Monday
Apr232018
Entries in nature (129)
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Thursday
Mar222018
World Poetry Day
Language river
Brown life highway
Mountain silent
Clouds fly around
Here we go
Tuesday
Dec122017
Li - Ice Girl
Chapter 16.
Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I am H’mong. I speak excellent English.
I finished nine years of school in my village and learned what I really needed to know on the street. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. I use really a lot. As someone said, “You don’t want to let school interfere with your education.”
Tourists visit Sapa. It’s in the mountains close to China. I’ve never been to China. I met a boy named Leo who used to live there as he passed through life as we all do. He said he had a crappy job there.
Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. Plan the dream and dream the plan.
I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC or Bang Cock. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese stuff. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.
They make me laugh because you can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses 2) they wear bright red tour baseball hats so they don’t get lost 3) they travel in packs like scared animals 4) they stay in local government hotels and eat at local Vietnamese places 5) they ignore you.
No, I’m talking and I speak excellent English about the foreigners. We, my friends and I, who work the street selling, politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. It’s such a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. Tourists find and travelers discover is what I say.
Li
They have a vacation schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? They eat, sleep, wander around and maybe take a trek to a local village and then, POOF! like magic they disappear.
And then the tourist machine spits out more tourists and visitors for us to sell to, pester and offer treks to our village.
For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels (H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses) charge a tourist $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get 10 people. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy only gives me $5-10.
I am smart. I meet them 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.
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 sit and talk with people. They take some snaps.
Then we walk trails through pristine forests, through rivers, 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 direct with the tourists and trekkers.
I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman. Ha, ha.
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 viewfinder box. What’s up with that?
Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live and work, play and evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand 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 overnight. 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 going all the way home that takes two hours and…you understand.
My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It’s simple. Beds and 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. See you in the next life.
Monday
Dec042017
Sewing - Ice Girl
Chapter 12.
Across town a sewing woman returned to her Kampot, Cambodia guesthouse.
She splashed water on her face and changed clothes. She spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the sprawling market inside a labyrinth.
At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.
Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux-paws silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.
She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universal process was selecting fabric, measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections and ironing.
Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost. Thread followed their conversation. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number.
All explanations have to end somewhere.
Sky darkened.
Ceremonial drum thunder sang vocal intensity.
Lonely lost suffering foreign tourists in Cambodia shuddered with fear.
What if I die here?
How will my family and friends begin to realize my intention to witness 1200 years of dancing
Angkor laterite stoned history
gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes?
Lightning flashed skies.
Giant flashbulbs illuminated petrified children
Buried inside cement caverns eyes eating cartoon images on a plasma scream.
Skies opened.
Rain lashed humans. Some laughed, others cried. Tears dissolved fear.
Sweet dreams, baby.
Dawn.
Two arrived. A boy is cutter. He carried rope, ladder, small axe and machete.
Helper friend is coconut palm tree scout.
Here and there, he said, pointing.
Go up.
The boy shinnied up a narrow palm.
Transferring to the towering 2’ diameter palm he climbed higher.
Roping his tools.
How’s the view, asked helper.
Sublime. A wide brown river lined by cauliflower oaks reaches bamboo huts.
Orange sunrise severs cumulus wisps.
A market woman has her nails done in blue glitter.
A boy saws crystalized ice on a red dirt road.
Girls in white cotton pedaled to school.
A woman grilling waffles along a road buys bundled forest kindling.
Saffron orange robed monks sit in meditation at Naga Wat.
One plays a drum. A heartbeat of possibility.
He climbed higher.
He chopped. Long thin heavy branches weighted by freedom danced free.
Helper dragged branches past advertisements for temples, orphanages, river trips.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He secured rope to the top. Blossoming.
He chopped.
Coconuts, leaves, bark danced down.
White interior life dust snowed.
Tree crashed.
Light escaped. 3 hours. $20/2.
Smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest.
Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.
Aggressive women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied perceived value in exchange for meat, fruit, gold and fabric.
Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams of light, cracked cement, lost mislaid wooden planks, debris, feathers, jungles, and jangled light waves they surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery. Needles led thread.
