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.

laosattitude

how does it work in laos, said elf.

a frenchman told me this, said orphan. he's lived here 6 years. he has a young son and daughter. he had, past tense, a marriage with a local woman. they met. they married. he invested time and money to develop a guesthouse. they had 5 properties. they had problems. her extended family smelled a huge profit. she threw him out. she wants all the land. 

i saw her one day when she brought their daughter to school. fat and unhappy. both.

so how does it work in laos, asked elf. you didn't answer the big question from a small person.

men make the rules, said orphan. women take care of the home. it's all unspoken subtleties. they do their thing. women worship in the temples. they do their meditation. men sit around getting drunk, discussing new night girls, ethics, morality and behavior.

what happened to the french man and the kids, asked elf.

he plotted a way to get them out of the country. let her keep the land and buildings, he said.

many people here never leave their village. why. everything i have is here. a village maintains the other world.

sullen & apathetic

in a small sleepy river town

a white haired 60-year old German with his

29-year old squeeze for two years said,

everyday I call my wife in Germany at 2 p.m. then I am free.

she always asks me why do you go to Cambodia. i go to Cambodia to come inside my squeeze. to received tenderness under the false pretense of love and affection.

it’s part of the International Fair Trade Agreement. i trade her my money for her time. it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

how’s the garden doing in Berlin? fine. 

sullen and apathetic suits their nature. evolutionary process. the khmer woman stabbed her lover in his heartless heart using laser quided molecular silent revenge. take that you bastard.

memory 101

1 memory creates fiction, said orphan.

A non-verbal memory of lost time, said elf.

The angry one thought it’d be her. She spat angry words and gestures. The fury of a woman scorned. Accept loss forever. He paid mama. They cycled back. They ate fish, vegetables and rice and went to bed. For hours. Normally her customers were 15 minute quickie jobs. He slowed her down. Take our time. She was flat and flat on her back. She started relaxing. No hurry, sweet thing. After awhile she’d say, boom-boom?

Her vocabulary was extensive.

Relax, take it easy. 24, no father, a brother in Malaysia and a mother north of a capital letter. 

You are a monkey, she said curling up soft and warm. She used imaginary scissors to cut off his instrument of mass destruction. 

Yes, she said, I will eat you alive tonight while rain assaults the tin roof through fractured eroding leaves of lost time.

trade sex for security

He sat at an Indonesian warung, a cheap food place offering white virgin rice, spicy chilly, egg, green veggies, tempe, tofu, deep fried crackers, on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Smokers called it the Berlin Wall because they could smoke away from the inquisitive prying eyes of parents and administration moles. Desk jockeys in green plaid. Hot and sticky tropics. He’d escaped from the tyranny of noisy educational sad robots trapped in their futile expectations of perpetual childhood.

An illiterate village woman piled her trash near a grove of banana trees. She lit a fire. Roosters, hens and chicks scattered. Smoke curled around a man pushing his chipped blue plywood cart loaded with plastic dishes, cheap cloth, simple tools, brushes, mops, bags, hats, and basic household goods. Rolling wheels through neighborhoods.

Cumulus clouds gathered momentum.

Nearby were yelling village people. A tall thin woman teased her 4-year old monkey boy child.

Pregnancy was her ticket out of hell, loneliness and misery.

In world villages you traded sex for security. Father ran away to impregnate new victims. A mother tormented the kid. He cried. She laughed at him. She created a mini-monster. A boy who hated women now and later. He was dependent on them for food and affection.

In the future he’d kill her with a sharp machete. A mother and daughter uttered primal grunt sounds. A mother combed her daughter’s hair scavenging follicles for nits and lice. Protein. Human evolution.

Crying children. Perpetual distractions. Emotional zombies, minus seven. Time=death. Life is a temporary condition.