Hello Chicken Soup

Goes the market women’s mantra song waiting for customers in Sapa, Vietnam.

Basic English is all you need to sell chicken soup. It arrives with long white noodles. Food women work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. 

Sellers, shoppers, locals, a few tourists with guides or in pairs feel comfortable with inexpensive market food. What is the profit margin, food cost, labor cost? 

Two foreigners live here. One is a Frenchman mid-20 with a brown ponytail. He speaks fluent H’mong. He stands on the cement staircase between the cloth market and sprawling food tables. He stares at people eating. He doesn’t smile.

He was married to a local H’mong girl, 19. She had a baby. Two years ago he left her. He pays support. Now he is chasing a Red Dzao girl. He works for the International Manipulate Relations Love Company with a Big Orgasm.

A fluent thin foreign man in his 20’s wearing large framed glasses carries a worn knapsack. He walks fast. He buys greens and tofu. He goes into a small shop for cooking oil. He hurries away over broken disjointed concrete blocks covering the central sewage system. He is in exile from far away. 

The Red Dzao women are persistent sellers, Buy from me. Repeat. Repeat. They never give up.

Mo, my 10-year old teacher gave a good lesson in how to handle these sellers. We were hanging out.

She said, When the women ask you to buy something, don’t say maybe, or later, or not now, or tomorrow, they will remember you and now and maybe and later and tomorrow they will tell you, you said tomorrow, later, maybe, now, Thanks for the lesson, Yes, I don’t know but I understand.

My and Mo, Sapa, Vietnam

Red Dzao

Mo

Finch's Cage

In Sapa, Vietnam I discovered a side street and thick cold java at a run-down Internet cafe. I sat outside.

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

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

Finch sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

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

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off fast beating your wings to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity or memories filled with attitudes, beliefs, values and fear pulling you down.

Free, you turn and glide, relax and soar.

Finch being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted 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. Let me in.” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown and bright eyed in its aloneness. 

An old woman opened the door. She trapped Finch 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 said.

Finch sat on its perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang, “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language.

Muttering under her breath about inconvenience she shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

Mandalay

River

A river sang
Please don't push me

You can't push me
You can't step in me twice
You can try
Everyone fails

I am from the source
Consider my source
When you drink me

Tibetan clouds obscure granite peaks
Climb high

Humans carry a short life on their back
Women wear love's labor
Feeling a child's warmth behind them
Harvest

Heartbeats mingle
Possibilities and potentials
Dreaming their long walk through jungles forests along a river

Be a river
Below the surface of appearances

Crescent yellow moon
Reflects hello dream

Dance on my surface
I am a mirror

Beauty before me
Beauty behind me
Beauty to my left
Beauty to my right
Beauty below me
Beauty above me

I am wide deep
I flow forever

No beginning no end

Are your needs being met

Mountain asked River
In the stream of life
Flow

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.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Sapa, Vietnam - Ice Girl

Chapter 13.

After Saigon, Leo walked to Sapa in northwest mountains.

  Talking monkey tourists from Hanoi are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance/screw and buy cheap Chinese plastic products, said Mo, 10, H’mong cloth seller. They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes.

They run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore us.

  A woman tourist slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at Mo’s work: a handmade belt, a colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than Mo.

  She’s surrounded by a chorus, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

  The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers selling fake watches, cheap pants, shirts, hats and knickknacks.

  Eyes scan colors, fabrics and faces.

  A park has baby red roses. A dusty historical statue stares at brackish fountain water. Six Red Dzao women talk with bags and threaded samples spread on the ground.

  “Do you want to buy from me?” said one smiling with gold teeth.

  “Yes. I want to buy the mountain.” Leo pointed to the rising green western forest, steel gray granite slabs, deep shaded valleys, and gray clouds skimming peaks around high deep edges.

  “Ok,” she said. “I will sell you the day mountain for 10,000 and the night mountain for 10,000.”

  “Ok. It’s a deal.” They laughed.

  Red communist scarfed school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

  Two big brown dogs fuck on the street in front of the church where tourists gather for a photo shoot.

Local Vietnamese women armed with cameras rented by the day selling images, memories and dreams poke and prod women, husbands, boys and girls into manageable groups for the moment.

The decisive moment they will remember forever.

Memories of their life will be framed on a family alternative votive candle altar near burning incense feeding, appeasing dead hungry ancestral ghosts.

  Caught in time.

  Frozen alive.  

  Possible signs of intelligent life in Sapa.

  Rumor control reports. 

Ice Girl in Banlung