Sapa by Tran

Sapa is high and deep. Wabi-sabi - quiet simplicity with beautiful imperfections and sanctuary.

It is a small mountain town in northwest Vietnam. Population is 15,000 not including water buffalo, chicks and pigs. V chicks come in on the weekends to hustle and fuck visiting male V piggy pygmies flashing cash. The swine flu stuff fat faces and buy cheap foreign plastic junk.

The water buffalo labor in rice paddies before humans plant. The rest of the year they graze and make baby water buffalos. Picture a buffalo on the American nickel. They are genetically related from a cousin who wandered North across Siberia then East over the Bering Strait 40,000 years ago, migrating south for their winter vacation.

Mountain air is a deep awareness. Orientation in the mountain hamlet means a blue lake, white fog, empty sky, wild mind visions and a hotel room near a bus station for $10 a night.

Room 402. No hot water. Clean sheets and a thick comforter. See Eastern mountains, sunrise, rolling clouds. Paint a Zen watercolor.

Hmong, Red Dzao and Tay women sell their living art, belts, beads, bags, detailed embroidery.

Thread your memory.

Tribal migrations arrived from China, Tibet and Laos across mountains, valleys, and rivers to live in the mountains. Some moved south to farm agricultural settlements in the hunter-gather stage of evolution. Animal husbandry. Simple bamboo and wood homes if they have money. Expensive concrete details are missing from this picture of habitat development.

Kind persistent kids and adult have mastered a direct sales approach. BUY FROM ME. You look at my things. They break the ice with excellent English.

In Cambodia we break ice with a rusty hammer, said Rita.

Kids learned language from invading European barbarians. White ghosts. The French were first. Where are you from? What is your name? Where do you go today? Want to see my village? 

I wander past V restaurants. Bored Vietnamese girls trim greens, slouch in chairs, sleep with their arms curled around their head, munch junk snacks, chat with friends and digit cell phones. They drive the local economy. They drive each other crazy.

The central market zone is a deep ramshackle concrete structure with broken slabs of stone and steep slippery mossy stone steps. This ageless, timeless human community of interaction and multiple languages is a la fresco Tibetan villages. Fresh clear clean cool air is a pleasant shift after noxious Hanoi fumes. Rural village life, air, attitudes and energies are filled with tears and rivers of loss.

Below mist mountains day tripping V tourist sheep pull their weekend rolling suitcase carts. They are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance, screw play girls and buy foreign junk. They are an invading commercial army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes.

Blindness speaks every language.

Ignoring local girls and their handicrafts they run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. A woman slows down in her long march toward consumerism to glance at a Hmong girl’s offerings, a handmade belt, colorful wrist wearable or a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl. Once the woman slows down she is surrounded by a chorus of voices, Buy From Me, Buy From Me. The woman dies.

Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork Vietnamese junk dealers. Watches, cheap imitation pants, shirts, and knickknacks. The eyes of Hmong youth scan customers at 6:05 a.m. offering elaborate colors and fabrics.

Sapa street theatre is filled with characters looking for a script.

Sleep deprived school kids in uniformed mass hysteria stagger uphill to a bright yellow building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a huge ceremonial leather skin drum. Drums remain an integral part of communication in Vietnam. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs fuck in front of the granite Catholic Church where tourists gather for a memorial photo shoot. Local Vietnamese women marketing images and memories prowl with cameras they rent by the day. They poke and prod lost, found and blind women, husbands, boys and girls into manageable groups for the eternal moment.

The decisive moment they remember forever. This moment is framed on their family neon altar with a flaming plastic red votive candle. An ancestor’s faded black and white monochrome image sees their son or daughter’s image with a white church and green mountains and wonders  ... Where is that, I’ve never seen it before, did you leave me here alone freezing with no one to feed me, I thought so, you will pay for this you ungrateful selfish child, my ghost will haunt your dreams with a dull machete  ... Caught in time.

Frozen alive, here we are, she laughed to her city friends when they gathered for tea in Hanoi. See a church. I am in front of it.

A blond European tourist wearing rubber sandals walks through the scene. Her t-shirt says, Love My Bones. She is a specialist in marrow transplants at the Children’s Hospital in Everywhere, Asia.

She smiles at every stranger along her magical story time line on steep stone trails above rushing rivers in the stream of life thinking,

when you smile at people

they don’t know you

and they talk about the smiling stranger

as they walk through nature where they live

where they are

and their walk is shorter,

or they smile back remembering others

who traveled slowly

greeting people like friends and strangers on their journey.

She was so friendly, the one with Love My Bones.

Is that what it said. Your translation skills on the fly are improving and life is so short we will smile more. Let’s practice.

Yellow sunflowers paint Van Gogh fields where water buffalo graze.

At 6:16 a.m. Vietnamese tourists pour into Sapa. They file off the bus wearing red cotton baseball hats designed for the Great Union Hotel sprawling across green hills above the church. They are a forlorn concoction of exotic creatures traveling in bunches, like overripe bananas.

The economy class of style, luxury, and pizzazz-a-lama meets the Hmong hard at work, pushing their handicrafts. Prussian blue indigo spins colors, handmade rainbows, skirts, and aprons. Blue-black tribes and flowering ethnology sings memory threads on their looms of time.

A heavy rain decorates the lake all night. Ripples dance from the center. Water echoes. 402 overlooks a mirror. Above the lake forested mountains with high granite ridges climb into clouds. Fog, water and low clouds rumble over peaks and down valleys bringing rain, fog and mist. Falling water creates whirlpools on a mirror with a steady mist. The air is clean and pure.

A three-hour road trip to the Bac Ha market south of Sapa is famous for the Flower Hmong’s colorful clothing. It’s a splendid wild nature ride up, down, through narrow mountain passes with zero visibility inside thick cold fog.

It’s pouring in Bac Ha. The market is flooded with rainbow locals huddled under blue tarps buying and selling. We return to Sapa inside clouds as twilight sweeps peaks into deep valleys hearing roaring waterfall rivers.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged