Animist Cemetery - Ice Girl

Chapter 20.

Ice Girl said: North of Banlung in a remote jungle village along Heart of Darkness they carve images of their dead.

  The Chunchiet animist people bury their dead in the jungle. Life is a sacred jungle. Animists believe in the universal inherent power of nature world. The Tompoun and Jarai, among animist world tribes have sacred burial sites. 

  The Kachon village cemetery is one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok River from Voen Sai. It is deep in the jungle.

  The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site. The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell. In their spirit story dream the shaman meets LOTH, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief says sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy LOTH. It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.

  After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, carve wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a festive week long celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village. New tombs have cement bases and carved effigies with cell phones and sunglasses. Never out of touch.

  See your local long distance carrier for plans and coverage in your area. The future looks brighter than a day in a sacred jungle.

  Fascinating, said Leo.

  Walking is the best form of travel, said Ice Girl. Take your time quickly.

  The paved road from Pakse, Laos to NE Cambodia is made for tourist buses, said Leo.

  A rusty red and white metal border bar weighted by rocks in a bucket netted by twisted wire hangs suspended. The VIP double-decker candy cane colored bus is packed with babbling European flash packers destined for the 9th Century at Angkor Wat. They have a long way to go to get back in time. They are doing SEA.

  The more they see the less they know, said a shaman.

  The efficient busboy hands out departure and arrival forms, collects passports, a $2 Lao departure fee, a $25 Cambodia visa fee and $2 entry fee. He takes everything to a Lao shack. The border bar goes up. The bus rolls through no-man’s land at the speed of a snail. 

  Being landless is fun, dramatic and exciting. No country, no documents, no money, no food, no medicine, no family, no friends, no chance. Abandoned on a strip of soil.   

  A female Cambodian health care worker wearing a facemask and official shirt patch gets on the bus. Pointing a small medical toy gun into each face, she registers body temperature.  

  Someone said, “If you’re sick you stay here.”

  “On the bus?”

  “No. Between countries. On the road.”

  Sounds like a novel.

  Crossing a border is a transcendental act.

  On the C side it’s business as usual. Immigration shacks, money changers, women hustling fried food, beverages, fruits, naked children, scavenging emaciated dogs, ripped cell phone umbrellas and haggard tourists drinking H2O waiting for the boy to return with passports.

An incomplete grandiose empty glass and brass Cambodian immigration building with fake Angkor temple motifs surrounded by landmines signifies exotic investment.

  Money = tourism and tourism = money. 

  Stung Treng in Ratanakiri province is 87 clicks south along the Mekong. Tourists pass through this small faded colonial town. They have a schedule. Time chases them, Hurry up! Hurry Up! You’re going to be late for an important date. Get a move on.

  Leo visited Mekong Blue, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center. Fifty women are trained in a six-month silk weaving course. They harvest, dye and create silk textiles. It is a UNESCO award winner for superior quality, creativity and originality. 

  They have Mulberry trees for leaves. Worms eat the leaves. Their saliva makes yellow cocoons. Saliva becomes a protein and stronger than steel. They boil silkworm cocoons to extract raw yellow silk. One thread is 300 meters long.

  It is separated into soft and fine threads. Women dye the threads using natural materials: banana (yellow), bougainvillea (yellow), almond leaves (black), lac insect nests (red and purple), prohut wood (yellow and green), lychee wood (black and gray), indigo (blue), and coconut (brown and pink).

  Women also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on silk threads prior to dyeing and weaving. It is called HOL with 200 motifs.

  The center improves the women’s standard of living. It breaks the cycle of poverty through vocational training and educational programs. They have a primary school with thirty-five kids and two teachers. Everyone receives lunch. It is the single biggest employer in town after the government.

That’s so cool, said Ice Girl.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Lao Dwarf - Ice Girl

Chapter 19.

At that moment following a 90-minute chakra body massage in Luang Prabang, a Disneyland of world heritage culture filled with French and German and Italian babbling idiots staggering on medical canes while craning arthritic necks toward cold European winter memories and grasping creased maps filled with blood red dots depicting guesthouses and casinos featuring obsessive oval tongued storytellers without maps, canes, awkward packs, widows, orphans, or land mine survivors piloting bomb boats down the Nam Ou river and recycling Grade A ordinance, a foreigner put a pile of gold on a table in Laos. He turned to a one-eyed squinting old man. “I will give you this pile of gold for your daughter.”

