My life now

An old friend of mine is coming to visit, my mother said one day, She’s bringing her son. She lived here during the war met a G.I. and had a baby. She was lucky. Luckier than us. She got out. She took her son to New York when he was two. This is his first visit back to his country. 

His country. Mrs. Lin and her son Michael came for lunch. He was tall and handsome with long black hair. He was smooth and charming. 

I work for a huge computer company in America, he boasted. Big man, small village. His mother had a large house in the village. He asked me out. We started dating. I did all the translating, all the necessary things. Michael played the big man, the rich Viet-American.

Local people resented his attitude, his lack of language. He had no humility.

I lived at home and my mother started in on me. Michael’s a good man. He could be your future, she said.

Maybe yes, maybe no. I had doubts. I still loved Robert. It was a typical mother conspiracy, his and mine.  Working on us. His mother was mean, vindictive.  

Finally one night we were both drunk and slept in his mother’s house. The next morning his mother gave us the silent treatment. Michael set her straight. Don’t fuck with us. We want breakfast, he said. She served us.

We slept late and partied all night. We were hot. He was a big, hot hungry animal and my body was his. He took me in every position and I loved it. Women want fucking, security and cash.

After six fast months he said, Move in with me. He told my mother and she said ok. Every little boy always asks for permission. I needed a man and Michael needed a woman.

My son and I moved in. My mother accepted the reality. 

His mother treated me like a slave. Her spoiled boy could do no wrong. She hated me. He was an accident of her fraudulent passion. Nothing changed. She was mean, violent and alone. I put up with it for the sake of hoping the relationship would work out. People either want control or approval.

I played her game.

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.

Checkmate

Fingering her Tibetan ivory prayer beads, death heads shook, rattled, and rolled.

The mother’s fingers caressed life’s thorns. Nothing happened completely by random chance, by accidental predetermined random fate in her life. Life for her in America or Amnesia if you will was free will versus determination confronting ambition, privacy, isolation, and community in a corrupt, violent cynical society.

People wanted to control their Fear. They believed in fear.

They worshiped fear and consumption.

They were afraid of being poor and lonely. They were willing victims of their fear, uncertainty and doubt. They switched on their amygdala — a small almond shaped brain structure — validated to be involved in fear and emotional response.

Manipulated by the insatiable invisible insolvent propaganda system, by socialization control mechanisms and the subtle power of right wing conservative propaganda persuasion, they either wanted control or approval facing daily choices.

They struggled, suffered, dancing discovering gratitude and forgiveness in their heart-mind. Living and dying. Dying once while you’re alive is necessary. Get’s it out of the way early.

You die twice. When you are born and when you face death. Inscribed on a Zippo lighter in a dusty Saigon museum case.

Were you born laughing or crying?

“Checkmate,” said Death.

Animist cemetary, Ratanakiri, Cambodia

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. 

fascinating

You are an object of endless fascination and speculation, said Orphan.

A stranger among strangers alive and well singing a blues song about disorientation, the unfolding process, dynamic. You are a ghost. People here see them before now later. 1.7 million to be exact.

Fear and superstition.

They pray to dead soul spirits because they are afraid of the dead. And it's theoretically possible to say local people have an EI or Emotional Intelligence of -7. This simple truth or unpleasant fact is revealed through behavior, attitudes and verbal communication. It’s a lack of maturity.

Zero personal individual incentive, initiative and growth.

It has nothing to do with culture, families, chance, fate, destiny, education or life social skills. I witnessed the same reality teaching in China, said Orphan, a survivor of Gulag #101.

Should living and learning come before teaching, wondered Orphan. Everyone is a student on peace street where life’s lessons are small and magnificent, said Elf.

There are book smarts and street smarts, said Orphan.

Children are a tool, said a wealthy Chinese man in Laos. He had 2.