Ang

Way of the empty hand.

Be inwardly humble and outwardly gentle, said Ang, a Hanoi student lawyer with a 5th degree Dan black belt. She was small fast and deadly. A quick tiger without a motorcycle license.

We rode around Hanoi. I knew the city and showed her diversions.

It’s strange having a foreigner give me directions in my town, she yelled into the wind as we negotiated a dusty section of congested road works for a new subway while speeding south near Lenin Park.

Take it easy baby I whispered as we swerved through a phalanx of cycles, cars, trucks and bike spokes.

We stopped near a lake for iced java. Hanoi has many lakes. The Vietnamese coffee comes from the Central Highlands. It is high quality. Vietnam is the world’s second biggest coffee exporter after Brazil.

Hanoi, like Beijing, is the conservative cold capital. It was bombed during the war. Hanoi survived the Chinese, French, Americans and Vietnamese. War by proxy like now elsewhere. Same-same but different. Saigon is the new young economic vibrant city where anything goes 24/7.  Beijing-Hanoi. Shanghai-Saigon.

My name means heart in Vietnamese, said Ang.

I am a Bui Doi, I said.

I know what that means, she said and she wasn’t laughing when she said it.

Dust collector whispered Tran.

An old man with heavy ropes eating his shoulder skin, tendons and bones pulled a wooden cart filled with bags of cement down the street. His rhythm, cadence and rubber sandals slapping pavement burned his energy doing his daily labor inside the people’s labyrinth surrounded by horns, cycles, cars, bikes, push carts and pedestrians as he strained forward, shoulder muscles bouncing, flexing, extending his action, thick thigh muscles grinding his momentum like a shark always forward.

Iceman arrived with his cart and long crystal blocks. He sawed ice into manageable chunks and carried bags of frozen water into the cafe. Light glimmered crystals.

A man in a white government shirt stood on the sidewalk picking his teeth with a sliver of wood demonstrating his ability to eat food.

It’s a slow gradual invisibility, said a witness at life’s moveable feast.

Today would be a good day to be a kite, I said to Ang.

You’re crazy, no one wants to be a kite, she said and I said, Maybe you’d rather be the string. She didn’t think this was funny.

Sure, I said, If you were the kite and others the string they would, could, should, control you, as a willing victim of circumstances outside your control with no free will. You’d have no responsibility, flying free.

Yes. I like having no responsibility except for myself.

You’d have free choice with amazing potential, I said stringing her along with The Analysis of Consequence.

Teach me something about photography she ordered in a domineering tone because she was small powerful AND angry with repressed regret because her mom abandoned her for economic reasons to work in a town 150 clicks north so Ang went to school to be a lawyer, to hopefully immigrate to England someday and attending daily karate practice with displaced aggression while taking care of her spoiled whining 11-year-old brother then her older sister had a baby and it meant more housework for Ang as a domestic servant being younger so she was frustrated at the mean dirty tricks life played on her.

I have a camera on my phone, she said. Advice?

Move slowly. Incorporate your karate skills into street movement. Practice. Be. See. Shoot a lot. Always have your camera ready. Anticipate. Try new angles and see geometric patterns of light. Paint with light. Prowl the streets. Ignore the main event. Focus on the spectators. Shoot through things and get close enough to touch your subject, dance around your subject, use RAW format.

I grabbed my Leica, got down on hands and knees angling between bamboo chairs, framed, composed, exhaled and squeezed the imperceptible impeccable shutter. The image of bamboo lined close to the eye, depth of field, legs, and blurred feet. Visual metaphors. See?

Yes, thanks.

It’s like karate or sex, I said. Practice. Do it 10,000 times until you get it.

A man walked by. He saw a foreigner with a local girl sitting on a bench near the Lake of Swords. Milk him, he joked. Ang walked over and severed his spinal cord in a blue flash of beauty and dexterity. He crumpled, dying instantly.

She sat down. That’ll teach him. A blind man with a cart collected the body. Physicians at Peoples’ Hospital #4 dissected the cadaver to recycle organs. Where do the eyes go, asked Doctor Death. In the eye bag, said a blind nurse.

See Beauty and Cruelty without hope or fear with a sense of humor, said Tran balancing on his strong leg in deep shadows.

What is the purpose of Beauty, asked Rita. Beauty held up her mirror, See for yourself flaneur.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Babbling Tongues

Same-Same But Different screamed from tourist t-shirts. Same-same for miles along shady streets inside narrow alleys babbling Chinese and Vietnamese mixed with grilled meat, ground java and motto cycle mayhem.

Where are you from, said a Hanoi motorcycle maniac at the intersection of Yes, No, & Maybe.

It depends, whispered Devina, a genius disguised as an extra in The Divine Comedy of infinite unlimited proportions.

Dialects of babbling tongues prayed to establish a connection, a bonding through need, want and desire. Tongues played on the sympathy of strangers. Tongues lashed a cerebral cortex. Strangers suffered from spiritual poverty and guilt begging fatigue.

Everyone had their hand out. I am from heaven, said scripter. Mr. Motorman expected a place name like Europe, America, Australia. Heaven? Yes, Where is it, I pointed into a blue sky. There.

It’s about trust here, said a Frenchman with gardening experience. I know foreigners who’ve lived here ten years and they still express reservations about who they can, do trust, it’s a problem, be careful.

A Vietnamese sex worker and money-loving predator surviving in a mean old world with a moist tight vagina in Saigon took her European trick out for a sushi dinner. She said, The perfect world is to be American, married to a Japanese and eating Chinese food.

You can trust maybe 10%.

Her dark eyes contained world secrets. She was a great French kisser.

Where did you learn to kiss like that, asked her exhausted lover escaping a lip lock.

From the French, they occupied our country a girl needs to make a living harvest my bush caveman. Open wide here comes the one-eyed snake.

She knew how to milk a throbbing purple snake. She could read but couldn’t write. In her line of work literacy wasn’t essential. Raising her hips with pleasure her fingers traced an imaginary alphabet on his skin in darkness.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Burma Isotope U-235

An emaciated bald mad broken toothed male junkie in relapse approached me on a Hanoi street.

He was on his personal quest for salvation. I am from North Korea. I spent seven years as political-economic prisoner in Burma, he postulated after dawn prowling Old Quarter needing a permanent change of address with no zip looking for someone to talk at. He was a lost one.

He was the star of his reality entertainment program. He blathered a blue streak. He was naked with belief and madness.

He ranted, I tried to sell the Burma generals nuclear arms from NK. I was this close to closing the deal, making a peace sign, They need to protect themselves from the big bad hostile world. They are paranoid idiots. Anyway, I have friends in NK. Hey, business is business. They sold me the goods. I paid cash.

In Burma I got mixed up with the wrong people. Schemers and deceivers. They lied. They cheated. They played me for a fool. They stole all my fissionable material and locked me up. I had everything: triggers, U-235, isotopes, plutonium, uranium, plans, diagrams, designs, centrifuges  ... the works  ... it was the full course meal  ... you have no idea  ... you just don’t get on a plane with this stuff.

One Burmese general’s wife wears $50,000,000 worth of gold and precious stones when she takes a shit. Can you believe that?

He continued: You need to go by boat from NK to Sing Some More. In Burma they made me sing in prison. I was in the choir singing for my supper for seven years. My voice is shot. I was lucky I wasn’t shot. They tried to shoot me out a cannon. I got stuck in THE SYSTEM. Un-fucking believable, I should write a book called Seven Years in Burma. Do you have a pen and paper. I need to get it down before it evaporates like morning dew.

How did you get out?

I became an informer rat. I took care of people. I developed relationships. Relationships and timing is everything in life., I bought and sold information. I sang for my supper. I did hard time. The nuclear stuff was worth millions on the black market.

I was born in a black market, stall #101. My mother was appointed to have me. I made a killing in Iraq. Literally. Mercenary work. Black ops. I went to N.K. I made connections with the Ministry of Fear and Nuclear Ambitions.

I worked. I paid. I got the shit out. Then it collapsed like a house of democratic chad cards in Burma. I played the Joker. It was wild. The Burmese said, Show us your hand. I did. They cut it off with a rusty machete. He held up his ticket stub.

He was beyond wild. He had his remaining hand out looking for compassion in the form of an exit permit.

An empty hand holds everything.

He lived on Dream Street at noon o’clock where a dusty Vietnamese grandfather clock strikes 12 inside a deep black gravitational void. Bong-bong-bong-bong. 

He jabbered his shadow illusion away past same-same travel tour shops, same-same bored boom-boom girls waiting for same-same tourists offering them same-same cash for same-same skin merchandise and same-same sleeping motorcycle hustlers.

He was the blues personified. He had a permanent case of the walking blues. He pleaded quiet desperation with anyone who’d listen. He was trapped in Hanoi with people hustling to eat. Hustling to dream. Girls hustling to fuck Mr. ATM cash flow. Hustlers hustling happy meal to happy meal needed a bailout from IMF.

Life’s karmic wheel of birth and rebirth spun him in circles.

Conversations love distractions and you can’t step in the same river twice.

It’s not the same river and you are not the same person.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Die Twice

Before going to Cambodia I discovered a Saigon museum named for Uncle Ho.

