The Yellers - Ice Girl

Chapter 15.

I sat on the garden balcony in Hanoi one morning.  

I cleaned The Dream Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door and they have an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids, like the man yelling at his infant until the kid balls. Tears stream until mother rescues her darling from the emotional abuse. Yelling affects their self-esteem and their wellbeing. Children will learn how to reject this yeller.

They, in turn will grow & learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They will be passive and then turn on the yell.

As they age they turn off. They turn off their ears. Their ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reaction recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to his parents, a generation raised with fear and intimidation and suspicion and insecurity and poverty and informers and empty promises and empty hope and loud authority voices. Some voices are real. Others are nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife.

Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with the infants. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You raise them to yell with the best of them.

They yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep cackling crows breaking palm branches sending shivers down your spineless self pity wearing regret and anger and manifesting fear inside narrow tight lives under long florescent lights shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

They will cremate you and take your photo to the artist who will memorize your face with graphite.

Generations stare at your sad stoic frozen face offering fruit and water. Survivors burn incense so your spirit has something to eat. It will not be angry, yelling, demanding and pleading. Feed me. Ancestors live in fear of the dead.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, then words, phrases, and sentences called talk. They grow louder until achieving decibels required by the living. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, boss, lover, or stranger - will yell at kids and they will ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller will yell again, a little louder. No answer. 

I wait for them to get their yell going. Louder says listener cowering inside silence.

After I’ve made them yell three times I will answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

Finally, to teach them a lesson I will answer. Softly. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with the other yellers around them. I reject them for yelling at me. I am easily distracted. I nurture chaos and entropy. Ah, the glare of bright artificial ancestor passion for pain and tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, ‘Give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000eyes.

I am an infinite ocean of wisdom.    

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell and make racket and talk over each other and don’t listen and yell louder to be heard and others block them out or ignore them completely and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas.

He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents which is how they evolved into this higher intelligent life form. To breed or not to breed, that is the quest-ion.

The other day Leo passed one of those narrow minded little hovels guarded by doors and rusting sliding gates. Narrow alleys are filled with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in the alley using round perforated compressed coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, stones, creating a

brave new world

with Marxist methods of production: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant, and stick.

In the street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, and kids playing fast and loose near women selling bananas from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog. Splayed legs. Glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from their shops. Sewing ladies held a needle and thread in air, a woman chopping greens held a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red cartoon balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother held her future yeller offspring - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beeped impatiently trying to negotiate through the crowd to get home to families, food, television and their beloved pet.

An old thin man emerged from his small dark utilitarian space where millions live in the dark can’t see the dirt and hide from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, lifting it into air. It draped. He resembled a hunter holding a wild hare after canines flushed it running fast filled with fear, afraid and free.

He was in shock standing there, holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool on the street surrounded by angry confused surprised voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his brain saying something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery so he stood there holding the legs and gently laid the dog closer to the gutter as the dog’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion returning to his dark interior space.

Inside every family’s deep dark space is a main room and altar for dead relatives, candles, fruit, and burning incense.

The black and white and color images reminded Leo of the Chinese artist in Maija, the poor pig village near the Fujian, university in China where he lived for two years riding his bike across forested hills, up and down narrow dirt back roads, watching butterflies mate in dust, old people planting, harvesting, threshing rice, women lugging piles of white cauliflower to market in bamboo baskets suspended on poles and zooming down long small tight dusty paths past athletic sweat shop shoe factories filled with morose girls and hunched over women threading clacking Butterfly machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until he reached a narrow street to sit drinking Fujian green tea with a man in his shop. 

Further up the hill were red wooden shops with appliances, market stalls, street food, electrical stores and hacking 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 democratic. Benevolent Chairman Mao (our grandfather leader bless his heart) smiled at the masses before ordering peasants, “Eat Grass.”

38 million died of starvation.

Their tired B&W image is used throughout 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. 

The bent nail gets hammered down! yelled a Chinese teacher next door to Leo’s classroom. 80 students applauded.

