Curious

Curious enrolled in an English class.

It was a Push Them Through English Scool, said Fool.

He was a native barbarian.

I need English vocabulary and the confidence to speak, to use it, said one.

I know my English is not grammatically perfect, but I know my English is fluent, said a student.

You are the teachers, Fool said to a room of passive dull beginners.

Brainwashed by the insert country here education system.

The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, one said. Smiling with cunning social intelligence.

The fewer mistakes I make, said another with cunning social intelligence, the less I am criticized.

You got that BS write.

Light my fire, said one.

Feed me, said another. I am not a participant. I am a willing victim.

Life is sacrifice. I sacrificed my life.

I know what you mean, said another SAD student.

See with soft eyes.

Don't think, LOOK.

My life now

An old friend of mine is coming to visit, my mother said one day, She’s bringing her son. She lived here during the war met a G.I. and had a baby. She was lucky. Luckier than us. She got out. She took her son to New York when he was two. This is his first visit back to his country. 

His country. Mrs. Lin and her son Michael came for lunch. He was tall and handsome with long black hair. He was smooth and charming. 

I work for a huge computer company in America, he boasted. Big man, small village. His mother had a large house in the village. He asked me out. We started dating. I did all the translating, all the necessary things. Michael played the big man, the rich Viet-American.

Local people resented his attitude, his lack of language. He had no humility.

I lived at home and my mother started in on me. Michael’s a good man. He could be your future, she said.

Maybe yes, maybe no. I had doubts. I still loved Robert. It was a typical mother conspiracy, his and mine.  Working on us. His mother was mean, vindictive.  

Finally one night we were both drunk and slept in his mother’s house. The next morning his mother gave us the silent treatment. Michael set her straight. Don’t fuck with us. We want breakfast, he said. She served us.

We slept late and partied all night. We were hot. He was a big, hot hungry animal and my body was his. He took me in every position and I loved it. Women want fucking, security and cash.

After six fast months he said, Move in with me. He told my mother and she said ok. Every little boy always asks for permission. I needed a man and Michael needed a woman.

My son and I moved in. My mother accepted the reality. 

His mother treated me like a slave. Her spoiled boy could do no wrong. She hated me. He was an accident of her fraudulent passion. Nothing changed. She was mean, violent and alone. I put up with it for the sake of hoping the relationship would work out. People either want control or approval.

I played her game.

A Jungle Story

Once upon a time in the long now there was a continent, a land mass floating on water. It was labelled Asia by white people on dusty maps. Deep inside Asia were vast lands, rivers and mountains.

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and insatiable appetite for peoples of diverse languages, customs and cultures lived in jungles and forests. Others preferred living in distant and remote mountains. 

Jingle, jangle, jungle. Using natural materials they created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and tools like looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played and learned life lessons from nature in extended families. 

One day a boat filled with white men sailed down the river to a village deep in the jungle. They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people didn't understand and carried weapons which made a lot of noise and scared the people.

They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

Every day more white people came down the river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their historical evolution on other continents. Their mantra was, Cheap labor, Cheap raw material, Cheap goods, Cheap markets and much Profit.

They said, We are civilized and you are savages. We have religion. It is called Wealth.

We are on a mission from the great chief. We control fire. We control time. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want.

The village gave them hospitality and shelter and friendship. The white men were greedy. They took control of the village, the people and the jungle. 

Every day the white men marched their slaves deep into the jungle singing, We control Nature. We shall overcome.

They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided people against people. Divide and conquer. Against each other. History had taught them well. 

They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every raw material of value. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

If we want to survive we move to a new jungle forest tomorrow, said a village shaman. Far away.

This is the story they told the people one night below stars singing with their light.

chinese cover story

One essential joy was selecting the cover photograph of a young Chinese girl.

Her image revealed heavy, deep and real emotional honesty. She stood trapped behind the steel grate at a Chinese nursery school enduring a hard dismal Chinese educational process seasoning her childhood character and personality in the poor village of Maija where the tea man and artist drawing the dead lived.

Her eyes held all the secrets of the world and unfilled wish-dream potential. She stared at the stranger, a diversion in her expanding universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her, trapping her against the gate.

It was locked by an old woman who feared persecution and execution if any kids escaped. He was on the other side. Being invisible has its advantages. He held a small black metallic machine to his blind eye.

She heard a series of curious clicks as a shutter opened and closed, an interval between life and death, trapping, freezing time, one decisive moment in the eternal present, a decisive instant, capturing her image on a memory-fiction circuit card. He smiled, whispered, Thanks, disappearing past pig farms on a dirty black mountain bike.

She had no way of knowing, because she was younger than tomorrow or older than yesterday remembering spring how her image on the cover, her clear child eyes were visible for everyone.

Her small dark eyes held archetypical memories of dynasties and great Chinese electronic fire walls evolving with the speed of electron particles illuminating her face, sadness, fear and curiosity at that precise moment. Stories about stories inside stories manifested the girl in alchemical truth, alive, breathing, unaware of her immortality in infinity.  

He'd visited her primary school with a university student who worked in the Maija pharmacy after school to make ends meet helping her aunt dispense cheap placebos to poor illiterate women and men alleviating their suffering, pain and fear of death singing, dancing speaking unintelligible Mandarin words.

Laughter and kindness were blessings after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored women teachers who didn’t want to be in a class tomb any more than the students. Teacher’s mantra was Push them through. No one had free choice. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability.

The dead, dying idiots sputtered stuttering in Beijing opening rusty doors of perception being a communist-socialist Marxist dream removed from poor villages where rich well connected officials raped and reaped huge financial benefits practicing oppression, coercion, bribery, graft, slander, using death threats as powerless simple peasants tilled soil, followed slumbering oxen, stalking mud and rice paddies. Where green rice stalks revealed a blue sky with Beauty.

Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic in China for years.

Why are so many Chinese students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking, besides the commercialization of education? The absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers. The one who dares to open their fat little face and question authority gets killed.

Bang. 

Cycles

Namaste,

The cycle of existence.

A person creates subjective reality and illusions. People feel pure joy with compassion, gratitude and forgiveness. Your center is clear and unified. No past regrets, no future fears.

The Chinese-Tibetan puppet leaders in Lhasa ordered monks to increase 24/7 patriotic education classes in all monasteries. Re-education through reform, ideology, propaganda and control.

It’s about power and control, ruling through fear and intimidation. The Chinese after looting and destroying monasteries in Tibet and mainland China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden.

They recruited Tibetan monks to live and work as spies and infamous informers. This system proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and capitalist running dogs. It was a practical peoples campaign of fear and suspicion creating paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns allowed to live and practice who resist or question this form of subtle patriotic education risk imprisonment, torture and death. They well know what has and continues to happen to liberal monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi prison outside Lhasa.

There are two kinds of suffering, said a girl weaving wool carpets in her yurt on the Tibetan plateau below bare brown mountains. Suffering you run away from and suffering you face.

Metta.