Making Money in China is Glorious - TLC 6

Living once in an old Shanghai neighborhood Lucky was surrounded by millions of peasants surviving in a paranoid zoo. Heavy metal doors clanged closed on night hinges. An adult admonished a child. Authoritarian accusatory commands were consistent simple and direct.

“Get in. The night is here. It is late. You have to fold the clothes. You have your homework for school. You have to clean up after dinner. You must study harder. Harder. Harder. If you fail your exams we will lose face. Shame will haunt us forever. You will become an unemployed migrant exploring Invisible Cities with Italo Calvino seeking your future in a grain of rice.”

High-heeled staccato music accompanied a young woman escaping her family. Muted whispers drifted through narrow concrete canyons as her heels faded.

An elevator door opened on the 11th floor of a 5* international business hotel. Employed on the management team Lucky stopped talking to accountants Shiva and Vishnu.

A beautiful twenty-year old Chinese in a white dress clutching a small black purse stared at a scuffed marble floor. Small puddles of rainwater collected around her red shoes.

She raised her face from the ground. Deep dark brown rings circled old, tired, fearful eyes hiding her heart’s knowledge. Revealing her soul. There was no place to hide, no magical cosmetic to conceal the truth of everything she knew and feared. The woman and stranger instinctively sensed each other.

Passing through she realized a temporary ethereal truth. She pressed another number. Doors closed. She went up to the room of a Taiwanese businessman who would savage her until daybreak.  

Finished performing her duty she folded hard earned hard currency into her purse after a long hot shower. She took the elevator down. Gliding through revolving glass and brass doors she passed her shimmering reflection in dark Japanese restaurant mirrors and negotiated gray steps to Nanjing Xi Lu.

Her brown eyes collected one million serious adults in blue industrial worker uniforms practicing Tai Chi with controlled balanced concentration. Every methodical movement had meaning. Dawn’s collective breath forming mist surrounded her red shoes skipping through shadows. 

To dance is life.

Neon billboards shouted: Making Money in China is Glorious!

Women in a dreary cement walled neighborhood demanded something at high decibels. Feed Me. A motorcycle roared past. A bike bell rang a sharp corner warning. Two women negotiated vegetable prices, cool days and their children’s fate.

Their syllabus adjusted musical interludes and surreptitious encounters in dark corners where sexually repressed couples groped for meaning away from surveillance cameras.

The Language Company
 

       I am pregnant. My family threw me out. I shamed them. This is my self criticism.

BB King 1925-2015

The chairman of the board has passed.

If you want to play the blues you have to pay your dues.

He paid his dues. 

Rolling Stone

The Guardian

The Thrill is Gone

street 21

A new photography book, Street 21, exploring Yangon, Myanmar is available on Blurb.

one village

He was useful here for thirty-seven days. Passion and compassion. Joy and laughter.

Savon, her husband Savuth and two adolescents have a hard rural Cambodian life.
She sold spices in the Siem Reap market.
She dreamed having a small school at her home where village kids could learn English.
Private schools are expensive.

She asked foreigners if they would visit and teach for a short time. Beginning.
They started the school one year ago. EEC - English Education in Community, an NGO in a dusty village.

They advertised on work-away a site for volunteer ops around Earth.
Volunteers come and go. Children need consistency.

Volunteers visited from Japan, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, USA, and UK. 
The majority stay two weeks or longer. They teach and/or build new rooms and prepare the house before rainy season. $5 a day covers accomodation and meals.

Community. 

Kids learn Japanese, English, have fun, how to think for themselves and help each other.
Fifty kids from 3-18, all levels.
Two classrooms - dirt floors, wooden benches, white board. Limited textbooks. Sigh.

One local Khmer girl, 15, showed exceptional progress translating and helping young ones. He suggested Savon hire her. She did. 

Nature is the teacher.

There are two classrooms at a forelorn pagoda three kilometers away. 

Ride a bike through world dust. Mid-day heat burns everything. Water buffalo, white oxen, rice paddies, naked kids, bamboo homes, ancient wooden structures, flat endless horizons, flaming plastic.

Celebrate your existence. 
Rain is coming. Life blossoms this beauty.

Brushes iPad - Lao mountains

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.