The Maija artist accepted the photo from a grieving relative and set up his easel. Using a magnifying glass he memorized her face. A pencil captured an 8x10 likeness.

On the chipped plaster walls were examples of his work: peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives and young and old Pioneer communist members with tight red scarves knotting their necks, suffocating their passion. 

Today he sketched an old unsmiling stoic woman, a sad resigned peasant. She suffered. She’d suffered at the hands of the nationalists then the communists then the new economic corrupt greedy revolutionaries.

She suffered the indignities of old age.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung on the wall near red streaks of paint inside his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed its feelers together. 

An old man with an emaciated skeleton face and paper-thin arms carefully opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand. He dispersed this into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. Leo shared tea watching the artist work. The likeness was perfect. The tea was delicious with an acidic after burn.

     These images decorate family altars. Dusty images rest in city temples. Death is a big deal. Ancestor worship = fear of ghosts.

     Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge all the yelling from the talking monkeys? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes. On anniversary death days they meet all the other ancestors inside narrow alleys where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicious liquids drain into punctured cement holes flowing along narrow passageways slanted toward the middle.      

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee to address family noise. ‘It’s come to our attention dear comrades, dear people, dearly beloved family and friends...that we have a communication issue here in the neighborhood.’

     ‘Silence! We are trying to sleep a long peaceful sleep. Leave us be. Shut the fuck up.’

  Years later in Hanoi a woman commented to five million friends, here I am in Sapa. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

  A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip-flops walked past posers. Her t-shirt read, Love My Bones. She is a marrow transplant specialist.

Ice Girl in Banlung
  

Life in Hanoi - Ice Girl

Chapter 14.

Leo’s neighbors are 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 and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang. 

Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.

You play the game or the game plays you.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early. The pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’

She never physically returned. She carried memories.

It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, a collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving

No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.

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

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.

Then 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 below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange. 

“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 burrowed 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 after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.

Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction.

This fiction created their memory. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

1655 Hanoi Alley Bell - TLC 56

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. He is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to celebrate life.

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

She thought of her father whispering as he carried her away from their burning village during the war, “Remember where you came from.”

She never physically returned. Memories saved her.

It didn’t really matter what went where because after she’d carried her garbage down the high walled alley blocking sincere fading daylight she tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of neighborhood garbage was tremendous.

Growing day by day it evolved as a collective socialistic mess and community consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She felt content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Enough to get her away from homeland security prison walls to gossip with neighbors waiting to die as twilight filtered past musical hammers, creaking broken carts pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight alley chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at a visual epiphany as exactly 21 shovels of earth were manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks and suicidal dreams.

Laborers were light years away from young H’mong Sapa mountain sellers and trek leaders speaking fluent English with no further hope of a formal education after ninth grade surviving with indigo blue stained fingers hands and hearts living through long dark cold mountain winters as storms howled, “I feel free.”

They cheerfully offered their bright beaded bags, embroidery and natural world experiences to strangers.

Cynical war weary logic infested objectivists burning inside towering twin infernos of their psychosis ate self-pity with no exit for dessert inside Fibonacci’s eternal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing and napalm.

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Lucky sat on a Hanoi garden balcony cleaning The Dream Sweeper Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door with an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids like the man tormenting his child until the kid balls. Tears stream. Mother rescues her darling from endless emotional abuse stunting the child’s development.

Children learn how to reject this yeller. They learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They are passive-aggressive. As they age they turn off their brains. Genetic engineering. Essential healthy neural paths lie dormant. They turn off their ears. Blend in. This attention deficit disorder is deader than an ancestor eating incense. Ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reactionary recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to generations raised with fear, intimidation, suspicion, insecurity, starvation, poverty, informers, paranoia, empty promises, false hope and loud voices. Some voices are real others are pure nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife. Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Put on your social identity mask and hit the bricks. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with your children. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You will raise them to yell with the best of them.

