Li - Ice Girl

Chapter 16.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I am H’mong. I speak excellent English.

I finished nine years of school in my village and learned what I really needed to know on the street. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. I use really a lot. As someone said, “You don’t want to let school interfere with your education.” 

Tourists visit Sapa. It’s in the mountains close to China. I’ve never been to China. I met a boy named Leo who used to live there as he passed through life as we all do. He said he had a crappy job there.

Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. Plan the dream and dream the plan. 

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC or Bang Cock. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese stuff. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh because you can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses 2) they wear bright red tour baseball hats so they don’t get lost 3) they travel in packs like scared animals 4) they stay in local government hotels and eat at local Vietnamese places 5) they ignore you.

No, I’m talking and I speak excellent English about the foreigners. We, my friends and I, who work the street selling, politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. It’s such a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. Tourists find and travelers discover is what I say.

Li

They have a vacation schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? They eat, sleep, wander around and maybe take a trek to a local village and then, POOF! like magic they disappear. 

And then the tourist machine spits out more tourists and visitors for us to sell to, pester and offer treks to our village.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels (H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses) charge a tourist $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get 10 people. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy only gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet them the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They sit and talk with people. They take some snaps.

Then we walk trails through pristine forests, through rivers, along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal direct with the tourists and trekkers.

I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman. Ha, ha.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza. With cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

  It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical viewfinder box. What’s up with that?

Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live and work, play and evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don't leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa overnight. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than going all the way home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It’s simple. Beds and toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work.

I’m a great little trek leader. I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do. Nature is my teacher. 

Life is good in Sapa. See you in the next life.

Ice Girl in Banlung

The Yellers - Ice Girl

Chapter 15.

I sat on the garden balcony in Hanoi one morning.  

I cleaned The Dream Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door and they have an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids, like the man yelling at his infant until the kid balls. Tears stream until mother rescues her darling from the emotional abuse. Yelling affects their self-esteem and their wellbeing. Children will learn how to reject this yeller.

They, in turn will grow & learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They will be passive and then turn on the yell.

As they age they turn off. They turn off their ears. Their ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reaction recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to his parents, a generation raised with fear and intimidation and suspicion and insecurity and poverty and informers and empty promises and empty hope and loud authority voices. Some voices are real. Others are nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife.

Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with the infants. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You raise them to yell with the best of them.

They yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep cackling crows breaking palm branches sending shivers down your spineless self pity wearing regret and anger and manifesting fear inside narrow tight lives under long florescent lights shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

They will cremate you and take your photo to the artist who will memorize your face with graphite.

Generations stare at your sad stoic frozen face offering fruit and water. Survivors burn incense so your spirit has something to eat. It will not be angry, yelling, demanding and pleading. Feed me. Ancestors live in fear of the dead.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, then words, phrases, and sentences called talk. They grow louder until achieving decibels required by the living. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, boss, lover, or stranger - will yell at kids and they will ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller will yell again, a little louder. No answer. 

I wait for them to get their yell going. Louder says listener cowering inside silence.

After I’ve made them yell three times I will answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

Finally, to teach them a lesson I will answer. Softly. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with the other yellers around them. I reject them for yelling at me. I am easily distracted. I nurture chaos and entropy. Ah, the glare of bright artificial ancestor passion for pain and tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, ‘Give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000eyes.

I am an infinite ocean of wisdom.    

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell and make racket and talk over each other and don’t listen and yell louder to be heard and others block them out or ignore them completely and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas.

He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents which is how they evolved into this higher intelligent life form. To breed or not to breed, that is the quest-ion.

The other day Leo passed one of those narrow minded little hovels guarded by doors and rusting sliding gates. Narrow alleys are filled with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in the alley using round perforated compressed coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, stones, creating a

brave new world

with Marxist methods of production: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant, and stick.

In the street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, and kids playing fast and loose near women selling bananas from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog. Splayed legs. Glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from their shops. Sewing ladies held a needle and thread in air, a woman chopping greens held a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red cartoon balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother held her future yeller offspring - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beeped impatiently trying to negotiate through the crowd to get home to families, food, television and their beloved pet.

An old thin man emerged from his small dark utilitarian space where millions live in the dark can’t see the dirt and hide from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, lifting it into air. It draped. He resembled a hunter holding a wild hare after canines flushed it running fast filled with fear, afraid and free.

