The Language Company - C 1

“Mother had me before polio condemned her to an iron lung. She had another boy, lived in a wheelchair and produced a daughter with Irish will power. I survived in a dystopian dysfunctional family coping with physical and emotional abuse. Whippings, sadistic beatings, trauma and abandonment, the usual childhood shit. Feeling guilt for her illness I developed stone cold manipulation skills and independent survival skills. Trust in woman was MIA.

"Vietnam is a woman. We fucked them during the day and they fucked us at night. Love them and leave them. Abandoned ones become abandoners. Mother died at forty-two. My sister died of leukemia at thirteen. Only the good die young. She taught me courage. By chance do you have any?”

“It’s rarer than something that doesn’t exist. Courage is an intangible feeling of wellbeing and supreme confidence. You know this from your mind full Tibetan experiences. I sense you are a stream-winner. Sensation, perception, desire, fear, and ignorance ceased. Frequency shifts. Transformations. What happens to dreams The Sweeper collects?”

“They are sorted by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime scientific symbolic meaning.

“Word dreams live in vignettes, jazz poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, blood, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings near Benaojan, Spain hearing hollow bells ring high ring low as a Cambodian boy in satori clapping with one hand drags his cart along fractured dusty red roads collecting cardboard. Dawn to dusk. Composing musical symphonies he squeezes a plastic bottle expelling stale air attracting garbage contributors and hungry literary agents in a traditional publishing casino wheeling and dealing for their glorious 15%.”

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner stirring tea.

Sappho, poetess

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.

Chinese history teacher goes home - TLC 7

Leo’s history teacher wrote in her journal - Ah, what a marvelous summer. I don’t make much money you understand so I use it wisely. Family is everything. To avoid relationship clashes of dynastic proportions I shelled out $200, a third of my salary for a round-trip train ticket home. After paying the university an exorbitant rental fee for my drab, cold apartment plus electricity and water, I had enough left for soggy onions, fresh spinach, tofu, rice and oranges.

Home is where the heart is. Well let me share a little advice about that. Singing the blues life's way of talking, I lugged my broken suitcase, guilt, shame and duty home to hearth and kin. Whew.

I am overwhelmed by the heavy burden of my family's expectations. After fulfilling my academic responsibilities meaning pass everyone or face dire consequences as ordered by university authorities whom or who will, for the sake of Social Stability and Harmonious Educational Reform Committees remain faceless, nameless and totally obscure, I escaped my prison sanctuary.

Train stations along the way were packed with migrants, laborers and prostitutes without a wing, hope or prayer. Mothers and fathers formed concentric protective circles around solitary children to prevent thieves. Stolen kids are a huge underground economy. People pay $3,500 or more for a boy. Princelings. They have high value in our new economy. Stealing, shilling, selling, buying children is how life works. Life is cheap here.

Accelerate baby production comrades, exclaim Stalinist loudspeakers.

It took twenty-two long, tedious hours sitting in hard seat with three transfers before I reached my province bordering North Korea where, across Time’s river, twenty-four million free starving people ate grass as liberated women scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes sang:

Hail our Great Leader!

Speaking of work, I need to run. My past is chasing me. I must help mother with cleaning, shopping and timeless chores. If I don’t perform my filial duties she may threaten to sell me to a marriage broker. I live in perpetual fear. I’ll return to my artificially inseminated alter-ego teacher existence next week. After reporting back for duty I will file another illuminating report. Thank you for your attention.

Big Time - TLC 13

One curious phenomenon in Turkey was the predominant and fashionable Big Time watch.

Big Time displayed itself in grandiose opulent design styles, rainbow spectrums and analog displays. He observed huge pieces illustrating manifestations of invisible time delighting wrists with panache and glamour. Frequent sightings of super-sized chromatic sundials featured a Kurdish weight lifter struggling to keep time overhead. For the majority of volunteer wage slaves heavy time dragged them through life.

A sweeping second hand swept piles of debris stranded on corners past idle bored women studying their undulating singular reflection in store windows between numerals 12 and 6.

A wild rabbit dragging a pocket Watch Out down Dreamtime Street yelled, “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date, no time to say hello, goodbye, I'm late, I’m late, I’m late.”

Rabbit passed Curious, a Chinese linguist at the intersection of Imaginary Fear & Enlightenment.

“What are you doing?” said Rabbit.

“I am begging people to open their head, heart, mouth and get to the verb. Where are you going in such a hurry Mr. Rabbit?”

“Through the looking glass.”

“May I go with you?”

“Do you have courage?”

“Yes. It's my most important virtue.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye. Let’s share an adventure.”

TLC 

Deal - TLC 39

Downcast broken Turkish females wearing too much foundation makeup portrayed a beautiful face above a big behind tomorrow as merchants hung Ottoman carpets, caressed friendships, soles, heels and leather working tools.

A one-eyed Bursa shoemaker sharpened his utilitarian knife. One blind brown eye reflected Winter Hawk’s wings in rods, cones, a retina, iris, and cornea. He heard unemployed grizzle-faced men in a nearby teahouse slap cards on a green felt table.

Shoemaker in his small blue shack threaded uppers to lowers. His steel Blade Runner revealed reflections. He smashed his left hand on a window sparking conversations with a wealthy barefoot beggar seeking alms.

Another day dead he flicked a yellow switch extinguishing a single bulb. Carrying his bent arthritic back he shuffled across fresh packed sticky asphalt into a diner for rice, beans, coarse bread and brown tea.

A silver teaspoon tinkled glass music.

A player shuffled a deck.

Your deal, said Omar the blind.

Wind-spirits turned a page.