They will bellow like stuck pigs, bleating sheep and cackling crows breaking heart-minds and transmit shivers down your spineless self with regret and anger and fear manifesting in narrow tight lives under long florescent lights, this shattering glare. They grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

Time is a circle.

They bury you and take your photo to the artist who memorizes your face with graphite on parchment. Generations and friends stare at your black/white frozen face. Kneeling in supplication they offer you fruit and water. They burn incense so your spirit has something to consume, so it will not be angry and return yelling, demanding and pleading. Survivors live in fear of ghosts. How we live and how we remember. Let’s eat.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, words, phrases, sentences called speech, then louder until they achieve the decibels required to re-join the family so to speak. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

We work. We breed. We get slaughtered.

Someone - a parent, teacher, sibling, boss, lover, or stranger - yells at them and they ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells a little louder. No answer. 

The child plays the game waiting for them to get their yell going strong. Louder says listener hiding inside silence. After they’ve made them yell three times child answers with a whisper. They can’t hear the child. They yell again and again. The child has conditioned them to their catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

A kid whispers to teach them a lesson. A-dolts can’t hear them. They raise their voice competing with other yellers. Kid rejects them for yelling at him/her. He/she is easily distracted. He/she nurtures chaos, confusion and distractions. He/she loves the fragments. Ah, the glare of artificial ancestor passion for tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, “Give them 1,001 lashes with your tongue. I have 1,001 arms and 1,001 eyes. I am infinite on the ocean of wisdom.” 

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell, talk over each other, don’t listen, yelling louder trying to be heard as others block them out or ignore them and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs howling, Feed Me.

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother ordered him to marry the slob who learned to yell while ignoring her parents which is how they evolved into this intelligent higher life form.

Every morning Lucky walked past homes guarded by rusty sliding gates. Narrow alleys and sardine dwellings. SHOCK was spray painted on a wall near a discarded sofa among residents cooking with round perforated coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, and stones creating magnificent futures with Marxist production tools: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant.

All fine well good ends to a means.

In a narrow street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs and glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from shops/homes. Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens fondled a veined leaf, a man oiling a bike gestured a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother hugged her young future yeller - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beep-beeped impatient music twisting through the crowd to get home to families, lovers, food, television, sex, dramas about heroes and heroines, their beloved pet and hungry dead ancestors.

A thin old man emerged from his small dark narrow utilitarian space where millions living in the dark hid from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, picked it up, lifting it into the air. It hung down. He resembled aristocracy holding a wild hare after dogs flushed it running wild filled with freedom’s fear.

He was in shock holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool surrounded by confused voices of friends, neighbors and strangers pealing like bells in his brain muttering something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery of death standing alone holding the legs before laying the dog near the gutter as the animal’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion, meaning and returned to his dark interior unconscious space.

Buried inside his family’s deep dark home was an altar for candles, fruit, dead relative images and burning incense.

The black and white imitations resembled the Chinese artist's work. He drew the dead. A relative gave him a common small black and white photo from 1949 when the country declared itself free and independent and benevolent Chairman Mao dear grandfather leader bless his heart smiling at the masses ordered peasants, “Eat Grass.”

45 million died of starvation.

Their small iconic image was used in documents for residence, work and party politics. People had the three iron rice bowls. Guaranteed living space. Guaranteed work unit. Guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal.

Everyone was treated the same, wore the same grey clothing, ate the same gruel, saying the same thing following the leader like condemned criminals playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

The bent nail gets hammered down, yelled an undersexed Chinese teacher in a university class tomb pounding her point home with a Marxist control stick.

The Maija artist accepted a photo from a grieving relative set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass. His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion. 

This day he sketched an old stoic sad resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung near red streaks of paint in his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed feelers together. Tasty. 

An emaciated friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. They shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted ascetic.

Images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts was a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they met ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes. 

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Hanoi family noise. “It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”

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

ha Noise Dave

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

His voice manifestation expresses human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunched over slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about greed on land, sea, and air, as water pianos played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation musical channels dances near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage.

Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Death Worship in Nam