Leaving Sapa by Tran

Singing farewell to friends and strangers I’m reminded of a quote by Georgia O’Keefe, “There are times when one spends an afternoon with someone whom they will never see again.”

We roll inside flying clouds through deep mountain passes, past deep brown running rivers, sculptured terraced green rice paddies. Thin bamboo walled hut homes, teams of boys driving water buffalo home, invisible valleys, forests, mist shrouded habitats tucked into distant hills.

Peaks obscured by fast clouds, road construction crews dreaming/living in hovels with one change of dry clothing, past women nursing infants near wood fires inside dark dirt floor interiors where smoke escapes through porous bamboo splinters.

A smiling Red Dzao women thumbs a ride, heavy laboring trucks and we rolled into Lao Cai.

It is a noisy miniature Hanoi. You notice the heavy air, polluted by vehicles dancing commerce, irate impatient motorcycle beepers, horns, whirling traffic, people competing for time and money. Drivers from Sapa get a kickback from hotel owners.

At a restaurant near the station is supply and demand value exchange. Touts are on us like flies on shit. They scramble, Here, Here, you can leave your bags here. Sit down. See the menu, says a suave hustler boy.

The sidewalk is littered with tables and chairs. The woman owner offers green tea.

Japanese, French, English, Thai and Vietnamese tourists drop their packs and collapse. There are three evening trains. Blow whistle blow. Southbound.

Tables are packed with middle-aged Thai tourists. The fat men wear watches studded with blood diamonds. Fat wives’ hair is styled. One woman is the jokester. She teases people. She laughs long and LOUD. The men swill beer, the women green tea. They talk loud and fast. Their tour group is on a four-day buying mission from Bang Cock. Their numerous bags, suitcases and boxes of Chinese appliances fills the restaurant, spilling into the street. Their cargo will clog train passageways.

A seven-month pregnant Vietnamese woman serving people moves around tables toward the sidewalk and slips on a cement slope. She hits the street. Flat on her belly. People rush to help her up. She’s shaken not stirred recovers her composure and collapses in a flimsy plastic chair.

A shoeshine boy in his late teens on a serious economic cleaning mission wearing a torn white t-shirt and baseball cap points at my dirty climbing boots, Mister, your shoes need waving a white plastic bottle of liquid in the air. I stare at him. No words. He tries again. No thanks. He doesn’t understand. No, thanks.

This is English 101 on the street of dreams with life’s economic expectations hustling and selling a quiet determined desperation.

He waves the bottle, pointing at my shoes. His confidence wavers. He loses eye contact. He knows he has no sale but tries again  ... Your  ... before he can repeat his pitch, I level his glance with a slight tonal breath. No thanks.

He wanders to another potential sale trapped in a plastic chair waiting for food, waiting for their train to leave, waiting for their next destination, waiting to die on their tourist trail of quest love. Smart ones avoid his words, his eyes. This always works. Avoidance.

Pretend someone doesn’t exist. Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is fear.

A young angry spoiled girl-child in the diner with her grandfather plays with a mechanical Santa Claus sleigh toy. He winds it up, sets it on the floor and lets it go. It plays Jingle Bells, rolls along the floor and crashes into a glass door. The sleigh rocks back and forth as Rudolph bashes his red nose into glass as spinning wheels ring Jingle Bells. Dancing all the way. The girl plays with this toy for three minutes gets bored and whines. Her grandfather collects her babbling esoteric poem.

Two kitchen girls at a table shucking green beans peal the skin of whining children.

A guy comes in and makes small talk. He pulls out an 8GB iPod. He fiddles with the dials, displaying photographs. Want to buy this, cheap, $200.

No thanks, I have one.

Yeah, this is new, I bought it from a tourist before they died of beggar fatigue.

You’re very clever, good luck selling it maybe you can trade it for a landmine.

The 2015 Lao Cai express prepares to depart for Hanoi. The boisterous group of Thai tourists reading gold time watches grasping Gucci Florentine handbags wrestle impossible suitcases and cheap Chinese appliances into the train.

Their leader works for Herbie Lives Organic and a freelance tour guide. He leaned over with unmitigated glee displaying his lapel pin with the bamboo company logo and heart saying, All Natural.

Sapa was magnificent, just what a traveler needed for peaceful fresh air nature and human connection. Bliss. Mountains fog mist clouds rain sun valleys and rivers. You know you’re in the zone when ten days feels like ten eons.

After dismissing Hanoi taxi touts Tran’s Dream Sweeper collects dreams from sleeping monkeys. Shh, the bats are roosting in palm tree serenity outside the window.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

In Hanoi by Ku

Ku said, I feel embarrassed when I go to Hanoi. They call me Little Cat.

She is from the Black Hmong tribe. She is 16 and Sa’s youngest daughter.

