Life Lesson #5 - Ice Girl

Chapter 18.

I’m a big seven as in 7, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator.

  Your life is a test. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear.

  My dad’s not very smart. It’s probably his DNA. A string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

  Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season here in Vientiane. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

  Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

  It’s amazing what people do when they have nothing to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. Anyway I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

a) people who make things happen

b)people who watch people make things happen

c) people who don’t know what the fuck is going on

  My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every day is a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

  Grandfather stares at rain collecting in pools.

  Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

  My mom’s also really smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

  After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

  It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

  When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

  Mom ignores me mostly. She’s very busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kind later.

  People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

  Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

  Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

  The trick is to tolerate, with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

  The kid continued: For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

  I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

  This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

  Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, expensive medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know?

  Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

  A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

  How do you build self-control and grit, asked Leo.

  Through failure, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

  What are they?

  Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

  Thanks for the life lesson, said Leo. You are the future of Laos.

Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Life in Hanoi - Ice Girl

Chapter 14.

Leo’s neighbors are Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang. 

Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.

You play the game or the game plays you.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early. The pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’

She never physically returned. She carried memories.

It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, a collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving

No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his social network domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. Vietnam forced them all the way back to Manchuria.

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange. 

“Quick into the tunnels!” They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They burrowed deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.

Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction.

This fiction created their memory. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

Life in Cambodia - Ice Girl

Chapter 10.

Ice Girl told Leo about Cambodia life. People here are cunning, devious and scheming.

They smile but behind the smile is repressed anger. Darkness.

It’s pure survivor behavior. They have little or no formal education. Impoverished adults think educating their children wastes time and m-o-n-e-y. Food and survival is their daily priority.

  Let’s Eat is their mantra.

Millions here mill around, stare, interrupt others, are rude, and do not LISTEN, preferring to talk over others.

  They think the louder one is the smarter one. They are easily intimidated by a speaker’s volume.

  Signal-noise.

  They demonstrate behavior and attitudes similar to chimps. Yeah, yeah.

  Their #1 priority involves searching, finding, preparing and eating food. Priority #2 is searching, finding, preparing and fucking females. Sleeping, #3 is popular before, during and after food or suffering a small sexual pleasure death in eight minutes. Sleeping is the best meditation in the tropics.

  Fucking is popular whenever the male, the ALPHA animal in the tribe demands it. This is natural selection. People live on Earth for two reasons: work and breed.

  Read and write, asked Leo.

  No. Work and breed. Female members are passive. They are conditioned by DNA genetics, environment and family expectations to be passive. Produce more workers, more tools.

Children are tools.

  If they refuse to submit to the male they are beaten. If they talk about it they are beaten. If they enjoy it they are beaten. If they run away they are captured and beaten. If they suffer humiliation they are beaten. If they are beaten they are beaten. If they live to tell the tale they are beaten. If they die while being beaten their corpse is beaten. They are beat.

   The longer I work the longer I live. The longer I breed the longer I live. In theory. My main objective is work and breed. Then I am slaughtered. Life is a cheap bitch.

  I see, said Leo, same in China. Our one-child policy is genocide.

 Later, sitting across a rural red road in Battenbang, Leo is a witness. You have to cross the road to learn something. He extrapolates, illuminates, illustrates, and desiccates.

  A family moved into a shack near muddy waters. They set up a food joint selling steamed corn and fast fried foods.

  There’s a mother, two boys 17 & 20 and two girls, the youngest about 15. The girls either belong to the mother or they’ve come from poor areas looking for domestic work. They are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

  No papa. He’s history in the tragic family fairy tale, one of millions throughout the magic kingdom. Long gone in the long now.

  Mom is at the market. Incest Is Best, male, 17, wears a towel-sarong. A girl sets up a glass display case on a wooden counter with her back toward him. He slides up behind her and presses his crotch against her.

  She freezes. Imitating sexual movement, he whispers, little girl, this is what happens to you. I have a little red rooster. Do you like it? I have big power.

  She is powerless. She stands there taking it. Silent. She feels like crying. Her tears create a river. She floats away searching for compassion and meaning in a cruel world without freedom.

 Rule #1: Boys and men run the show. They pay lip service to girls and women. It’s the old work and breed paradigm. You are my property.

Sexual harassment by immature boys and older men (with money, power and control) and a high level of testosterone, IS a game. Simple sex. No education. Zero responsibility. No morals. No ethics. No education.

  This explains why millions of girls have babies and boys run away. Zero responsibility.

Girls and women tolerate it because:

a)    it’s an unpleasant hard, cold cruel fact of life

b)   they are told to submit to males

c)    they live in Fear & Ignorance

d)   they are considered stupid and second class citizens

e)    they have no human rights

f)    no quest-ions allowed

g)    it’s the LAW of the jungle

h)   it’s expected

i)  they have no voice, no way out

j)  they don’t have the power to say or do anything to stop it

k) mother is not sympathetic. it happened to her. that’s life so they say

Ice Girl in Banlung

Running Capitalist Dog - Ice Girl

Chapter 6.

You can say that again, sang Leo, a broken-hearted brainwashed exhausted starving peasant practicing free speech with the fluency of intellectual rational objectivity at a Reform Through Re-education labor unit on the edge of the Gobi desert or Hell on Earth.

  He was short, fast and deadly.