He was in shock standing there, holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool on the street surrounded by angry confused surprised voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his brain saying something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery so he stood there holding the legs and gently laid the dog closer to the gutter as the dog’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion returning to his dark interior space.

Inside every family’s deep dark space is a main room and altar for dead relatives, candles, fruit, and burning incense.

The black and white and color images reminded Leo of the Chinese artist in Maija, the poor pig village near the Fujian, university in China where he lived for two years riding his bike across forested hills, up and down narrow dirt back roads, watching butterflies mate in dust, old people planting, harvesting, threshing rice, women lugging piles of white cauliflower to market in bamboo baskets suspended on poles and zooming down long small tight dusty paths past athletic sweat shop shoe factories filled with morose girls and hunched over women threading clacking Butterfly machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until he reached a narrow street to sit drinking Fujian green tea with a man in his shop. 

Further up the hill were red wooden shops with appliances, market stalls, street food, electrical stores and hacking butchers. In a small mud and brick place was an artist. His job was drawing pictures of dead people. 

After someone died a relative gave him a common small black and white image, the kind from 1949 when the country declared itself free, independent and democratic. Benevolent Chairman Mao (our grandfather leader bless his heart) smiled at the masses before ordering peasants, “Eat Grass.”

38 million died of starvation.

Their tired B&W image is used throughout life in documents for residence, work, school and party politics.

The people had the Three Iron Rice Bowls. A guaranteed living space, guaranteed work unit, and guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal.

Everyone was treated the same, wore the same clothing, said the same thing and followed the leader like kids playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

The bent nail gets hammered down! yelled a Chinese teacher next door to Leo’s classroom. 80 students applauded.

The Maija artist accepted the photo from a grieving relative and set up his easel. Using a magnifying glass he memorized her face. A pencil captured an 8x10 likeness.

On the chipped plaster walls were examples of his work: peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives and young and old Pioneer communist members with tight red scarves knotting their necks, suffocating their passion. 

Today he sketched an old unsmiling stoic woman, a sad resigned peasant. She suffered. She’d suffered at the hands of the nationalists then the communists then the new economic corrupt greedy revolutionaries.

She suffered the indignities of old age.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung on the wall near red streaks of paint inside his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed its feelers together. 

An old man with an emaciated skeleton face and paper-thin arms carefully opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand. He dispersed this into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. Leo shared tea watching the artist work. The likeness was perfect. The tea was delicious with an acidic after burn.

     These images decorate family altars. Dusty images rest in city temples. Death is a big deal. Ancestor worship = fear of ghosts.

     Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge all the yelling from the talking monkeys? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes. On anniversary death days they meet all the other ancestors inside narrow alleys where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicious liquids drain into punctured cement holes flowing along narrow passageways slanted toward the middle.      

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee to address family noise. ‘It’s come to our attention dear comrades, dear people, dearly beloved family and friends...that we have a communication issue here in the neighborhood.’

     ‘Silence! We are trying to sleep a long peaceful sleep. Leave us be. Shut the fuck up.’

  Years later in Hanoi a woman commented to five million friends, here I am in Sapa. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

  A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip-flops walked past posers. Her t-shirt read, Love My Bones. She is a marrow transplant specialist.

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

Sapa, Vietnam - Ice Girl

Chapter 13.

After Saigon, Leo walked to Sapa in northwest mountains.

  Talking monkey tourists from Hanoi are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance/screw and buy cheap Chinese plastic products, said Mo, 10, H’mong cloth seller. They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes.

They run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore us.

  A woman tourist slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at Mo’s work: a handmade belt, a colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than Mo.

  She’s surrounded by a chorus, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

  The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers selling fake watches, cheap pants, shirts, hats and knickknacks.

  Eyes scan colors, fabrics and faces.

  A park has baby red roses. A dusty historical statue stares at brackish fountain water. Six Red Dzao women talk with bags and threaded samples spread on the ground.

  “Do you want to buy from me?” said one smiling with gold teeth.

  “Yes. I want to buy the mountain.” Leo pointed to the rising green western forest, steel gray granite slabs, deep shaded valleys, and gray clouds skimming peaks around high deep edges.

  “Ok,” she said. “I will sell you the day mountain for 10,000 and the night mountain for 10,000.”

  “Ok. It’s a deal.” They laughed.

  Red communist scarfed school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

  Two big brown dogs fuck on the street in front of the church where tourists gather for a photo shoot.

Local Vietnamese women armed with cameras rented by the day selling images, memories and dreams poke and prod women, husbands, boys and girls into manageable groups for the moment.

The decisive moment they will remember forever.

Memories of their life will be framed on a family alternative votive candle altar near burning incense feeding, appeasing dead hungry ancestral ghosts.

  Caught in time.

  Frozen alive.  

  Possible signs of intelligent life in Sapa.

  Rumor control reports. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

Leo Walked to Saigon - Ice Girl

Chapter 7.

He met a woman’s storyline.

  When I was twenty I packed a bag and crossed the border. I went to the capital. I met other Vietnamese girls and they helped me find a simple room in a house for $25 a month. We shared a common toilet and kitchen. We became friends. They were my first teachers about life in Cambodia.

  Always look your best and wear high heels. They make you look taller. Men like tall girls. Always negotiate their offer. Negotiate means talk more. Get the most you can. Save it. Let them do what they want with you. Many will be rough and try to hurt you because they think you belong to them. They bought you. They hate their wives and will take it out on you. Women are only objects, things to be abused. Learn to be passive. Accept what happens. Close your eyes, pretend you feel pleasure and learn to close your heart. Close it tight. Don’t become soft and weak and open it for anyone. The only pain you will feel is physical. It will go away. We have doctors who understand our life and help us. You can choose to be either a bargirl and entertain customers there or a taxi girl. They go to homes and apartments. They make more money but they service more clients. Always give Tan her cut or she will throw you out.

  My head spun from all this.

  One night I put on my best red and green dress. I applied makeup and went to the Hello bar with two girlfriends. It was loud and crowded with men and girls. We bought cheap drinks and sat at the bar. My friends introduced me to Miss Tan, the owner. Her diamond ring flashed. So you’re the new girl. Vietnamese? Yes.

  You can demand more money. Your skin is pale. Men will want you. You work here as a taxi girl. You go out, you come back. You give me 70%. If you cheat me I kill you. I know everything. Understand?

  Yes. We shook hands. Hers were soft. Get to work girls.

  A fat Khmer man sat down and offered to buy me a drink. He ignored my friends.

  Where are you from?

  Vietnam.

  I am from here. This is my country. I am a rich businessman. You are very beautiful.

  Thank you.

  How much for one hour?

  I played dumb. What do you mean?

  He laughed. Are you stupid? I said how much for an hour with you.

  I looked at my girlfriends. One raised her right eyebrow. Go for it.

  How much are you willing to pay?

  $50.00.

  This was the most money I’d ever heard of. I gambled. Make it $500 for one night. I’ll take good care of you all night long. Maybe you can help out my friends.

  He looked at them. Five hundred is easy money, he said. Let me make a call and have another drink first.

  Ok, take your time. He bought me a whiskey. He talked about making money, exploiting the poor, twisted business deals using connections, land grab property development. I pretended to be interested. It was getting late. I gambled. Time’s up, I said. Are you going to help my friends? If you want me it’s $500. All night.

  Yeah, yeah. He called someone. I have some chickens for you. He laughed and hung up. I have a place near here. Get me a taxi.

  We went through dark streets and stopped at a house. Inside were two older men, drinking. They looked at the girls, paired off and disappeared.

  I was a virgin and he was my first man. It hurt like hell, he was rough but I handled it and didn’t cry in front of him. I swallowed silent bitter tears. He fucked me all night. It was brutal.

  In the morning I could hardly walk. He paid me in cold hard cash. Five clean crisp hundreds. I couldn’t believe it. I gave Miss Tan her cut and she was very happy.

  The pain will pass, she said. Get used to it. I was in business. Easy. Turn on the charm, smile, dress up, be smart, gamble, be open to suggestions, don’t drink too much and be ready, willing and able. Negotiate. Be a passive machine. Close your heart. Pretend you’re somewhere else.

  That’s how I became a taxi girl. I was beautiful and tough.

  Before fucking a stranger I’d take a shower, come out, drop the towel so he could get an eyeful, throw a condom on the bed, lie down, open my legs close my eyes shut down my feelings and let him have his fun. I dressed his hard sausage in a sock. Easy money honey.

  They paid for my time using my body. I gave Miss Tan her a share. I learned about business. I learned how to gamble. Bet big, win big.

  For two years I worked hard and saved money. I sent money to my mother every month like a good daughter. I told her I worked in a hotel.

