Journeys
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact

Entries in China (137)

Thursday
Jun242010

Sam and Dave Part 4

Greetings,

Inside every family’s deep dark Hanoi space was a main room and altar for dead relatives, candles, fruit, burning incense a spirit food, and the black and white and color images reminded me of the Chinese artist in Maija, the poor pig village near the Fujian university where I lived for two years riding my bike across hills up and down narrow dirt back roads,

watching butterflies mate in the dust, old people threshing rice in fields, a woman lugging piles of white cauliflower to market in her bamboo baskets suspended on a bamboo poles, down long small tight dusty paths past athletic shoe shop sweat shop factories filled with morose girls and women hunched over threading clacking Butterfly machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until I reached a narrow street to sit drinking Chinese green tea with a man in his little shop. 

Further up the hill were small wooden shops with appliances, family market stalls, street food, electrical stores and butchers. In a small mud and brick place was an artist. His job was drawing pictures of dead people. 

After someone died a relative gave him a common small black and white image, the kind from 1949 when the country declared itself free, independent, and open with 3 Represents and benevolent Chairman Mao (our grandfather bless his heart) smiled at the masses.

Before he told the peasants, “Eat Grass.”

It was an image used throughout their life: in documents for residence, work, school and party politics. The people had the three iron rice bowls. A guaranteed living space, guaranteed work unit, and guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal. Everyone was treated the same, wore the same clothing, said the same thing and followed the leader, like kids playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

Metta.


Friday
Jun182010

Sam and Dave Part 2.5

Greetings,

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barb wire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat eternal spring walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, shards of glittering glass composed of miniscule myopic minimal, musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the Day. 

Eventually the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels well below the surface of appearances. Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family all the way back to a dynasty encroaching on walls and shrines inside brown temples welcomed the silence. During the day they worked fields before going underground where nightingale arks brought carpet bombing, napalm, agent Orange. Forever. 

‘Quick into the tunnels!’ They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath, their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence, save all the crying, wounded after all the foreign devils packed and left, fleeing in terror as peasants streamed down from the mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking all the oceans in their creation myth, draining lands of blood, forcing them back into the sea. A blue green sea danced in blood.

This easing down of their voice flowing between crumbling sand, crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but the sound of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at the reality of life’s twisted reality. Their memory was a fiction and this fiction created their memory.

Metta.

Friday
Jun042010

Dhaka

Greetings,

You find poetry while sweeping. Poetry finds you while weeping.

Metta.

Dhaka

Only five million humans 

Horns for beggars, their arms
Broken and bleeding
Hands extending through cracked windows
 
Floods send them into traffic
Unable to cope with land loss
Daughter sells body, father sells wife,
Son sells self
 
We sell them malnutrition,
Handfuls of rice
As sanitation system collapses
Under strain of poverty
 
Misery is a child
Bloated stomach a hopeless
Jaundiced eye full of tear
Never going to fall
Into streets where holy bull wallows
Next to a one-legged man
His crutch a stench rising
In dust, sleeping in a broken down 
Life

My fake pregnancy begs for charity in China. Save face. 

Friday
May212010

Writing and sex 301

Greetings,

A Chinese computer science professor received a 3.5 year sentence for "crowd licentiousness."  This is vague government wordage. It covers crowds. It covers licenses. It mean a crowd gets together and applies for a license. In this case with broad overtones they applied for a license to swap identities.

He led informal swinger clubs for partner swapping. He pleaded innocent. "I had nothing to do with the North Korean submarine attack in an apartment with 18 people. I was only the middleman. I was formatting my hard drive and downloading data."

He was charged under Criminal Law 301. 

A Chinese academic said...“I feel that the thought process of the Chinese authorities is always to try to manage and control the population, the people. Beyond prosecuting criminal activities, they feel they have to control or manage people to their standards.” read more...

Turkey also has an infamous Article 301 law. This law makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity or Turkish government institutions. Writers Orhan Pamuk, Noam Chomsky, Elif Safak, among others have been charged under this article. All the cases were either dropped or acquitted.

A spoiled young girl in Ankara was recently arrested and charged under Article 301 for insulting her mother's cooking. "I hate Turkish food. Too many tomatoes. I don't want black olives. I don't want fresh salad. I don't want fresh seafood from the Marmara Sea. I want Italian pizza with extra cheese please squeeze." It was thrown out for lack of evidence.

Her mother said, "Eat what I give you. Hurry up. I'm late for my wife swapping seminary with binary logic."

Number 301 is very popular. The number of words mating and swapping with other words is increasing. Words remove an article of clothing like a, an, the.

Metta.

 


 

Wednesday
Apr282010

State secrets - fools

Greetings,

The fat happy alien American tourist is on his cell. Across the street is a river. The town is dead because Bangkok is a no-go zone. The red light district is red. What is red for you?

Thailand has been declared a disaster zone by various countries. They've issued travel advisories. 

"DO NOT travel to Thailand." If any travelers come in now it's from Nam, by boat or bus. Swimmers are more rare than very expensive electricity. The river of tourists has dried up. 

Mr. Shallow is talking. He shares state secrets.
"I can tell you a lot about my life." He lacks hard travel experience.
He's already called all his friends to talk about dental care in Asia. This is his BIG issue.
"I don't want to be walking around Bangkok full of pain killers."

Bangkok is filled with pain killers.
He needs an extraction. The more you drill the more you bill. Down the road.

"I have high blood pressure."
"I'm waiting for the place down the road to open up. They have amazing pork ribs."

He is suffering personified.

Meanwhile, if you are in China you are not reading this. My site is blocked in China. I used a proxy in the heart of Texas. It was blocked when I lived there teaching English to lazy students. They wanted to pass, not learn. 

China is wonderful. Especially the government. They recently announced new measures to control freedom of speech. They have notified all telecom and internet service providers to give them data on users.

It's about government control over private communication. They are tightening the screws, fools.

Their BIG FEAR is losing control. The broad propaganda words are State Secret.

In a related move, the Chinese government on Monday posted on a government Web site a broad definition of what constituted a commercial secret, covering information related to strategic plans, management, mergers, equity trades, stock market listings, reserves, production, procurement and sales strategy, financing and finances, negotiations, joint venture investments and technology transfers. more...

The majority of Chinese use their cell phones to access the internet. It's cheaper than a desktop. They use the internet to: 

  • listen to music
  • play games
  • chat

 "This is perfect," said a Chinese gremlin in Beijing. "The immature masses are like sheep."

"More like perpetually spoiled children," said another gremlin. "This is what happens after 30 years of a one child only policy. This planned genocide will come back and haunt us."

He's one of 50,000 internet Police spending their day surfing, looking for words or phrases like June 4, Tibet, freedom, democracy, Uighar, slavery, reform, literature, human rights, gulag, corruption, nepotism, bribery, unrest, strife, demonstrations, education, scandal, liberty, equality...and so on.

Metta.