Ang
Share Article Way of the empty hand.
Be inwardly humble and outwardly gentle, said Ang, a Hanoi student lawyer with a 5th degree Dan black belt. She was small fast and deadly. A quick tiger without a motorcycle license.
We rode around Hanoi. I knew the city and showed her diversions.
It’s strange having a foreigner give me directions in my town, she yelled into the wind as we negotiated a dusty section of congested road works for a new subway while speeding south near Lenin Park.
Take it easy baby I whispered as we swerved through a phalanx of cycles, cars, trucks and bike spokes.
We stopped near a lake for iced java. Hanoi has many lakes. The Vietnamese coffee comes from the Central Highlands. It is high quality. Vietnam is the world’s second biggest coffee exporter after Brazil.
Hanoi, like Beijing, is the conservative cold capital. It was bombed during the war. Hanoi survived the Chinese, French, Americans and Vietnamese. War by proxy like now elsewhere. Same-same but different. Saigon is the new young economic vibrant city where anything goes 24/7. Beijing-Hanoi. Shanghai-Saigon.
My name means heart in Vietnamese, said Ang.
I am a Bui Doi, I said.
I know what that means, she said and she wasn’t laughing when she said it.
Dust collector whispered Tran.
An old man with heavy ropes eating his shoulder skin, tendons and bones pulled a wooden cart filled with bags of cement down the street. His rhythm, cadence and rubber sandals slapping pavement burned his energy doing his daily labor inside the people’s labyrinth surrounded by horns, cycles, cars, bikes, push carts and pedestrians as he strained forward, shoulder muscles bouncing, flexing, extending his action, thick thigh muscles grinding his momentum like a shark always forward.
Iceman arrived with his cart and long crystal blocks. He sawed ice into manageable chunks and carried bags of frozen water into the cafe. Light glimmered crystals.
A man in a white government shirt stood on the sidewalk picking his teeth with a sliver of wood demonstrating his ability to eat food.
It’s a slow gradual invisibility, said a witness at life’s moveable feast.
Today would be a good day to be a kite, I said to Ang.
You’re crazy, no one wants to be a kite, she said and I said, Maybe you’d rather be the string. She didn’t think this was funny.
Sure, I said, If you were the kite and others the string they would, could, should, control you, as a willing victim of circumstances outside your control with no free will. You’d have no responsibility, flying free.
Yes. I like having no responsibility except for myself.
You’d have free choice with amazing potential, I said stringing her along with The Analysis of Consequence.
Teach me something about photography she ordered in a domineering tone because she was small powerful AND angry with repressed regret because her mom abandoned her for economic reasons to work in a town 150 clicks north so Ang went to school to be a lawyer, to hopefully immigrate to England someday and attending daily karate practice with displaced aggression while taking care of her spoiled whining 11-year-old brother then her older sister had a baby and it meant more housework for Ang as a domestic servant being younger so she was frustrated at the mean dirty tricks life played on her.
I have a camera on my phone, she said. Advice?
Move slowly. Incorporate your karate skills into street movement. Practice. Be. See. Shoot a lot. Always have your camera ready. Anticipate. Try new angles and see geometric patterns of light. Paint with light. Prowl the streets. Ignore the main event. Focus on the spectators. Shoot through things and get close enough to touch your subject, dance around your subject, use RAW format.
I grabbed my Leica, got down on hands and knees angling between bamboo chairs, framed, composed, exhaled and squeezed the imperceptible impeccable shutter. The image of bamboo lined close to the eye, depth of field, legs, and blurred feet. Visual metaphors. See?
Yes, thanks.
It’s like karate or sex, I said. Practice. Do it 10,000 times until you get it.
A man walked by. He saw a foreigner with a local girl sitting on a bench near the Lake of Swords. Milk him, he joked. Ang walked over and severed his spinal cord in a blue flash of beauty and dexterity. He crumpled, dying instantly.
She sat down. That’ll teach him. A blind man with a cart collected the body. Physicians at Peoples’ Hospital #4 dissected the cadaver to recycle organs. Where do the eyes go, asked Doctor Death. In the eye bag, said a blind nurse.
See Beauty and Cruelty without hope or fear with a sense of humor, said Tran balancing on his strong leg in deep shadows.
What is the purpose of Beauty, asked Rita. Beauty held up her mirror, See for yourself flaneur.
