Hanoi Job

After walking through a narrow Hanoi concrete passageway and dodging motorcycles on chaotic dream streets I ate in silence with young desolate hardhat construction workers.

I visited Jasmine, 21, a tall regal aristocratic beautiful virgin with a trembling lower lip allowing her to develop English fluency and confidence. She has a university degree and works as an office girl at DUMB, an international shipping company. Their office is on the 101st floor of Ocean Parking, a silver & glass business monster with many empty offices.

Her manager, Sonny Boy, invited me over for breakfast on the top floor overlooking Lenin Park and massive traffic gridlock. He has an MBA from Hollandaise.

This is how it works in a Socialist country, he said, People are not paid enough so they figure out how to make more money by ... shall I say, using their position, their opportunity to increase their profit ...

at Level One people need to get a good education and get a job with a multinational company ...

at Level Two they need connections with the authorities, they need to move up the food chain with government people having no ethics and no morals it’s all about Survival, this is the empirical reality derived from experiment and observation and connections and facts rather than theory.

Dancing wind and lightning bolts send shock waves through the atmosphere.

Jasmine sleeps her noon dream.

Her mother cleans glass display world windows downstairs in unconscious soup zones.

A woman adjusts her bamboo hat above a face mask resting her lungs from morning’s bike pedal adventure loaded with heavy duty plastic five-gallon containers of cooking oil.

A temporary consumer boredom passes through a metamorphic Carpe Diem, 24/7 below a solace solarium.

Wagging tongues inside language laughter weave a crème silk linen blend as an old blind woman wielding a bamboo staff leads her blind husband along a narrow cement path past high cracked walls dreaming about their long lost free orphan children prospering in green villages away from the madness.

Hanoi LOUD Speakers by Tran

Garden is a green dawn. Mynahs high in early breeze whistle Living Is Happiness.

Keep your hand moving yes no maybe automatic central nervous system electrical impulses dance ink in a notebook as a Hanoi train whistle signals its approach to a crossing.

A low frequency of rumbling engines pulling thirteen green cars penetrates a thick hazy pollution cloud cover.

An authoritarian female voice echoes from rusty loudspeakers at Lenin Park.

SUPPORT YOUR FAMILY

LOVE YOUR PARENTS

REMEMBER YOUR ANCESTORS

REPORT UNUSAL BEHAVIOR

PRACTICE GOOD SOCIALIST BEHAVIOR

DO NOT PEE OR SPIT IN PUBLIC

CARE YOUR NEIGHBORS

WASH YOUR PAJAMAS

CLEAN OUT YOUR DREAMS

SACRIFICE FOR THE COLLECTIVE HARMONY

Every street corner in Hanoi wears million-year-old wired concave loudspeakers mounted on tall grey cement pilings. The city is crisscrossed by pilings, black spider wires and speakers before, during and after wars.

At 7:45 a.m. they blare out tinny indistinguishable news propaganda blather and martial music. Residents marching to new economic tunes ignore ha noise.

Making Money Is Glorious Comrade!

Impatient frustrated motorcycle people beep-beep-beep to negotiate a thin street filled with kids, elderly walkers and young exercise addicts going or coming from Lenin park after crossing congested wide boulevards as mercenary maniacs increase 125cc speed.         

Women carrying bamboo baskets filled with vegetables, bricks, recycled steel, bread and dreams mix with residents sitting on tiny plastic kindergarten forever young chairs crowding homes and store fronts, drinking beer, peeling, peeing, cooking, eating incense, screwing, living and dying.

Inside numerous open portal homes fronted by rusty gray metal accordion gates motorcycles nestle in the front room. Central parking. Volume idiot box images flickers phosphorescence, marketing, branding and economic advertising:

WE DON’T HAVE WHAT YOU WANT

WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED

into brains and faces of comatose kids, parents, grandparents and dead ancestors. An old woman sits slumped against a doorframe staring at the box.

She hasn’t seen the sky for years.

If she looks left and up she can see a slight sliver shiver that’s it, said Tran.

Let’s eat. Let’s watch TV. Let’s look at our phones. Give up your consciousness.

Fill your stomach. Everyone is happy. Life is amazing and short.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged