Lao Dwarf - Ice Girl

Chapter 19.

At that moment following a 90-minute chakra body massage in Luang Prabang, a Disneyland of world heritage culture filled with French and German and Italian babbling idiots staggering on medical canes while craning arthritic necks toward cold European winter memories and grasping creased maps filled with blood red dots depicting guesthouses and casinos featuring obsessive oval tongued storytellers without maps, canes, awkward packs, widows, orphans, or land mine survivors piloting bomb boats down the Nam Ou river and recycling Grade A ordinance, a foreigner put a pile of gold on a table in Laos. He turned to a one-eyed squinting old man. “I will give you this pile of gold for your daughter.”

  “I want more,” said the man. “Her face and body and heart are Lao. She has Vietnamese blood. It’s supply and demand. Business is business. Politics is business and business is politics. It’s all about value. No plastic. Cash only. See this machete?” waving it in the man’s face, cutting him off.

  Nearby, two American males hadn’t decompressed. Trying to communicate in complete sentences was impossible. One released sounds, nouns, impressive words, past and present participles, guttural phrases, heavy deep real sentences and, like a game of chess, war or blind love showing no respect, the OTHER cut him off at the throat with a sharp sophisticated verbal annunciated machete.

  Frustrated and grimacing, he suffered severe irreparable brain damage. Short circuit. Transmission lines went down. Thud. Crash. Burn.

  The two Yankees were fresh off the banana boat. They’d sailed out of NY, past the oxidized tall green torch lady, diverted through the Suez Canal, picked up palm oil in Goa, and translated the lack of wind into thermal icecaps near Ceylon surveying tea plantations harvesting vast green high grade qualities of pure logic in a scientifically approved coherent genesis. The ship’s captain texted his mistress in Kuala Lumpur, “I’ll be late for dinner.”

She was engaged to a dour celibate hypocritical monk disguised as a novice meditating in an isolated cave on the Tibet-Bhutan border at 21,451 feet. She missed his calm sense of (purpose) intention and clear motivation. She prayed he’d complete his destiny to be One With Everything, leave the cave and travel south living fearless inside fatigued winds to meet her at an undisclosed location. This was her secret desire, wish, dream and consistent memory. 

   She imagined him bargaining his flesh-covered skeleton in a brief temporary life condition. He negotiated passage using Sumerian script etched on clay tablets. Brushing shard dust off shard dust revealed time-lines, sharp indentations, incomplete circles, zigzag lightning bolts and fingerprints of whirling dervish dancers. 

  Whorls reflected afternoon light into somnambulistic retinas.

  A middle aged male Laotian dwarf in a well cut gray suit coat, black baggy pants and sturdy green army issued tennis shoes walked past. Pink sky streaked sunset. He’d been walking all day. His stride was steady. Other than a bowl of noodles near the Mekong he’d been raising dust. He was headed home, passing golden Wats, shimmering pots of food cooking on clay burners fired by kindling, blaring TVs, noisy greasy engine repair shops, bamboo pavilions and a sleeping tuk-tuk driver. 

  He passed a teashop chalk sign:

Smile. We Will Help You Practice.

  He walked across a narrow red iron bridge above a river and down a dusty road to his bamboo home complete with a single watt bulb surrounded by dancing omnivorous insects.

  His shoes went near the door. Slapping his jacket against a wall released day’s dust. He hung it up. He splashed water on his face and smiled at his incomplete reflection. He poured a cup of green tea, ate a handful of sticky rice and prepared his table. 

  He spread out a large sheet of rough handmade beige paper, camelhair brushes and black ink.

  Memory spoke: After they cut my tongue out during my Re-education through shit labor experience I started writing script. I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire.

  I added a little water to a recessed gray stone surface. I placed the ink in the center. Then, using my right hand, as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me, I rotated the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid as a drop of water rippled a pond.

  After collecting ink I picked up my long thick brown brush with white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper. I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, with my left palm flat on the table and fingers spread.

  I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink and slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess. I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality and character. There are 5,000 characters in my written language.

  My Chinese script is about unity of mind and spirit. I have much to see and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I know. The more I see the less I know.

  My teacher recited a poem.

A mountain loses its spirit without cloud,
loses its peculiarity without stones,
loses its elegance without trees,
and loses its life without water,
and in painting,

one should concentrate the mind,
and hold the breath,
with concentration of the mind,
serenity is maintained, with the breath held up,
preciseness is attained.

One should be as serene as an old monk in meditation and be as precise as a silk worm in spitting silk.
The spirit and real fun of painting are from nature and beyond brushes and paints.

  I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness. I centered my unconscious on the blank paper filled with nothing. Respect the white emptiness.

  My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus. I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit. Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

  Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

  My useless tongue flapped like a prayer flag in Himalayan winds. Stories and songs are nightingales. I heard children laughing and singing. They greeted each other in the babble of playful nothing with laughing word pearls.

They dream with their eyes open. When we are asleep we are awake.

  Life gave me art and I used art to celebrate life.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Life Lesson #5 - Ice Girl

Chapter 18.

I’m a big seven as in 7, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator.

  Your life is a test. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear.

  My dad’s not very smart. It’s probably his DNA. A string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

  Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season here in Vientiane. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

  Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

  It’s amazing what people do when they have nothing to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. Anyway I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

a) people who make things happen

b)people who watch people make things happen

c) people who don’t know what the fuck is going on

  My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every day is a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

  Grandfather stares at rain collecting in pools.

  Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

  My mom’s also really smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

  After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

  It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

  When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

  Mom ignores me mostly. She’s very busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kind later.

  People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

  Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

  Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

  The trick is to tolerate, with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

  The kid continued: For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

  I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

  This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

  Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, expensive medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know?

  Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

  A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

  How do you build self-control and grit, asked Leo.

  Through failure, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

  What are they?

  Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

  Thanks for the life lesson, said Leo. You are the future of Laos.

Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Life in Laos - Ice Girl

Chapter 17.

Banlung was 100 degrees with no clouds. The landscape was flat. Intermittent rolling parched Eastern hills led to a shimmering blue volcanic lake and cool shade.

To the north The Heart of Darkness flowed strong. Impenetrable jungles bordering Laos sheltered animists and cannibals.

How’s life in Laos, asked Ice Girl.

  A French doctor in Luang Prabang told me this, said Leo. He’s lived there six years. He has a young son and daughter with a Lao woman. He invested time and money to develop a guesthouse. They expanded to five properties.

They had problems. Her extended family smelled a huge profit. She threw him out. She wanted all the land. I saw her when she brought their daughter to a pre-school where I played and learned from kids. They were both fat and unhappy.

  So how does it work in Laos, said Ice Girl. You didn’t answer the big quest-ion from a small person.

  Men make the rules, said Leo. Women take care of the home, kids and money. It’s all unspoken subtleties. They do their thing. Women worship in the temples. They do their meditation. Men sit around getting drunk, discussing new night girls, ethics, morality and behavior.

  What happened to the French man and kids?

  He plotted a way to get them out of the country. He let her keep the land and buildings.

  Many people never leave their village, asked Leo. Why?

  Everything we have is here. A village maintains the other world.

  The world is a village.

  Good things happen when you take risks, she said. You risk expanding your perception. You risk losing everything in the expansion. Are you prepared to lose everything? I know the feeling, said Leo. They killed my family. I’m sorry, she said. We have to accept loss forever.

  What is the most beautiful word you know, she said?

  Kindness. And yours? Food.

  Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, she said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach magical levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.

  The asylum is a prison and protection, said Leo.

  You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, she said cutting crystals.

  Make the right choice for the wrong reason, he said.

  Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, she said.

Ice Girl in Banlung

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