I am confused there. Too many cars and buildings. It’s hard to see the sky. The city is too big. It is noisy and scary. I get lost. She smiled.

Do you know what we call the Hanoi city people, talking monkeys. They go to Sapa to buy cheap Chinese junk. They miss the noise, motorcycles, tall buildings, endless clatter and traffic confusion. They run into buildings. They hide. They are afraid of nature. They complain it’s too cold it’s too hot it’s too weird say the city people with all these noble literate savages trying to sell us things like bags and embroidery and nature walks.

They don’t fool me.

Yes, they are strange animals. Because I am smart I speak many languages; our Hmong dialects, Dzao, Tay, Vietnamese, Mandarin learned from Chinese traders in the mountains, English, European words, even some Tibetan.

Cool eh, I love languages, especially nature’s language, like animals, mountains, clouds, rivers, sky, and wind.

Many people need more life experiences, she reflected on a cool rainy day in Sapa sitting in the market overlooking valleys hearing birds and noble savages sing their authenticity and integrity. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Drum

From the 4th floor balcony you see the yellow elementary school building. Students are obedient. Teachers are bored, overworked and underpaid. Drones. Going through chalk and talk with dry drab emotions. Memorize the text. Grammar rules. Close your mouth and open your ears. Vomit the material.

A red flag with a bright five-point yellow star is silent. All the hot air is in the classroom. The educational skin drum at the school echoes a long deep resonating thunder. Vibrations bounce off clouds and granite mountains. It is large and stretched tight. Clouds and mountains? No the skin drum.

Remember all the amazing drums at the Ethnology Museum over centuries and A Century Is Nothing, but a long now, drums here are essential for communicating over distance.

Drum language has two tones.

Be the drum, frequency and vibration, said little drummer boy pounding out his message. Thump. Thump. Thump. Three heavy beats. Vibrations echo across Sapa space and curl around the lake into eastern mountains.

Drums call young tribal members. All the children gather. Be the drum with mind-at-large.

It is seasonal mountain music saying plant, weave art, make children, tend animals, harvest fields, celebrate life, all the gathering of Black, White, Flower Hmong, Red Dzao, Tay. Community.

Spirit. Storytellers. Animism. Integrity. Authenticity. Nature is your inspiration, guide and teacher.

You live in an amazing art museum.

Cheap foreign plastic factory junk overwhelms natural fiber markets, threading globalization.

Joyful female cloth sellers in the old fabric market sustain energies in their sewing community.

The Hmong and Red Dzao women walk from their villages to stay in Sapa for 3-4 days like their daughters. If they sell or don’t sell they return to their village.

It’s a long walk. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

 

Finch's Cage

After seeing Tao I found an Internet cafe and sat outside.

I met a human-bird.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside the plate glass door. It had escaped from its small bamboo cage in the main room.

Someone, perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her old mother worried about dying alone or her brother worried about dying of boredom had left the cage door open.

Finch was outside. It sang, Where’s my home, what is this beautiful world?

Finch hugged the ground. It saw trees across the street. It saw a blue sky and inhaled clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in trees but it didn’t understand them. Their songs were about nesting, flying, clouds, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of nature’s freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. It was obvious.

It lacked real flying experience, where you lift off beating your wings to get up and get going to escape gravity’s weight pulling you down as freedom pulls you up into everything new and exciting reaching an attitude or altitude and you turn glide and relax feeling air beneath your wings. You soar free.

Finch, conditioned to a caged world of perch, food and water looked and listened to the world. This was enough.

Finch retreated from the possibility of freedom and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the glass door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage waited. It needed someone to rescue it.

It sang, Help, Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all, I’ve seen enough. Please let me in.

Finch was amazing in its beauty. Yellow, red, brown, bright-eyed in its small alert aloneness.

An old woman came out, trapped it in a purple cloth and returned Finch to its cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

Did you learn your lesson little bird, she whispered.

Finch sat on its perch, had a long cool drink of water singing, Thank you now I am truly happy.

The old woman didn’t understand this language, muttered under her breath about inconvenience and shuffled down a long dark hallway to kill a chicken for lunch. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Sa, Mo, Mi

I rescued a brown moth from room 402 to fly free.

A white yellow dawn sun explodes over mountains. A brilliant rainbow arches over high green western hills in perfect harmony.

I met Sa, a Black Hmong woman. We walked around the cloth market discussing fabric quality.

She said, A Hmong woman in the far north mountains was kidnapped by Chinese men from Yunnan, taken over the border and forced into prostitution. When she became pregnant she was taken to a remote cabin in the mountains and kept there as a prisoner, one day she escaped with her child and returned to Sapa.

She’s the one over there crying and sewing her life story into cloth. Human trafficking is a persistent world problem.

Sa talked about the lack of Hmong shops in Sapa. We sat with mountains, sky, clouds, kids and stories.

Sa and daughter Ku

Sa’s Home

Small steps wind down steep trails. Sa identifies wild plants used for indigo colors and their clothing. The undulating terrain of rising rice terraces supports people harvesting rice. People cut, thresh, stack yellow stalks and burn them. Isolated puffs of black smoke signals wave in the valley below green forests and purple mountains. They have one crop of rice per year. The south has two.

It’s a long simple home with a dirt floor and bamboo walls. Wooden walls are expensive. The home is divided into a kitchen, main room and bedroom. The main room has a TV and DVD. Under the roof is a storage area. Outside is a water faucet, a bamboo holder for toothbrushes, a water buffalo pen, a pigpen and a writing pen. 

Imagination’s pen rearranges words. Words are masks to conceal fears of speaking the truth.  

The more words the bigger the fear.

Words hide in bamboo clouds, foliage, in flowing rivers, on slippery rocks, slithering inside important life experiences. Words form languages speaking indigo cloth, dyed in a large vat and hanging to dry on a wooden wall.

Stacked sacks of straw for winter’s feeding are ready. Twenty-five kilogram bags of rice in blue, white and orange plastic bags marked Made in Indonesia are piled in a corner. Sa’s husband drives water buffalo home.

We share a simple lunch prepared by one of Sa’s three daughters. She is 19, a mother and a trek leader speaking fluent English. Many girls marry at sweet sixteen. We share rice, tofu, greens and stories.

Cat-Cat Village, Mo and My Munchkins by Tao

Cat-Cat village is buried down a long meandering rough flag stone steep path descending to rivers and bamboo forests below rolling hills and mountains.

Steps lead past bamboo homes. Women wash and dry long streamers of blue indigo cloth for bags and clothing. It stains their hands a dark gray-blue shade. Naked Hmong kids play, pee, run, stare and take care of siblings. All the homes have tables outside selling silver, woven bags, wall hangings, shirts and hand-carved stone souvenirs.

Steps lead into forests near a wide river and a waterfall. Hanoi tourists run around taking photos of each other with roaring water in the background yelling, Look, a waterfall, Jump!

There is a small Hmong theatre behind shops. A Hanoi team from Open Community Solution Investment Joint Marxist Hit Them With A Stick Company films dancing Hmong girls.

A Hmong boy plays a small mouth harp. Hmong girls sit and embroider.

Boys smoke watching the action. Everyone shifts outside where the Hanoi dwarf star sits with two Hmong girls. They show him how to move a needle through fabric as the waterfall roars behind them. It’s the most complicated action he’s ever rehearsed.

The director yells, ACTION. The star embroiders. The girls help him.

CUT, yells the director. He gives directions.

Take two. ACTION!

Just get to the verb, said Tran.

Young girls carry baskets loaded with kindling up steep stone steps to their village home. One smiling girl hauls two gigantic logs on her bamboo basket. Her laborious elementary education hauls the world on her young back.

I visit Chocolate & Baguette to speak with Ms. Tao about their humanitarian work and hospitality training school. The C&B is a boutique hotel with four rooms and extensive menu in Vietnamese, French and English. The headquarters is in Hanoi. 

Hearing disadvantaged, blind and destitute children attend the Hoa Sua School for training and education in hotel services, bakery, housekeeping and English. They return home with skills to find meaningful employment. They are empowered.

Mo, 10 and My 8, two little Hmong munchkin friends work the street. My is a street urchin wearing a dirty green t-shirt, jeans and filthy yellow perforated sandals. Everyone wears these cheap sandals except older girls leading treks in stable Teva sandals.

Buy from me, she pleaded.

What do you have? She pulled out long embroidered wallets, colorful wristbands and postcards.

Look, here, cheap, thrusting them at me. Miniature vultures feast on a hapless victim.

Ah, I remember you from yesterday.

Sapa’s a small place and it doesn’t take long for all the street sellers to make your acquaintance if you are friendly and curious.

I walked down stone steps to a rusty museum gate and pivot.

Where are you going?

Down to the market, said Mo.

Ok, Let’s go together. We passed sidewalk vendors on a circle of grass ringed with blue tarps, stuff, dreamers and teams of Hmong and red Dzao women bargaining over hemp quality.

Are you hungry? I’m going to the market for coffee.

Ok. SOP is for the young girls to canvas streets, hotels and restaurants where tourists go. They wait.

We hung out in the market overlooking valleys, fog, hills, and steel blue wisps of flying water. They were hungry. The chicken soup was delicious. I suggested we meet the next day for lunch in the market. They said they had a good day selling belts, bags, purses and handiwork.

Their reality is the street. Mo has limited school opportunities. My mom said I need to make money.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged