Eat fast or starve - TLC 8

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery. They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing. Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and Ankara dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' glazed befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus. It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

TLC

Chinese history teacher goes home - TLC 7

Leo’s history teacher wrote in her journal - Ah, what a marvelous summer. I don’t make much money you understand so I use it wisely. Family is everything. To avoid relationship clashes of dynastic proportions I shelled out $200, a third of my salary for a round-trip train ticket home. After paying the university an exorbitant rental fee for my drab, cold apartment plus electricity and water, I had enough left for soggy onions, fresh spinach, tofu, rice and oranges.

Home is where the heart is. Well let me share a little advice about that. Singing the blues life's way of talking, I lugged my broken suitcase, guilt, shame and duty home to hearth and kin. Whew.

I am overwhelmed by the heavy burden of my family's expectations. After fulfilling my academic responsibilities meaning pass everyone or face dire consequences as ordered by university authorities whom or who will, for the sake of Social Stability and Harmonious Educational Reform Committees remain faceless, nameless and totally obscure, I escaped my prison sanctuary.

Train stations along the way were packed with migrants, laborers and prostitutes without a wing, hope or prayer. Mothers and fathers formed concentric protective circles around solitary children to prevent thieves. Stolen kids are a huge underground economy. People pay $3,500 or more for a boy. Princelings. They have high value in our new economy. Stealing, shilling, selling, buying children is how life works. Life is cheap here.

Accelerate baby production comrades, exclaim Stalinist loudspeakers.

It took twenty-two long, tedious hours sitting in hard seat with three transfers before I reached my province bordering North Korea where, across Time’s river, twenty-four million free starving people ate grass as liberated women scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes sang:

Hail our Great Leader!

Speaking of work, I need to run. My past is chasing me. I must help mother with cleaning, shopping and timeless chores. If I don’t perform my filial duties she may threaten to sell me to a marriage broker. I live in perpetual fear. I’ll return to my artificially inseminated alter-ego teacher existence next week. After reporting back for duty I will file another illuminating report. Thank you for your attention.

The Language Company

Democracy & Happy Meals

Immediately after 9/11 Spanish children scrambled through dust pawing soil looking for energy cells. Emergency air raid sirens exploded. Everyone scrambled into bombed out buildings.

"Hey, check this out," said a hungry refugee, "I found a case of Democracy. The Republican label says it spreads easily."

"Is it crunchy or plain?"

"How do I know? It’s just plain old Democracy."

"I hope it’s better than that old rancid Freedom Sauce. Let’s give it a go. Democracy is a good idea, in theory."

They opened the box, took out a jar, unscrewed the top, grabbed sharp knives, broke bread and slathered on Democracy.

"Wow! This is yummy."

"Yeah, well I got some stuck in my throat. It tastes like sand."

"It’s protein."

World tribes collected their Democracy.

"We need more energy," someone said. "We need music, news, a weather forecast. We need to know what’s happened."

"Need a clue? Take a look around you," said an illiterate person. Twin Towers, Iraqi and Syrian villages, and Afghan mountains smoldered on the immediate horizon.

"It looks desperate," said one.

"Eye, it does," said another. "It’s always darker before the dawn."

Sirens stopped and they emerged from darkness.

"We need shelter," said a family gathering rushes from the World Bank. Third world immigrants and internally displaced people pounded rocks and carried them on their backs toward unknown futures. They sang, “Give me shelter. Shelter from the storm.”

"Beware those who live on dreams," said a rationalist.

"We need a committee," said a company man. "We need order."

"May I take your order?" requested a disembodied voice from a black box in a drive-thru combat zone.

"One happy meal to go," cried a distraught family trapped in a massive traffic jam. It was bumper to bumper on the highway of death between the airport and Baghdad. Where the rubber met the road. Their digestive systems were backed up for miles with sugar, fat, grease and carbohydrates.

"Consider the essentials will you," pleaded a small voice from the back seat trying to get a dial tone, trying to get through, trying to find a rhythm inside swirling chaos. It threatened to swallow everyone and spit humans into a black hole sucking everything into a parallel universe. 

A Century is Nothing

MK 92 - Preface to The Language Company

Here's the beginning of The Language Company. Thanks for listening. Making a podcast is fun.

MK 92

TLC - 5

“A human life in China is worthless,” said Leo, 14, born in a Re-education-Through-Labor Reform Camp in Hubei. His mom worked in the empty university library.

After school exploring forested hills on mountain bikes Lucky and Leo shifted gears where the rubber met the road. One day they stopped in an old quarry to play in dirt.

It was an abandoned country, an abstract concept.

They stood in a deep excavated canyon. High dirt walls bordered by pine, evergreen and blue sky wore sharp deep gashes after machine teeth gouged down dirt. Workers harvested red clay for imperial jade tombs at the university where 15,001 students struggled to survive in a harmonious society. Students hiding from recycled Mao-styled uniformed security guards mastered eating, texting and casual sex.

They stood at the bottom of a bottomless pit.

“Everyone is a spy,” said Leo.

“How did you surmise this theoretical fact?”

“Life is my teacher. It’s our 5,000-year history plain and simple. Their job is to keep an eye on us. Think about it. We have too any people here and so, to monitor our behavior, attitudes and thinking, they recruit students and teachers as spies. Informers. Minders. They’re paid with passing grades or cash. My father was an informer during the Cultural Revolution. It’s Darwinian logic, evolution of the species. Survival.”

“I’m not surprised. This was common through dynasties. Perpetuate control and authority. The Central Party created a climate of fear. Husbands reported wives. Wives reported husbands, sons and daughters. Daughters and sons reported fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles. Concubines reported lovers. An evil cycle.”

“Yes,” said Leo, “evil is a myth. Everyone is a charter member of the Big Ears Sharp Eyes No Mouth Society. Our generation of informers and spies make good money. Knowing their place they keep their mouth shut to survive. Creativity is my meditation. I meditate on the comic, the absurd. Don’t take life seriously. It’s too short. If you laugh you last.”

“Thanks for life lesson #5.”

Lucky shared writing-living suggestions with eight new Chinese teachers. Make your characters want something right away, even if it’s a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of life need water from time to time. It’s your job to create conflict so the characters will say or do surprising and revealing things, educating and entertaining us. Characters change/grow. Kill your darlings. If a writer can’t or won’t do that they should get out of the trade. A writer is a hustler.

Write like you’re dead. Someday you will be.

Ah the drama - the unfolding play observing sensational phenomena. 

Entertainment is alive and well in Asia. It’s the entertainment capital of the world. Keep them stupid and happy. Children of all ages stay amused by cell phones, Lose Face social sites and the idiot box. They surrender their consciousness. Watch TV. Miss the show.

 “Keep your hand moving,” he said to lazy Chinese robots. “The hand is directly connected to the heart. You are pure sensation. Be an anarchist. Take risks. Take a line for a walk.”

As a foreign language barbarian wearing a Tang Dynasty five-clawed red dragon, yin-yang symbol, a rising Phoenix and a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains he witnessed emperors screwing concubines inside Forbidden Cities with red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams wove silent abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss. Manifestations of superior phenomenal detective analysis and forty questions of the soul redlined final exams.

“We know so much and understand so little,” Lucky said.

“I don’t understand a thing. People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said Leo. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’” Hear ye, hear ye.