Spirit Dream

Spirit dream rides clouds. Ancestor ghost eats incense. Feeling slow and clean in the temple zone.

Leo discovered new Chinese ink, stone and brushes. He remembered Mr. Li, his calligraphy teacher in Utopia.

How to stand.

How to hold the brush.

How to rub the ink stone inside the black oval with water.

How to caress the brush and black ink along an edge.

Create simple strokes.

Be the ink, be the brush, be the paper.

Museum

The Saigon Museum is filled with glorious death defying historical struggles: wars, artifacts, diagrams, maps, tanks, planes, final assault plans, old cars used to haul the dead dying wounded and ammunition, statues of men making pistols, old medical equipment, typewriters for propaganda material, flags, posters, pamphlets, a burning monk in 1963 as Kodachrome blazes his life, villages, corpses, soldiers, politicians, dog tags, gas masks, knives, guns, tools, radios, helmets, baskets, pots and pans, shoes, shirts and skeletons.

Papier mâché people exhort the masses, Independence or Death!

They’ve traded illusions of independence and freedom for a one-party Socialist state filled with greed, corruption, nepotism and economic opportunity.

Life - contradictions and paradoxes.

Where does the artificial end and the real begin, asked a blind beggar.

Thich Quang Duc

The Amputee  - Knife Sharpener

After eating noodles in a cold alley, a man, 60, remembering how wars and hard survival ages humans, sat sharpening a knife for a woman customer redefining steel. No left foot. He rested his curled leg stump on a boot.

In the afternoon he walks past with a shuffling gait. He’s wearing a green fatigue shirt, floppy hat, motorcycle helmet and carrying his worn red plastic bag of simple tools. I know his truth not his story. A landmine or a stray bullet?

His left boot is a discarded war object and split down the front.

It is brutally hot. The sun is behind him. How does he feel? Where is he going? Home for lunch and rest? Looking for more dull edges.

I am always walking, he said. I stop, find work, sit, sharpen an edge, get small money, put away my tools, put on my boot and walk. I eat noodles or rice on the street. 

I walk and work until dark. Then I go home. Home is where they have to take you in. I am a storyteller with tools for sharpening life’s dull imperfections.

I am surrounded by amputees, he said. They approach me on their crutches, their hands out. Without legs they wheel themselves down the street on little trolleys low to the ground truth.

____

A one-armed young man wears an old blue baseball hat. He sees local businessmen approaching. They wear fresh pressed white shirts, leather shoes, and pressed pants with shiny belt buckles.

He takes off his hat. Holds it out. It is empty. They ignore him. He puts it on his arm stump, runs his good hand through his black hair, puts on his hat and moves down the street.

I am in the army now, he said. An army of the legless armless physically and emotionally wounded forgotten humans. They know you and you know them. 

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

October by Rita

Affect your environment. Do not let your environment affect you.

Take the blue line … celebrate red ink with a Chopin fountain pen … see how the ink bleeds on new paper … how it feels, this dancing wind song, point and line … take a line for a walk.

Hanoi air is cool before dawn when the landlord’s dog trapped in a long cement tunnel howls at 3:30 a.m. The dog is an apt metaphor for residents trapped in long cement tunnels called home sweet home.

Elsewhere the canine is grilled and basted on a spit at low heat allowing the flavor and juices to penetrate meat for a family feast.

Someone passing through is awake seeing stars, hearing the shriek of fruit bats returning to roost in long green palm branches gathering membranes, silent before dawn amplifiers at Lenin Park sing heavy DUTY patriotic songs with yellow grumbling bulldozers moving dirt, filling in lakes, drowning algae, plankton and fish habitats before the Party Leader plugs in her cassette machine to play aerobic madness in orange light before brainwashed human-birds preen ruffled dream feathers, screw their darling, feed incense to the dead, turn on plasma televisions, cook rice, fire up motorcycles and well before women sweep leaves from night’s tears.

Who will write the history of tears?

Free air raptors and Finch, destined to die in a bamboo cage, sing. Bats sleep in deep green leaves near the balcony of a narrow Hanoi home.

I don’t remember the century. Maybe it was The Glorious Year of Reconstruction.  Men hammered, shoveled and hauled Hanoi toward a glorious future.

Night stars dream before dawn hearing heavy machines at the park. Workers truck rocks to fill in the lake. Old Russian bulldozers shove piles of granite along paths creating new boundaries in citizens’ imagination limiting their curiosity and freedom. The ceaseless mechanical rumbling of machines sounds like a broken Teutonic alarm clock with geologic earthquake Richter intensity.

Echoes of crashing, tumbling granite stones shatters stillness. Reconstruction machines have a schedule, a deadline, a force of progressive development.

Inside bamboo an invisible scripter blends into a natural environment weaving a thread with unconditional love. Music perforates starlight silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

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

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

Sapa by Tran

Sapa is high and deep. Wabi-sabi - quiet simplicity with beautiful imperfections and sanctuary.

It is a small mountain town in northwest Vietnam. Population is 15,000 not including water buffalo, chicks and pigs. V chicks come in on the weekends to hustle and fuck visiting male V piggy pygmies flashing cash. The swine flu stuff fat faces and buy cheap foreign plastic junk.

The water buffalo labor in rice paddies before humans plant. The rest of the year they graze and make baby water buffalos. Picture a buffalo on the American nickel. They are genetically related from a cousin who wandered North across Siberia then East over the Bering Strait 40,000 years ago, migrating south for their winter vacation.

Mountain air is a deep awareness. Orientation in the mountain hamlet means a blue lake, white fog, empty sky, wild mind visions and a hotel room near a bus station for $10 a night.

Room 402. No hot water. Clean sheets and a thick comforter. See Eastern mountains, sunrise, rolling clouds. Paint a Zen watercolor.

Hmong, Red Dzao and Tay women sell their living art, belts, beads, bags, detailed embroidery.

Thread your memory.

Tribal migrations arrived from China, Tibet and Laos across mountains, valleys, and rivers to live in the mountains. Some moved south to farm agricultural settlements in the hunter-gather stage of evolution. Animal husbandry. Simple bamboo and wood homes if they have money. Expensive concrete details are missing from this picture of habitat development.

Kind persistent kids and adult have mastered a direct sales approach. BUY FROM ME. You look at my things. They break the ice with excellent English.

In Cambodia we break ice with a rusty hammer, said Rita.

Kids learned language from invading European barbarians. White ghosts. The French were first. Where are you from? What is your name? Where do you go today? Want to see my village? 

I wander past V restaurants. Bored Vietnamese girls trim greens, slouch in chairs, sleep with their arms curled around their head, munch junk snacks, chat with friends and digit cell phones. They drive the local economy. They drive each other crazy.

The central market zone is a deep ramshackle concrete structure with broken slabs of stone and steep slippery mossy stone steps. This ageless, timeless human community of interaction and multiple languages is a la fresco Tibetan villages. Fresh clear clean cool air is a pleasant shift after noxious Hanoi fumes. Rural village life, air, attitudes and energies are filled with tears and rivers of loss.

Below mist mountains day tripping V tourist sheep pull their weekend rolling suitcase carts. They are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance, screw play girls and buy foreign junk. They are an invading commercial army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes.

Blindness speaks every language.

Ignoring local girls and their handicrafts they run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. A woman slows down in her long march toward consumerism to glance at a Hmong girl’s offerings, a handmade belt, colorful wrist wearable or a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl. Once the woman slows down she is surrounded by a chorus of voices, Buy From Me, Buy From Me. The woman dies.

Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork Vietnamese junk dealers. Watches, cheap imitation pants, shirts, and knickknacks. The eyes of Hmong youth scan customers at 6:05 a.m. offering elaborate colors and fabrics.

Sapa street theatre is filled with characters looking for a script.

Sleep deprived school kids in uniformed mass hysteria stagger uphill to a bright yellow building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a huge ceremonial leather skin drum. Drums remain an integral part of communication in Vietnam. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs fuck in front of the granite Catholic Church where tourists gather for a memorial photo shoot. Local Vietnamese women marketing images and memories prowl with cameras they rent by the day. They poke and prod lost, found and blind women, husbands, boys and girls into manageable groups for the eternal moment.

The decisive moment they remember forever. This moment is framed on their family neon altar with a flaming plastic red votive candle. An ancestor’s faded black and white monochrome image sees their son or daughter’s image with a white church and green mountains and wonders  ... Where is that, I’ve never seen it before, did you leave me here alone freezing with no one to feed me, I thought so, you will pay for this you ungrateful selfish child, my ghost will haunt your dreams with a dull machete  ... Caught in time.

Frozen alive, here we are, she laughed to her city friends when they gathered for tea in Hanoi. See a church. I am in front of it.

A blond European tourist wearing rubber sandals walks through the scene. Her t-shirt says, Love My Bones. She is a specialist in marrow transplants at the Children’s Hospital in Everywhere, Asia.

She smiles at every stranger along her magical story time line on steep stone trails above rushing rivers in the stream of life thinking,

when you smile at people

they don’t know you

and they talk about the smiling stranger

as they walk through nature where they live

where they are

and their walk is shorter,

or they smile back remembering others

who traveled slowly

greeting people like friends and strangers on their journey.

She was so friendly, the one with Love My Bones.

Is that what it said. Your translation skills on the fly are improving and life is so short we will smile more. Let’s practice.

Yellow sunflowers paint Van Gogh fields where water buffalo graze.

At 6:16 a.m. Vietnamese tourists pour into Sapa. They file off the bus wearing red cotton baseball hats designed for the Great Union Hotel sprawling across green hills above the church. They are a forlorn concoction of exotic creatures traveling in bunches, like overripe bananas.

The economy class of style, luxury, and pizzazz-a-lama meets the Hmong hard at work, pushing their handicrafts. Prussian blue indigo spins colors, handmade rainbows, skirts, and aprons. Blue-black tribes and flowering ethnology sings memory threads on their looms of time.

A heavy rain decorates the lake all night. Ripples dance from the center. Water echoes. 402 overlooks a mirror. Above the lake forested mountains with high granite ridges climb into clouds. Fog, water and low clouds rumble over peaks and down valleys bringing rain, fog and mist. Falling water creates whirlpools on a mirror with a steady mist. The air is clean and pure.

A three-hour road trip to the Bac Ha market south of Sapa is famous for the Flower Hmong’s colorful clothing. It’s a splendid wild nature ride up, down, through narrow mountain passes with zero visibility inside thick cold fog.

It’s pouring in Bac Ha. The market is flooded with rainbow locals huddled under blue tarps buying and selling. We return to Sapa inside clouds as twilight sweeps peaks into deep valleys hearing roaring waterfall rivers.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged