invisible bird lament

He decided to end it. Ling was too expensive. Her heart was good yet money/greed was her basic underlying motivation. He'd been contributing to her welfare for five weeks.

"Money for mama and papa. Money for my friends. Money for the festival. Money for my motorcycle. Money for my son. Milk money."

He’s a soft touch.

They shared their desires, lust, loneliness, curled up together in the dark night of the soul as wild cats howled before a invisible tropical bird sang its long lament at dawn.

Yes, he'd had enough playing this rescuing role.

If you pay you owe.

He ended it on Valentines Day. Break my heart.

There was no emotional attachment to the sight.

It was an unpleasant fact.

Moleskine sketch #1

Ancestor Worship - TLC 55

After a year at TLC and a year in Indonesia he rented a room near Lenin Park for four months. Dream Sweeper Machine evidence verified life in Hanoi.

He planned to burn a hardback copy of A Century is Nothing near Hue where he was transformed. Sacrifice. Omar said, please gift to three Vietnamese-Australian girls you meet in Ho Chi Minh before you walk to Cambodia. They’ll carry it back to Sydney. Sharing is caring. He did.

His Hanoi neighbors were Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is Daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin or new Yin and old Yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife had someone to yell at. They needed someone, anyone to take care of them in old age sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 dancing kitchen smells with the sweet memory of insistent incense. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000 cash up front or no deal. Pay to play. Dave and his wife pretended to need kids so offspring would feed them later. When you’re young and naive multiple pregnancies are paramount. Accelerate production comrades.

It’s easy to produce kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are ninety million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the popular Communist Party bestseller, Produce & Consume.

Get married early the pressure is on. Honor off her.

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, and forgotten. Loneliness and alienation increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and instability in a well-mannered informer-driven paranoid society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to get a husband.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I speak excellent English. I finished nine years of school in my village. I learned what I really needed to know on the street of life. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. What I really needed to sustain my curiosity and sense of humor. I use really a lot.

Don’t let school interfere with your education.  

More tourists than travelers visit Sapa. It’s near The Middle Kingdom. I've never been there. It’s an old civilization. Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. If you fail to plan you plan to fail better. I have a dream, to be.

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at the nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese products. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh. You can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses polluting pristine air 2) they wear bright red baseball hats so they don’t get lost ha, ha, ha 2) they travel in packs like scared animals 3) they stay in government hotels and eat at Vietnamese places 4) they ignore me.

No, I’m talking, and I speak excellent English among other languages about the foreigners. My friends and I working the street politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts, embroidery work and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners real travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. Sapa is a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. In and out people.

Tourists have a holiday schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? A Greek guy named Arrest Throttle said time is the greatest wealth or maybe it was health. They’re related.

Anyway, they eat, sleep, wander around and maybe if I’m lucky take a trek to my village and then, POOF - like magic they disappear. 

Then the tourist machine spits out more day-trippers for us to sell to pester and offer village treks. Some want to see the real deal. They want to experience nature and the real Sapa. Life is all about meeting, engaging and establishing emotional connections with people.

It’s about what you feel not what you understand. I feel free.

Engage-study-activate.

Some stay overnight in my village, which is fantastic because by avoiding the greedy hotel middlemen after profit, my folks make some small money.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels - H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses because we are free - charge tourists $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get ten. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet trekkers the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that. One said that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. I am a wise owl.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They slow down. They sit and talk with my mom and dad. They take some snaps. Here we are.

Then we follow trails through forests, crossing rivers, trekking along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal directly with tourists and trekkers. I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman, ha, ha. Does that make me a middle woman?

I live in the middle way.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza with cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical box. What’s up with that? Squeeze a memory. Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live, work-play, evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand at a cultural level why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don’t leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than walking home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It has beds and a toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work. I’m a great little trek leader.

I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do.

Nature is my teacher. Life is good in Sapa. Bye-bye and good luck.

The Language Company

draw the dead - TLC 54

Below shattered shouting Fujian mountains a patient Maija village artist sketched the dead near the university where Lucky and Leo biked through forests along narrow dirt paths seeing black and orange butterflies mate in dust as farmers planted, harvested and threshed rice. Women lugged exploding white cauliflower in bamboo baskets suspended on pliant poles balanced on emaciated shoulders.

Easy riders zoomed past athletic sweat shop shoe factories filled with morose girls and bent-backed forgotten women huddled over clacking Butterfly sewing machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until they reached a steep narrow street where they entered a small shop to enjoy high quality Fujian green tea with a purveyor of leaves. 

Uphill were red slat wooden home/shops, street noodles, rice, doughy steamed buns, appliances, a primary school filled with teachers screaming Blend In and hacking butchers.

The artist sketched dead people. His stoic art decorated family altars. Dusty faded ancestor images in temples and home altars ate bowls of fresh fruit and burning innocence. Death worship is a cultural way of life. 

The Language Company

Ambivalent - TLC 48

Bursa residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt. A thin Turkish man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire. A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.

He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.

His wife’s hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.

Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring signal snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Hart pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.

They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.

“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.

A cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed. One May day an old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.

The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point. Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.

Waving, he cut a waving garden.

Death watched. Ambivalent.

A blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.

 

keep it simple

Everything is vague and uncertain.

The Cambodian brick factory blues. 2500 Real ($.60) = 4 hours after school.

397 kids. Primary school. World food free breakfast. One family - 10 kids. Brick owners encourage DEBT.

Live in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

He absorbed reflections, it was a small village in SR. Attracted by no tourists, partly cloudy skies. She slowly undressed. In her silent beating heart she knew he, the old foreign man couldn't, wouldn't, save her. She was happy with him. Not for the money he gave her when their hour was complete rather for his playful kindness.

She signed. He seemed to understand or attempted to understand. It was her willingness to accept, sharing their intimacy. He was a slow patient lover. She trusted her instincts. After knowing him for nine months she'd eventually relax accepting soft passions with certain conditions of intimacy. No kissing. No cunning linguists.

One-eyed blind.

He said, Yes, I prefer doubt to certainty. I am more interested in the traces than the object. I love the fragments.

Where do I place it, this story?

What country on what continent, in what city, village, town or heartbeat?

How do I keep it simple yet moving like a breath?

She asked him, Do you like small? Skin on skin? Yes kneading her shoulder muscles, easing out tissue from her supine sublime spinal chord erasing tension. Her smile said, Yes. Her relaxation exhaled.

She spoke with her hand wings. Short, fast and deadly.

She dreamed of writing a short story, perhaps flash fiction.

Nervous, she selected a pen. She unscrewed the black ebony summit. She opened a black notebook. She made a pot of green tea. She started with flowing calligraphy letters.

My life began in a village. I don't need to leave my village. My village is the world.

She drew a picture. It looked like this.