  Now I live in Ho Chi Minh City. I work as a cook and domestic servant. I wear round cigarette burn marks on my wrists. They are my internal-external permanent anger memories.

  I don’t know how to write so I told this story to a man I met while working as a domestic in a Saigon guesthouse. He was a good listener. I worked with another girl. She changed sheets and dumped trash. I cleaned the toilets by hand. I was sweeping the garden balcony on my first day and a stranger said hello. He was drinking water and smoking.

  Hi. I saw you downstairs. You were waiting for an interview for a job here. I was shocked. He knew too much. I kept sweeping.

  I needed a job.

  You have too much class for this place. Come up tonight and we can talk.

  Ok, I said. That’s how it started. Talking at night on the balcony away from the mean old street.

  After two days I was fired because the woman owner was jealous and pretended I couldn’t do the job. She figured I was hustling foreign men. I had plenty of that job experience.

  I took advantage of his kindness because it was a short-term fix. A woman needs fucking, emotional security and cash.

  I felt open and honest with him. One night on the balcony we talked and watched stars until 2 a.m. He listened to my story. Sometimes I cried remembering everything.

  We became friends and lovers for a week.

  We can’t stay here, he said. He rented a room nearby. A place where we could sleep together and I’d be safe until I found a place to stay.

  The first night together I felt shy. I undressed in the bathroom and took a shower. I put on my underwear and blouse, wrapped a towel around me and came out. My short black hair was wet.

  Low lights were yellow. Classical music came from his phone on the desk. He wore blue shorts. You are beautiful, he said.

  I curled next to him and we held each other. I have a scar from my son, and my left breast is smaller than the right one, I said.

  It’s ok, he said. I liked feeling his arms. He stroked my hair. I closed my eyes.

  We both wanted the same thing. I wanted him to take his time. He massaged my neck, tracing fingers along the edge of my shoulders. He kissed my neck, throat. His tongue was wet. I rolled onto my stomach. His fingers spread down my spine, kneading tissue. It felt good, warm muscles, touch, and all sensations.

  He shifted his weight over me massaging my back through my shirt. Strong and steady. He pushed my shirt up to touch my skin with his skin. I exhaled. His softness increased pressure across tight neck muscles, shoulder blades, down my lower back. He kissed my spine, sending shivers through me. His hands and tongue were magic. He took his time with me.

  I rolled over keeping the towel tight around me in a shy Vietnamese way.

  He rested his head on my chest. I can hear your heartbeat, he said. It is a strong drum. Thump, thump. My heartbeat was a solid percussion instrument. My good heart was open and receptive. It was a shy love.

  I held him like an infant, pressed close. I felt safe with him. I am a little girl, I whispered, tracing his back with my fingers. I love your hands, they are small and soft, he whispered. They were dancing elusive magic fingers. It was all touch, gentle, and soft, exploring, shy. Pure sensations.

  He opened my blouse and kissed my left nipple. His tongue felt hot and soft. He massaged my breast with his fingers. He caressed my right nipple with his tongue. My nipples were sensual points in his mouth. His fingers examined soft curves.

  Kissing my breasts he opened the towel and moved to my scar. I didn’t stop him. His fingers explored my belly, drifting lower until he found my hair, then my pubis. His fingers gently massaged my labia minora and found my clitoris. The little button.

  No, I gasped. No. My hips and thighs were on fire. I was afraid from past abuse and a man’s fast anger slamming into me. This felt gentle.

  I knew from long experience that once I started sex I couldn’t stop. It felt way too good even if it hurt a part of me.

  It’s ok, he whispered. I love touching you here.

  I was wet. His fingers gently rubbed my clitoris. Sensations of pure pleasure filled me with joy. I arched my hips. I took his hand and put it where I’d receive the most stimulation. I showed him how to massage me. I knew he was experienced in the act of love, just out of practice.

  Women want fucking.

  He slid his pants off. I found his hard penis and stroked it.

  Ah! That feels wonderful, he said. I massaged his penis, moving under his soft balls. He tongued my nipples rubbing my hard little clitoris. He slid a finger inside. I was so wet.

  I have a condom. Ok. He rolled it on. I took off my panties and opened my legs. He climbed on his wild horse.

  Slowly, I whispered, Slowly.

