beggar rubbed his stubble. “Hmm. Let me think about it.”

“Take your time. Knowing our destiny means there’s no hurry.”

“How can you be so sure?” 

“Call it a hunch,” laughed the beggar, “Fate’s a great teacher. Ha, ha, ha.” Kids passed. One coined the bowl. 

“Thanks kid. Good luck on your exams next week.” 

“I hate school. Too much homework. It’s so boring and tedious. I rather be home playing violent computer games or chatting online with my friends. I am an only child. I am a little Titan in my universe of want, want, want.”

“Your attitude sucks. Only 5% of the Chinese population has a university degree. Did you know every June, four million students graduate from a university. 60% will not find a job. They will work the street like us. Your so-called developing society faces hard cruel lessons.

"Reality outside your textbooks. Your people have fucked up the environment. Do you sleep where you shit? Sixteen of the most twenty polluted cities in the world are in this country. You sound like one of those single pampered little emperor kids I see, hear and smell every day. Busy, busy, busy. Get used to it or you’ll be out here with us.”

“A fate worse than death,” said the kid. “My father owns a factory. He is rich man making huge profits off the sweat of poor illiterate fools and idiots like you. Bum. My future is filled with money, a big house and a new car.

"Thank God for the one-child policy. I will buy a trophy wife. I will give her blood diamonds imported from African mimes. My country is investing huge amounts of capital around the world to export raw materials. We feed our machines of consumption 24/7.

"As you know our country was squeezed, manipulated and exploited for years by big nose foreigners. Now it’s our turn to cash in billions of T-bills and let them dance to our sweet tune. And...my family has a multiple-entry visa for Macau so we can leave whenever we feel like it. So, fuck off beggar man.”

“Yeah, begging isn’t a job, it’s an adventure.”

Rural Chinese school, Sichuan. A paradise to learn. Cradle to become a useful person.

chinese cover story

One essential joy was selecting the cover photograph of a young Chinese girl.

Her image revealed heavy, deep and real emotional honesty. She stood trapped behind the steel grate at a Chinese nursery school enduring a hard dismal Chinese educational process seasoning her childhood character and personality in the poor village of Maija where the tea man and artist drawing the dead lived.

Her eyes held all the secrets of the world and unfilled wish-dream potential. She stared at the stranger, a diversion in her expanding universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her, trapping her against the gate.

It was locked by an old woman who feared persecution and execution if any kids escaped. He was on the other side. Being invisible has its advantages. He held a small black metallic machine to his blind eye.

She heard a series of curious clicks as a shutter opened and closed, an interval between life and death, trapping, freezing time, one decisive moment in the eternal present, a decisive instant, capturing her image on a memory-fiction circuit card. He smiled, whispered, Thanks, disappearing past pig farms on a dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing, because she was younger than tomorrow or older than yesterday remembering spring how her image on the cover, her clear child eyes were visible for everyone.

Her small dark eyes held archetypical memories of dynasties and great Chinese electronic fire walls evolving with the speed of electron particles illuminating her face, sadness, fear and curiosity at that precise moment. Stories about stories inside stories manifested the girl in alchemical truth, alive, breathing, unaware of her immortality in infinity.  

He'd visited her primary school with a university student who worked in the Maija pharmacy after school to make ends meet helping her aunt dispense cheap placebos to poor illiterate women and men alleviating their suffering, pain and fear of death singing, dancing speaking unintelligible Mandarin words.

Laughter and kindness were blessings after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored women teachers who didn’t want to be in a class tomb any more than the students. Teacher’s mantra was Push them through. No one had free choice. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability.

The dead, dying idiots sputtered stuttering in Beijing opening rusty doors of perception being a communist-socialist Marxist dream removed from poor villages where rich well connected officials raped and reaped huge financial benefits practicing oppression, coercion, bribery, graft, slander, using death threats as powerless simple peasants tilled soil, followed slumbering oxen, stalking mud and rice paddies. Where green rice stalks revealed a blue sky with Beauty.

Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic in China for years.

Why are so many Chinese students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking, besides the commercialization of education? The absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers. The one who dares to open their fat little face and question authority gets killed.

Bang.