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

Finch's Cage, Sapa, Vietnam

In Sapa, Vietnam I discovered a side street and thick cold java at a run-down Internet cafe. I sat outside.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside a plate glass door. It’d escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room. Someone, perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her brother worried about dying of boredom or her old mother worried about dying alone had left the cage open.

Finch sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw a deep blue sky. It inhaled clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in trees but didn’t understand them.

They sang about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off fast beating your wings to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity or memories filled with attitudes, beliefs, values and fear pulling you down.

Free, you turn and glide, relax and soar.

Finc, being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang, “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in.” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown and bright eyed in its aloneness. 

An old woman opened the door. She trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to its cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she said.

Finch sat on its perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang, “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language.

Muttering under her breath about inconvenience she shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

 

Asia for sale

Across a porous border is the dry season in Khmer civilization.

Leaders, bleeders and corrupt businessmen sell forests to furniture, chopstick and toothpick fact stories in China/Nam. Let’s eat.

Greed is a hungry animal.

Asian developers buy Cambodia and Laos to build garment sweatshops paying slaves $61 a month, golf courses, shopping centers filled with morose manikins and hundreds of empty glass and brass hotels financed by prostitution, opium, wild animals, natural resources, imperial emerald jade, rubies, Blue Zircon, sapphire.

Appliance factories, baby production machines and Mandarin language schools babble tongues.

China owns northern Laos. Vietnam owns the south. Thailand owns the electricity from twelve Lao dams on the Mekong. Sixty million farmers and fishermen starve downstream. Lights are on and nobody’s home.

In Phonsavan - Plain of Scars, Jars and Wars - before dawn every morning logging trucks carrying trees from Laos rumble toward Vietnam furniture factories.

$10,000 a tree.

Log in log on log out. The hills are alive with the sound of chainsaws.

As of August 2013, Asian investment in energy, mining and agriculture according to a financial source was:

Vietnam has 449 projects in Laos worth $5 billion.

Thailand has 760 projects in Laos worth $4.8 billion.

China has 800 projects in Laos worth $4 Billion.

Lao capital investment has twenty-nine hydropower projects valued at  $739 million, $271 million in mining and $100 in construction.

Asia is for sale. Act Now. Cheap. ABC.

The National Museum in Seems Ripe is 50% owned by Thailand. Khmer people don’t visit. It’s a tourist how now cash cow?

Angkor Wat is managed by Japan. Pass the sushi. Domo arigato.

The Language Company

Plain of Jars. Archeologists say giants created them for drinking 4,000 years ago. I know. I was there.

1655 Hanoi Alley Bell - TLC 56

It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

Sex is fun.

Responsibility is a duty.

Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. He is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off 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 a circular abstract desire to create art lasting for eternity which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

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

His voice manifestation expresses human auditory tendencies in a tight space near a gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank cement wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where a hunched over family sits on cold red floral tile slurping from cracked rose bowls and shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths while yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland for glass and brass designer hotels with a double blade axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, the national anthem about survival and rampant greed on land, sea, and air as water pianos played by a young wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of fast incantation musical channels dance near a woman garbage collector ringing a bell at 1655 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 arranged her family’s daily consumptive waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, shreds of fat pink. She didn’t waste a thing. No one did. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s faces, dead, gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost images living above eternal electric Buddha bulbs pulsating red, green, blue, and white on the family altar.

Plastic flowers, daily fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food.

Let’s eat.

She thought of her father whispering as he carried her away from their burning village during the war, “Remember where you came from.”

She never physically returned. Memories saved her.

It didn’t really matter what went where because after she’d carried her garbage down the high walled alley blocking sincere fading daylight she tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of neighborhood garbage was tremendous.

Growing day by day it evolved as a collective socialistic mess and community consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She felt content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Enough to get her away from homeland security prison walls to gossip with neighbors waiting to die as twilight filtered past musical hammers, creaking broken carts pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight alley chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at a visual epiphany as exactly 21 shovels of earth were manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls from poor villages with zero educational opportunities laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks and suicidal dreams.

Laborers were light years away from young H’mong Sapa mountain sellers and trek leaders speaking fluent English with no further hope of a formal education after ninth grade surviving with indigo blue stained fingers hands and hearts living through long dark cold mountain winters as storms howled, “I feel free.”

They cheerfully offered their bright beaded bags, embroidery and natural world experiences to strangers.

Cynical war weary logic infested objectivists burning inside towering twin infernos of their psychosis ate self-pity with no exit for dessert inside Fibonacci’s eternal spiral.