He’s the patron saint of Diehard Marxist Mania. It is a popular location for virginal couples posing for wedding photographs using expansive interior halls and sweeping stairways. Happy grooms escorted joyful brides in rented sparkling jewelry trailing gowns, frozen on stairs, in corridors, on window ledges. Jump!

In a dusty display case along a forgotten corridor were piles of medals, stamps, currencies and Zippo lighters. A Zippo was ubiquitous among soldiers with engraved inscriptions. One lighter said:

There are two times you face death.

Once when you’re born and once when you face death.

Hala, a Muslim girl I knew in Lhasa said, There are people who are born laughing and people who are born crying. I was born laughing.

Parked outside the museum was a U.S. Air Force F-16, ambulance, jeep, Huey helicopter and the tank North Vietnamese forces commanded to flatten gates and liberate the South. Rows of antique French cars used to ferry the wounded and ammunition around Saigon during the war collected dust in meticulous gleaming historical automotive fashion.

Hexagram 34 - The Power of the Great

Perseverance furthers. Ask what is right. Be in harmony. Movement. Not stubborn. Yielding quietly preserving work to remove resistance.

Spiral Foundation

In Hue the Healing The Wounded Heart shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization in Nepal and Vietnam.

            Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love.

At the SPIRAL workshop they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. All net proceeds from handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries.

Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

Hue Help, an educational charity, works with an orphanage, mobile health care units and supports volunteers creating educational vocational projects. They work with the visually challenged. They have three schools providing supplementary education.

The Vietnamese attitude is to be perfect in school so they fear failure, said the short-term British volunteer coordinator.

How do you survive here? I said. Always incorporate a condom in your lesson plan, hide your money and trust only 10% of the people.

The Hue Embroidery Center on the bank of the Perfume River has a fine art gallery.

*

The House of the Artist at Night with 12 Emotions

30 breaths whisper leaves changing color

invisible dialects dance mysteries

open heart women do embroidery

30 Japanese tourists in wheelchairs with guidebooks

behind a white haired woman in a rickshaw dawns attention span

30 single-minded awareness diamond minded white butterflies flutter

Perfume River flows as women laugh at unknown possibilities

30 singing girls on 30 bikes under 30 trees on 30 paths see

30 lightning bolts escape 30 clouds inside 30 central nervous systems. three o boy o

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

lanterns

Hoi An women unload the night catch of screaming silver fish into baskets, weighing, selling, slicing and frying protean. I wander through the market smelling fish, meat, vegetables, inspecting fruit in broken light.

I am Lucky Foot. Wherever I am I bring good luck to universal money exchangers, manicure salon girls, banana woman, schools kids, tailors, cloth sellers and craggy faced Dan the local boat captain who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the war.

I bring good fortune to the 125cc motorman, water seller girl, barber, high-heeled sandal seller, massage love sock girls, noodle mama and rent-a-life companies. HCE – Here Comes Everybody.

A girl searches Tailor Town for magic silk, linen, cotton cloth and an invisibility cloak. Everywhere every day everyone on their quest meets the old woman with a basket sitting outside the cloth market discovering the exact threads they need.

Everyone has a quest. Some have quests for air, water, food, sex, shelter, clothing and money. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs feeds the sheep. Someone else owns the grass.

I stop at a salon. I ask for a pedicure. The women are shocked. They are familiar strangers. Everyone smiles and laughs. Ha they chatter in musical frequencies. The old snake wants to shed his skin.

It’s good to know all the walking, treading movement and sole memories are so easily erased as curling epidermis falls away.

How slow can you travel?

You discover ice in the market. It is a floating world of light and shadows.

Ukiyo-e.

In the old town past the Japanese bridge is a serene shady street lined with trees, homes and shops. An abandoned temple once used as a school is jammed with jumbled desks and dusty forgotten Communist party political posters. It is now a workshop for bamboo lantern production.

Hoi An is famous for circular red bamboo lanterns. Their reflections line the river at night and decorate streets and homes. Boys carry long bamboo poles into a courtyard, set them on a chopping block and split them lengthwise with a machete. They cut long pieces into ten-inch sections and split them into the thin fragments. Three women chat while shaving the narrow green bamboo pieces.

Boys drill holes in the pieces using a simple punch machine. Girls and women assemble wooden lacquered bases for tops and bottoms by wiring pliable bamboo staves into bases to shape and curve frames with circular dialogue.

A young girl does her homework using a chair for a table as her mother works. An old frail woman arranged lines of fresh lacquered staves to dry in the sun. Every generation has their role to play.

A boy loops piles of round bamboo skeletons on his bike for merchants who’ll wrap diaphanous red cloth skins around frames.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged