Frozen Memory

After Saigon, Leo walked to Sapa in NW mountains.

Talking monkey tourists from Hanoi are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance / screw and buy cheap imported plastic products, said Mo and My, H’mong storyteller sellers.

Day trippers are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts and lost eyes. They run to stand in front of a Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore us.

A woman tourist slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at my work: a handmade belt, a colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than Mo.

She is surrounded by a chorus. “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!” 

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers selling fake watches, cheap pants, shirts, hats and knickknacks.

Eyes scan colors, fabrics and faces.

A park has baby red roses. A dusty historical statue stares at brackish fountain water.

Red Dzao women have bags and threaded samples spread on the ground.

“Do you want to buy from me?” said one smiling with gold teeth.

“Yes. I want to buy the mountain.” Leo pointed to the rising green western forest, steel gray granite slabs, deep shaded valleys and gray clouds skimming peaks around high deep edges rolling toward them.

“Ok,” she said. “I will sell you the day mountain for 10,000 and the night mountain for 10,000.”

“Ok. It’s a deal.”

School kids in uniformed mass hysteria and deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial skin drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs fuck on the street in front of the church where tourists gather for a photo shoot.

Local women armed with cameras they rent by the day selling images, reflections, memories and dreams poke and prod women, husbands, boys and girls into groups for the moment. The decisive moment they will remember forever.

Their image will collect dust near a votive candle altar and burning innocent incense feeding, appeasing dead hungry ancestral ghosts. Caught in time. Frozen alive.

Eat Fast or Starve

Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots.

He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.

They connected dots forward.

Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.

Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery.

They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in village shoe factories years and lives away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows.

Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.

Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' gazing befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.

Laughter is perfect survival therapy.

After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus.

It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.

“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”

“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.

Lombok

I climbed through the center of Bali

inside magical light

past a sacred volcano at Lake Batur

with a small portable typewriter

a map carved on narwhal bone

a roll of scented four-ply toilet paper

codices or painted books and texts

on bark paper called Amate

and cactus fiber including

palimpsest animal skins and dialogue of Mayan origin.

My hair caught fire.

Gathering flames I lit a piece of bark for guidance.

I mixed volcanic ash with water creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm of antioxidants.

I applied this to my skin to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors.

Land Mines

Below 5* hotels at the House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, welfare, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C in her crying heart, a 10-year old Cambodian girl stared up at mirrored skyscrapers watching the Wheel of Life flash prisms into sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported 300-count Egyptian threaded linen. No lye. A thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage.

She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one leg after discovering a land mine on her way home from school. Her t-shirt screams:

Beware of Land Mines

She wears a permanent tear on her left cheek.

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 16 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Too many died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap.

A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He suffers from denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world.

My village is the other world.

Where do you live?

I am one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines remaining from some ongoing or forgotten conflict.

I love unpleasant facts.

I am a walking, talking, breathing encyclopedia of knowledge and wisdom.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries. It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

I hear children crying. Doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from my skin. I cannot raise my bandaged hands to cover my ears. Perpetual crying penetrates my heart. Blood tears soak my skin.

The technical mine that took my right leg off that fateful day as I walked through pristine rice paddies near my village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around me.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Perhaps it was a plastic Russian PMN-2.

I never saw it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot me up with morphine.

All strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

Standard issue.

April 4th is International Day for Mine Assistance.

Jungle Story

Once upon a time in the long now there was a continent, a landmass floating on water. White barbarians called it Asia on dusty maps. Deep inside Asia were vast lands, rivers and mountains.

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and an insatiable appetite for diverse languages and cultures lived in jungles and forests.

Jingle, jangle, jungle.

Using natural materials villagers created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played and learned life lessons from nature with extended families. 

One day a boat filled with white men sailed up river to a village deep in the jungle.

They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people could not understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared everyone. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

Every day more white people came up river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their evolution on other continents.

Their mantra was: cheap labor, cheap raw materials, cheap goods, cheap markets and much profit.

White people said, we are civilized and you are savages. We have religion. It is called Wealth & Greed. We are on a mission from the great chief. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want.

The village gave them hospitality, shelter and friendship.

The white men took control of the village, people and jungle. Every day the white men marched their slaves deep into the jungle singing, “We control Nature. We shall overcome.”

They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided people against people. Divide and conquer. History taught barbarians well.

They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every raw material of value. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

If we want to survive we have to move to a new jungle far away, said the village shaman.

This is the story they told their people one night below stars singing with their light.