  “I want more,” said the man. “Her face and body and heart are Lao. She has Vietnamese blood. It’s supply and demand. Business is business. Politics is business and business is politics. It’s all about value. No plastic. Cash only. See this machete?” waving it in the man’s face, cutting him off.

  Nearby, two American males hadn’t decompressed. Trying to communicate in complete sentences was impossible. One released sounds, nouns, impressive words, past and present participles, guttural phrases, heavy deep real sentences and, like a game of chess, war or blind love showing no respect, the OTHER cut him off at the throat with a sharp sophisticated verbal annunciated machete.

  Frustrated and grimacing, he suffered severe irreparable brain damage. Short circuit. Transmission lines went down. Thud. Crash. Burn.

  The two Yankees were fresh off the banana boat. They’d sailed out of NY, past the oxidized tall green torch lady, diverted through the Suez Canal, picked up palm oil in Goa, and translated the lack of wind into thermal icecaps near Ceylon surveying tea plantations harvesting vast green high grade qualities of pure logic in a scientifically approved coherent genesis. The ship’s captain texted his mistress in Kuala Lumpur, “I’ll be late for dinner.”

She was engaged to a dour celibate hypocritical monk disguised as a novice meditating in an isolated cave on the Tibet-Bhutan border at 21,451 feet. She missed his calm sense of (purpose) intention and clear motivation. She prayed he’d complete his destiny to be One With Everything, leave the cave and travel south living fearless inside fatigued winds to meet her at an undisclosed location. This was her secret desire, wish, dream and consistent memory. 

   She imagined him bargaining his flesh-covered skeleton in a brief temporary life condition. He negotiated passage using Sumerian script etched on clay tablets. Brushing shard dust off shard dust revealed time-lines, sharp indentations, incomplete circles, zigzag lightning bolts and fingerprints of whirling dervish dancers. 

  Whorls reflected afternoon light into somnambulistic retinas.

  A middle aged male Laotian dwarf in a well cut gray suit coat, black baggy pants and sturdy green army issued tennis shoes walked past. Pink sky streaked sunset. He’d been walking all day. His stride was steady. Other than a bowl of noodles near the Mekong he’d been raising dust. He was headed home, passing golden Wats, shimmering pots of food cooking on clay burners fired by kindling, blaring TVs, noisy greasy engine repair shops, bamboo pavilions and a sleeping tuk-tuk driver. 

  He passed a teashop chalk sign:

Smile. We Will Help You Practice.

  He walked across a narrow red iron bridge above a river and down a dusty road to his bamboo home complete with a single watt bulb surrounded by dancing omnivorous insects.

  His shoes went near the door. Slapping his jacket against a wall released day’s dust. He hung it up. He splashed water on his face and smiled at his incomplete reflection. He poured a cup of green tea, ate a handful of sticky rice and prepared his table. 

  He spread out a large sheet of rough handmade beige paper, camelhair brushes and black ink.

  Memory spoke: After they cut my tongue out during my Re-education through shit labor experience I started writing script. I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire.

  I added a little water to a recessed gray stone surface. I placed the ink in the center. Then, using my right hand, as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me, I rotated the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid as a drop of water rippled a pond.

  After collecting ink I picked up my long thick brown brush with white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper. I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, with my left palm flat on the table and fingers spread.

  I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink and slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess. I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality and character. There are 5,000 characters in my written language.

  My Chinese script is about unity of mind and spirit. I have much to see and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I know. The more I see the less I know.

  My teacher recited a poem.

A mountain loses its spirit without cloud,
loses its peculiarity without stones,
loses its elegance without trees,
and loses its life without water,
and in painting,

one should concentrate the mind,
and hold the breath,
with concentration of the mind,
serenity is maintained, with the breath held up,
preciseness is attained.

One should be as serene as an old monk in meditation and be as precise as a silk worm in spitting silk.
The spirit and real fun of painting are from nature and beyond brushes and paints.

  I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness. I centered my unconscious on the blank paper filled with nothing. Respect the white emptiness.

  My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus. I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit. Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

  Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

  My useless tongue flapped like a prayer flag in Himalayan winds. Stories and songs are nightingales. I heard children laughing and singing. They greeted each other in the babble of playful nothing with laughing word pearls.

They dream with their eyes open. When we are asleep we are awake.