  My vagina yielded as he entered me. He sighed in relief feeling me contract taking him. He was big in me and it felt fantastic. Again. There’s nothing that pleases a woman more than a big, thick, throbbing, meaty, hot penis. Take it from me and I’ve taken a lot of them in my time. Every time all the time. All sizes, shapes and colors. In my vagina, mouth, anus, on my breasts, between my breasts, on my face, across the scar on my belly.  Face up face down on my knees with my face buried in a pillow, raised on my elbows begging for it in perpetual heat. Some fucks are short some are long. I fuck for a living. A girl has to make a living.

  We established a fine smooth rhythm. He paid attention to my body, how I moved to absorb him, how I showed him what I needed and how I needed it. He was a good patient lover and I was his teacher.

  I kept him from moving fast. I knew if he got crazy from the sensation, he’d explode before I was ready. It was all about timing. He was deep inside and I was all around him, arms, legs, hips, everything was his to take, taste, savor and enjoy. He kissed my small breasts. I was hot.

  I grabbed his small ass pushing him deeper into me. His penis throbbed. He tried to get up on his elbows but I kept him against me for maximum penetration. He relaxed on me, sucking a nipple, feeling my vagina contract around his penis. He smothered me with kisses. His lips were frantic. Kiss me again, he said. Kiss me again. Kiss me again. I tongued him deep, exploring his lips, mouth, curling lips everywhere.

  As my arousal increased and our hips slowly pounded each other, he felt my timing and pace to reach orgasm. I paused, squeezing my vagina tight, priming him to complete the next-to-last stage of our orgasms. I was ready. His penis shuddered, regained its pressure and he pumped fast and furious. We fucked like two wild animals until our bodies exploded. I released wet waves of pleasure. I milked him long and hard. Pleasure rushed through me. His body jerked as he came twice. My vagina collected his hot love juice.

  Bathed in sweat, we collapsed into each other. His head listened to my rapid heartbeat. Don’t go, I said. I’m afraid to be alone. He held me until I fell asleep.

  That was the first time. He was crazy about sexing me. I was his bed rabbit and he couldn’t get enough of the good stuff. Skin the bunny honey pie.

  Most men just want to shoot their wad and get the hell out of your life. That’s why so many women have a kid(s) and no man. He’s long gone. No sense of responsibility. Zero. They run away. They’re long gone, screwing another stupid woman who believes his lies and opens her legs thinking the guy’s her savior. Live and learn baby.

  He was different. Maybe it was because he was lonely, undersexed, and hungry for a real woman.

  If you pay you owe, I said in broken English. Men had always taken care of me, monetarily, physically. I kept my true feelings inside.

  One night while eating sushi with miso soup I told him, Be careful. You can only trust 10% of the people.

  In Saigon I found a room with friends from my village. I came in at night to have dinner, talk, fuck and sleep with him. I took advantage of our relationship. He encouraged me to develop my love for cooking saying it was a good skill. He was honest with me.

  You’ve made some poor choices, he said. You’re street smart. Create a new life for yourself. Take care of yourself. I leave next week. My time here is finished.

  He left me for another country. Vietnam is a woman. Men come and go. Men left me all my life, beginning with my father. I never knew him.

  As I was growing up I asked my mother, Where is my father? He’s gone. I never asked again.

  I finished 9th grade in my village school and lived at home helping my mother with chores; feeding chickens, shopping, cooking, and cleaning. She beat me.

  You are a worthless daughter. You have no future, she screamed at me. I took it silently. I served my older brothers. They were strangers. Little kings.

  Growing up I heard stories about making money in Cambodia. I crossed a border.

  You are a survivor, said Leo. Yes I am. My precious life revealed user-exchange value and power using sex for money.

  Parting, they embraced mutual loneliness. 

  One hand washes the other, said an armless amputee in shadows.

*

  In another incarnation we were naked in a meadow. I am blind. He is deaf. We hold hands. Skin is our unified quantum field theory of tactile language, beyond feeble illiterate words. Fate introduced us at an NGO charity ball, Save The World’s Children Now & Forever.

  Deaf is a famous concert pianist. Blind is an Angkor Wat explorer. She scaled 88 keys seeking tonal quality, perfect pitch and frequency. He traversed twin peaks, smooth geography, labyrinths, valleys, and topographical jungle foliage. He discovered a secret cave. They had a tacit agreement to be gentle and kind together. Peel my skin like sweet aromatic fruit, she whispered. I am your skin mistress. One must sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit.

Ice Girl in Banlung