A shattered mirror reflected Pho’s fragmented identity.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown bard wire encircling his social network domain avatar easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter.

Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

Vietnam massacred them back to Manchuria.

The French introduced excellent wines and installed intricate glass mosaics in Dalat garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them as fragments of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic minimal musical microcosms and colonial ideology.  

At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs back to De’ Arc of Triumph.

They kept the language and baguettes. Yellow colonial buildings aged along Rue This and Rue the Day. 

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, death, suffering and chaos unleashed their blind idiotic military-industrial ambition on peasants gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family through dynasties encroaching on walls and shrines inside meditative brown temples celebrated silent stories.

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

Agent Orange extended misery for generations. 

“Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.”

- Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

“Quick into the tunnels. Run.”

Sitting, crying and praying they heard the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel canisters thudded tremors shredding forests, jungles, paddies and lives. Bamboo homes danced in flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat.

They traveled deeper following interior earth trails until their unconscious became conscious. Earth swallowed breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

Sweet silence comforted the crying and wounded after foreign devils fled in terror, guilt, shame and loss.

Survivors streamed down mountains, emerged from caves and tunnels, poling rivers, walking on water, drinking oceans in creation myths, forcing devils into the sea. Blue green seas ran red.

Vietnam forced Americans back to Guam in 1975.

Voices in Hanoi flowed between crumbling sand and haphazard red bricks. Cement walls blocked wailing anger. Frustration's repressed bitterness adapted survival instincts in the reality of life’s twisted fateful truth.

Their memory was fiction.

Fiction created their memory. 

Lucky sat on a Hanoi garden balcony cleaning The Dream Sweeper Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door with 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 tormenting his child until the kid balls. Tears stream. Mother rescues her darling from endless emotional abuse stunting the child’s development.

Children learn how to reject this yeller. They learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They are passive-aggressive. As they age they turn off their brains. Genetic engineering. Essential healthy neural paths lie dormant. They turn off their ears. Blend in. This attention deficit disorder is deader than an ancestor eating incense. Ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reactionary recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to generations raised with fear, intimidation, suspicion, insecurity, starvation, poverty, informers, paranoia, empty promises, false hope and loud voices. Some voices are real others are pure nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife. Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Put on your social identity mask and hit the bricks. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with your children. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You will raise them to yell with the best of them.

They will bellow like stuck pigs, bleating sheep and cackling crows breaking heart-minds and transmit shivers down your spineless self with regret and anger and fear manifesting in narrow tight lives under long florescent lights, this shattering glare. They grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

Time is a circle.

They bury you and take your photo to the artist who memorizes your face with graphite on parchment. Generations and friends stare at your black/white frozen face. Kneeling in supplication they offer you fruit and water. They burn incense so your spirit has something to consume, so it will not be angry and return yelling, demanding and pleading. Survivors live in fear of ghosts. How we live and how we remember. Let’s eat.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, words, phrases, sentences called speech, then louder until they achieve the decibels required to re-join the family so to speak. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

We work. We breed. We get slaughtered.

Someone - a parent, teacher, sibling, boss, lover, or stranger - yells at them and they ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller yells a little louder. No answer. 

The child plays the game waiting for them to get their yell going strong. Louder says listener hiding inside silence. After they’ve made them yell three times child answers with a whisper. They can’t hear the child. They yell again and again. The child has conditioned them to their catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

A kid whispers to teach them a lesson. A-dolts can’t hear them. They raise their voice competing with other yellers. Kid rejects them for yelling at him/her. He/she is easily distracted. He/she nurtures chaos, confusion and distractions. He/she loves the fragments. Ah, the glare of artificial ancestor passion for tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, “Give them 1,001 lashes with your tongue. I have 1,001 arms and 1,001 eyes. I am infinite on the ocean of wisdom.” 

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell, talk over each other, don’t listen, yelling louder trying to be heard as others block them out or ignore them 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 ordered him to marry the slob who learned to yell while ignoring her parents which is how they evolved into this intelligent higher life form.

Every morning Lucky walked past homes guarded by rusty sliding gates. Narrow alleys and sardine dwellings. SHOCK was spray painted on a wall near a discarded sofa among residents cooking with round perforated coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, and stones creating magnificent futures with Marxist production tools: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant.

All fine well good ends to a means.

In a narrow street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling produce from broken bamboo baskets was a dead chilled out sausage dog with splayed legs and glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from shops/homes. Sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens fondled a veined leaf, a man oiling a bike gestured a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother hugged her young future yeller - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beep-beeped impatient music twisting through the crowd to get home to families, lovers, food, television, sex, dramas about heroes and heroines, their beloved pet and hungry dead ancestors.