  Life gave me art and I used art to celebrate life.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Life Lesson #5 - Ice Girl

Chapter 18.

I’m a big seven as in 7, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator.

  Your life is a test. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear.

  My dad’s not very smart. It’s probably his DNA. A string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

  Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season here in Vientiane. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

  Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

  It’s amazing what people do when they have nothing to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. Anyway I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

a) people who make things happen

b)people who watch people make things happen

c) people who don’t know what the fuck is going on

  My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every day is a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

  Grandfather stares at rain collecting in pools.

  Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

  My mom’s also really smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

  After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

  It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

  When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

  Mom ignores me mostly. She’s very busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kind later.

  People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

  Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

  Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

  The trick is to tolerate, with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

  The kid continued: For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

  I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

  This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

  Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, expensive medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know?

  Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

  A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

  How do you build self-control and grit, asked Leo.

  Through failure, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

  What are they?

  Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

  Thanks for the life lesson, said Leo. You are the future of Laos.

Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Life in Laos - Ice Girl

Chapter 17.

Banlung was 100 degrees with no clouds. The landscape was flat. Intermittent rolling parched Eastern hills led to a shimmering blue volcanic lake and cool shade.

To the north The Heart of Darkness flowed strong. Impenetrable jungles bordering Laos sheltered animists and cannibals.

How’s life in Laos, asked Ice Girl.

  A French doctor in Luang Prabang told me this, said Leo. He’s lived there six years. He has a young son and daughter with a Lao woman. He invested time and money to develop a guesthouse. They expanded to five properties.

They had problems. Her extended family smelled a huge profit. She threw him out. She wanted all the land. I saw her when she brought their daughter to a pre-school where I played and learned from kids. They were both fat and unhappy.

  So how does it work in Laos, said Ice Girl. You didn’t answer the big quest-ion from a small person.

  Men make the rules, said Leo. Women take care of the home, kids and money. It’s all unspoken subtleties. They do their thing. Women worship in the temples. They do their meditation. Men sit around getting drunk, discussing new night girls, ethics, morality and behavior.

  What happened to the French man and kids?

  He plotted a way to get them out of the country. He let her keep the land and buildings.

  Many people never leave their village, asked Leo. Why?

  Everything we have is here. A village maintains the other world.

  The world is a village.

  Good things happen when you take risks, she said. You risk expanding your perception. You risk losing everything in the expansion. Are you prepared to lose everything? I know the feeling, said Leo. They killed my family. I’m sorry, she said. We have to accept loss forever.

  What is the most beautiful word you know, she said?

  Kindness. And yours? Food.

  Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, she said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach magical levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.

  The asylum is a prison and protection, said Leo.

  You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, she said cutting crystals.

  Make the right choice for the wrong reason, he said.

  Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, she said.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Li - Ice Girl

Chapter 16.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I am H’mong. I speak excellent English.

I finished nine years of school in my village and learned what I really needed to know on the street. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. I use really a lot. As someone said, “You don’t want to let school interfere with your education.” 

Tourists visit Sapa. It’s in the mountains close to China. I’ve never been to China. I met a boy named Leo who used to live there as he passed through life as we all do. He said he had a crappy job there.

Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. Plan the dream and dream the plan. 

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC or Bang Cock. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese stuff. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh because you can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses 2) they wear bright red tour baseball hats so they don’t get lost 3) they travel in packs like scared animals 4) they stay in local government hotels and eat at local Vietnamese places 5) they ignore you.

No, I’m talking and I speak excellent English about the foreigners. We, my friends and I, who work the street selling, politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. It’s such a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. Tourists find and travelers discover is what I say.

Li

They have a vacation schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? They eat, sleep, wander around and maybe take a trek to a local village and then, POOF! like magic they disappear. 

And then the tourist machine spits out more tourists and visitors for us to sell to, pester and offer treks to our village.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels (H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses) charge a tourist $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get 10 people. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy only gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet them the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They sit and talk with people. They take some snaps.

Then we walk trails through pristine forests, through rivers, along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal direct with the tourists and trekkers.

I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman. Ha, ha.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza. With cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

  It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical viewfinder box. What’s up with that?

Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live and work, play and evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don't leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa overnight. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than going all the way home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It’s simple. Beds and toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work.

I’m a great little trek leader. I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do. Nature is my teacher. 

Life is good in Sapa. See you in the next life.

Ice Girl in Banlung