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
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