friday the 13th

The village of Sa near Sapa.

Small steps going down. Steep trails, dirt. She identifies wild plants on the hillside used for indigo colors in their clothing.

The wild terrain. Rising rice terraces where people harvest. People cut, thresh, stack of stalks and burn them. Isolated puffs of smoke dot the valley below rising green forests and mountains.

It’s a long simple home with a dirt floor, and bamboo walls. There are some wooden walls but wood is expensive. The home is divided into a kitchen on the left, main room and bedroom. The main room has a TV and DVD machine. Under the roof is a storage area.

Outside is a faucet for water, water buffalo pen, pig pen and writing pen. 

Indigo cloth dyed in a large vat hangs to dry along a wooden wall. Stacks of straw for winter feed wait. Twenty-five kilogram bags of rice in blue, white and orange plastic bags made in Indonesia are piled in a corner.

Sa's father returns with water buffalo. Her mother smiles.

We share a simple lunch prepared by one Sa’s three daughters. She is 19, a mother, a trek leader and speaks excellent English. Rice, tofu, and greens. 

The sky is Falling

On an edge of planet Earth spinning in a galaxy,

Countries adjusted advertising concepts of insecurity.

They sold Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Adventure and Surprise.

Consumers washed it down with a super-sized sugared sixteen-ounce big gulps.

Populations accepted multiple real and imaginary nightmares of unknown caloric proportions.

The sky is falling. Love is in the air. Run for cover.

Really? 

 The Children's Hospital in Siem Reap has 22 beds in one room. They are full. They are filled with infants and children wearing air hoses in their nose. They suffer from pneumonia and tuberculosis. This is common in Cambodia. A parent holds a tiny hand.

 I.C.U. has five beds. They are full.

400 mothers cradling kids wait to see a nurse. The nurse can dispense five medicines. Cheap generic pain killers.

Life is a pain killer.

Two drugs are generic placeboes. The mothers are happy to get SOMETHING, anything. They have no knowledge about medicine.

One effective pill prescribed by a doctor costs $1.00. Parents need to buy 15. 

$15.00 is a fortune. Out of the question. Parents accept cheap ineffective drugs.

Parents need a miracle.

How much does a miracle cost?

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.

hello june

Goodbye May. Pound out your bright beautiful future. 

A Turkish man with a hammer. Gypsy music. 

Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone.

We began in India. Wandering no name alleys, streets, villages, rivers, valleys, mountains.

Darkness whispers, Who's there?

I received a reprieve from death row one night in Vietnam. My sentence was commuted to life without parole. A South American writer said parole means speech, word, a word of honor.

Parole is the condition under which you are free, with a language and human awareness.

Human freedom is unconditional.

Memory fades into living color remembered with absolute infinity. Desperate hands fold across heaving chests, feeling abandoned sucking air injuries. Stop the bleeding. Start the breathing. 

It rained yesterday. It was long sweet and slow and heavy. Streets became quiet. Everyone huddled in corners of their mind. 

Why is nature so cruel, they cried. Nature laughed, Hahaha. Human tears fell like rain. Tears flooded their memory of nothing.

Today the sun came out. It was hot. Humans cried, Why is nature so cruel. Nature laughed.

 

Scientists say old memory is not destroyed, but that many copies of the same memory could exist in parallel.

They say your memory is only as good as your last memory rather than based on your initial memory.

Speak memory.

“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses
from the top of his wall.
A thorn from that is still in my palm,
working deeper.” - Rumi 

Deeper

‘Quick! Into the tunnels!’

They sat sweltering, crying, still. Hearing the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron napalm canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went 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, save all the crying and wounded after all the foreign devils packed and left, fleeing in terror as peasants streamed down from the mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking all the oceans in their creation myth, draining lands of blood, driving them into the sea. A blue green sea danced red.

This easing down of their voice flowing between crumbling sand, crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but the sound of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness in life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction and this fiction created their memory.