marxist elephant control stick

An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a paid Communist party member stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green banked walls, Play the angles you idiots! she shouts, elevating her Marxist elephant CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with land mines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me! she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization rules named Fear.

Famine survives in green paddies beneath heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming streaming white oxen past orphaned sex slaves selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.

Vegetable lovers sleep on discarded Burmese teak furniture. Across from the restaurant behind a mud spaceship hut is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare.

In a dusty lot someone squats over a mud toilet. They shit fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Motivation in China

Please open your creative notebook. Using a simple writing tool like a pen or #2 lead pencil I want you to consider the following questions. Please answer them using your basic English. 

Why am I here? _____ 

Am I a machine, a tool? _______ 

What exactly is a machine? ________ 

What is my motivation to learn English? Money. 

Your supervisor has instructed me to motivate you. She expects me to motivate you to complete the assigned tasks, pass the exams and arrive on time. Her management style instructed me to use fear as a form of discipline with you. We are all well aware how the power and threat of fear motivates humans. 

If I fail to motivate you and pass you I will be executed. Survival is my fear based motivation. 

Fear of starvation. Fear of poverty. Fear of failure. Fear of humiliation or shame. Fear of not meeting social expectations. 

Ghost speak

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said a foreign teacher. 

“We know so much and understand so little,” said a bright Chinese girl. One of eighty in a class tomb.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.” 

During a moment of silence they heard an authoritarian female voice yelling in Mandarin from another room. “The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A ghost passed brown faced women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Single girls mopped cement passageways from dawn to dusk. Dutiful daughters swept floors staring at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent and hairline fractured straw mattress bedding. 

China is the entertainment capital of the world!

He passed retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured strategic rows as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes painted the city’s rising dust. A ghost they never imagined floated past, an apparition they dreamed in their wide eyed wonder.

A peasant woman collected cow manure in broken reed baskets. She carried her load to a road, spreading it out with a hoe to dry in the sun. Instant organic fertilizer.

Ghost speaks the language of silence. This comforts them. His inability to articulate his passion and suffering illusions witnesses a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s incarnate garden. 

The meaning of meaning was obscured by clouds of anger, fear, desire, jealousy, ignorance, and attachment. They waved him away.

They cast him into deep water. He replenished his spirit. His motivation and intention was clear. 

zero effort

yes, said the seven year young genius. here's another true class tomb saga from Laos. 

it happened like this. a foreign teacher faced 12 seventh grade homonids.

how many of you are afraid to speak? afraid to make a mistake?

12 hands shot into air. trembling arteries and armed veins exploded cortex capillaries.

reach for the sky yelled a thief disguised as an autocratic robotic local teacher. 

memorize the text. keep your big fat mouth shut. class dismissed. zero effort.

it takes 12 years of formal education to beat the spirit out of a child, sighed a genius.

bye-bye said orphan.

save face idiot

They are thinking: We have ways to make you talk.

They don’t tell me this but I know how it works. I’ve read Tu Fu’s work. I’ve digested their bone dust history through dynasties.

“Yes, well, we’ll see,” she said. “We need to remind you to remember this very carefully.” Her voice rose an octave.

“The bent nail gets hammered down!”

"Just because you speak our language doesn’t mean you are special. We can revoke your visa and force you to pay a fine. We can put you away where no one will ever find you. We will discuss your situation with our leaders. We have driven the talented people abroad. Some went into hiding but we know where they are and we find them. We always do. We find them in their homes, schools, jobs. Some accepted positions at foreign universities where they form counter-revolutionary groups bent on overthrowing the state by writing articles, stories and books critical of their homeland.” 

Her face resembled nuclear fission. She pounded the table. “They are a disgrace! They are running dogs!” 

“I see,” he said, dropping his eyes to save face.