A thin old man emerged from his small dark narrow utilitarian space where millions living in the dark hid from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, picked it up, lifting it into the air. It hung down. He resembled aristocracy holding a wild hare after dogs flushed it running wild filled with freedom’s fear.

He was in shock holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool surrounded by confused voices of friends, neighbors and strangers pealing like bells in his brain muttering something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery of death standing alone holding the legs before laying the dog near the gutter as the animal’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion, meaning and returned to his dark interior unconscious space.

Buried inside his family’s deep dark home was an altar for candles, fruit, dead relative images and burning incense.

The black and white imitations resembled the Chinese artist's work. He drew the dead. A relative gave him a common small black and white photo from 1949 when the country declared itself free and independent and benevolent Chairman Mao dear grandfather leader bless his heart smiling at the masses ordered peasants, “Eat Grass.”

45 million died of starvation.

Their small iconic image was used in documents for residence, work and party politics. People had the three iron rice bowls. Guaranteed living space. Guaranteed work unit. Guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal.

Everyone was treated the same, wore the same grey clothing, ate the same gruel, saying the same thing following the leader like condemned criminals playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

The bent nail gets hammered down, yelled an undersexed Chinese teacher in a university class tomb pounding her point home with a Marxist control stick.

The Maija artist accepted a photo from a grieving relative set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass. His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion. 

This day he sketched an old stoic sad resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

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

An emaciated friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. They shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted ascetic.

Images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts was a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they met ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes. 

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Hanoi family noise. “It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”

Ancestor Worship - TLC 55

After a year at TLC and a year in Indonesia he rented a room near Lenin Park for four months. Dream Sweeper Machine evidence verified life in Hanoi.

He planned to burn a hardback copy of A Century is Nothing near Hue where he was transformed. Sacrifice. Omar said, please gift to three Vietnamese-Australian girls you meet in Ho Chi Minh before you walk to Cambodia. They’ll carry it back to Sydney. Sharing is caring. He did.

His Hanoi neighbors were 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 or new Yin and old Yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife had someone to yell at. They needed someone, anyone to take care of them in old age sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 dancing kitchen smells with the sweet memory of insistent incense. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000 cash up front or no deal. Pay to play. Dave and his wife pretended to need kids so offspring would feed them later. When you’re young and naive multiple pregnancies are paramount. Accelerate production comrades.

It’s easy to produce kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are ninety million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the popular Communist Party bestseller, Produce & Consume.

Get married early the pressure is on. Honor off her.

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, and forgotten. Loneliness and alienation increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and instability in a well-mannered informer-driven paranoid society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to get a husband.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I speak excellent English. I finished nine years of school in my village. I learned what I really needed to know on the street of life. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. What I really needed to sustain my curiosity and sense of humor. I use really a lot.

Don’t let school interfere with your education.  

More tourists than travelers visit Sapa. It’s near The Middle Kingdom. I've never been there. It’s an old civilization. Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. If you fail to plan you plan to fail better. I have a dream, to be.

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

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

No, I’m talking, and I speak excellent English among other languages about the foreigners. My friends and I working the street politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts, embroidery work and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners real travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. Sapa is a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. In and out people.

Tourists have a holiday schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? A Greek guy named Arrest Throttle said time is the greatest wealth or maybe it was health. They’re related.

Anyway, they eat, sleep, wander around and maybe if I’m lucky take a trek to my village and then, POOF - like magic they disappear. 

Then the tourist machine spits out more day-trippers for us to sell to pester and offer village treks. Some want to see the real deal. They want to experience nature and the real Sapa. Life is all about meeting, engaging and establishing emotional connections with people.

It’s about what you feel not what you understand. I feel free.

Engage-study-activate.

Some stay overnight in my village, which is fantastic because by avoiding the greedy hotel middlemen after profit, my folks make some small money.

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

I am smart. I meet trekkers 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. One said that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. I am a wise owl.

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 slow down. They sit and talk with my mom and dad. They take some snaps. Here we are.

Then we follow trails through forests, crossing rivers, trekking 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 directly with tourists and trekkers. I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman, ha, ha. Does that make me a middle woman?

I live in the middle way.

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 box. What’s up with that? Squeeze a memory. Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live, work-play, evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand at a cultural level 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. 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 walking home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It has beds and a 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. Bye-bye and good luck.

The Language Company