  He was condemned to the labor unit for quest-ioning heavily armed moral authority at Beijing Abnormal University. It was the beginning of the Brand NEW Cultural Revolution lasting 10,000 brutal years.

Quanzhou, Fujian, China

  China was systemically dismantled and converted into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It was sold at global discount stores labeled Made In China By Poor Illiterate Sweatshop Slaves.

  Millions of educated people were purged from jobs. All social connections were severed. Informers prospered. Families turned each other in to save their skin. Dignity and self-respect devolved into humiliating samzen or self-criticism sessions.

  Yes, they cried. I am guilty, stupid and the cause of all my suffering.

  Yes, they wailed. I am a Running Capitalist Dog. Have mercy. Where do I sign my glorious true confession?

  Here, said Authority. On the dotted line.

  After accepting Leo’s coerced confession interrogation thugs dressed as acrobats rehearsing for a Beijing Opera beat Leo with tofu sandwiches and sand-filled rubber hoses.

A clandestine CIA torture manual instructed them how to adapt modern waterboarding tactics with ancient Chinese water torture techniques.

  Sink or swim sucker, said a diving instructor in a bell jar.

Unemployed and pregnant, Quanzhou, China.

  They hung Leo upside down in the asylum. They spun him around until he became a flashing strobe light jellyfish. A literate starving peasant applied electrodes to his genitals. An illiterate starving peasant cranked up the juice on an old car battery.

  Leo talked. Leo stuttered. Leo cried for mercy.

  Leo screamed, Why me? Not me!

  Denial will kill you, said interrogators. You are an enemy of The One State. You are a clear and present danger to social harmonious stability. Questioning authority is forbidden. Repent Running Dog!

  Leo screamed, I’m a mongrel cur. I will never ever ask another quest-ion, have mercy. They cranked up jungle juice shocking Leo back to a Brave New World.

  His memory was erased.

  This happened because corrupt Chinese party leaders choking on greed, concubines, estates, and gold plated chopsticks with their futures on the line were not pleased one lost day when, in a Correct Political Thought class, Leo had the temerity to ask, Why do we have to read Mao’s Little Red Book, it contains nothing of value, it is outdated, filled with mush for pigs, doublethink ideologies and peasant socialist agrarian social big brother control plans, mindless propaganda and is obsolete.

  Shock and awe filled airless silence.

  Leo was denounced before the entire population. Leaders took care of Leo. They executed all his relatives. That’ll teach the little SOB, said a bureaucrat.

  Authority has spoken, leaders said, standing with Leo wearing shackles of regret and loss and remorse code watching his ancestral Sichuan home erupt in a blazing inferno, hearing his ghost parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandmother, and grandfather scream for mercy in Dante’s fire.

  I will get revenge, Leo reflected in the Gobi. Someday I will stand in front of a tank on Main Street in Beijing screaming, “Run me over you bastards!”

 Until then, Leo’s task based re-education reform activity or Understanding by Design pedagogical reality meant hauling buckets of night soil shit out of labor unit shacks near his straw and mud hovel.

  All day. Every single fucking day.

  He fed it to pigs on Animal Farm. Some pigs are more equal than other pigs. Oink, oink.

 After days, weeks, months, years, decades and centuries hauling loose smelly shit Leo received a Certificate Of Merit and Achievement at an award ceremony.

 20.5 million political-social prisoners witnessed the event.

  Maija, Fujian, China

Fat party work unit leaders exclaimed to tumultuous applause, You Comrade Leo, carrier of the people’s glorious shit, have learned your humbling life lesson through re-education and reform. You learned the hard way. The hard way is the smart way.

You have reformed your thought and behavior in accordance with Confusion moral and ethical social principles. You are now a skeleton, an example of a good, wise and moral person. Congratulations. You may now return to society as a useful citizen.

Here’s a map of the Middle Kingdom, a pocketknife, a handful of rice and a free bottle of water.

  Survivors exhaled with joy. They celebrated his freedom with festive drinking, eating, dancing and tons of free shit. If it can happen to him, it can happen to us, said one of 20.5 million.

  Shouldering his bag Leo wandered out of the Gobi. It was hotter than hell and almost as expensive. It’s a long fucking walk and I lived to tell the tale. I am alive. Leo experienced freedom from anger and attachment with mindfulness.

 Walking, whispered Antonio Machado a Spanish poet, makes the road.

 Timeless metaphorical themes of love, hope, despair, treachery, revenge, betrayal, alienation, loneliness, boredom, loss, choices, consequences, morals, ethics, values, principles, free will vs. determinism, and abandonment coagulating with DNA in a cosmic soup struggled to find clean water, education and medicine expressing irony, symbolism, satire, comedy, weather and sex. 

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Maija, Fujian, China

Question Authority - Ice Girl

Chapter 4.

Leo carried buckets of night soil shit. It was the price he paid for quest-ioning Authority.

  -why, do we have to read Mao’s little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

  -because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

  -this shit stinks.

  -here, said Authority. Carry some more.

  After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

  He didn’t suffer from PTDS. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic.

  He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus. He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth.

He did not attend pre-9/11 flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

  Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese.

  He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

 I am a camera, he said to Rita, cutting ice. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It's the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

  It’s all small stuff, said Rita. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details.

Checkmate, said Death. I only make one move and it’s always correct.

In Cadiz, Spain a well-dressed bald man with gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag to collect his dog’s shit off Roman cobblestone. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

  Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”                                              

  “History.”

Ice Girl in Banlung