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

Cheap Thrills in Turkey - TLC

Editors note: Considering the fake coup in Turkey and massive number of people laid off, arrested and intimidated by the governement's fear tactics this exceprt from The Language Company bears witness.

Creative non-fiction.

Lucky heard dull Turkey talk accept pervasive inherent genetic sadness weighing hearts, minds and futures. Big time. Victimized by fate mothers sang, “Be well darling you can always come home.”

I am thirty+ and still live with my parents, said a male child sitting on the human supply side scale of justice.

Humiliation is obese.

Independence & freedom in Turkey is a foreign concept.

Click your diamond heels together three times. I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.

Domestic violence is a REAL social problem. Guns will not solve it. Giresun stores are filled and killed with guns. Boys carry them. Men carry them. Women pack them. Kids play with them. Police are everywhere. Visual intimidation with artificial insemination lives breathes and procreates.

Gravediggers love steady unforgiving work. Look at my hands said one turning a shovelful of metaphors and observations. I know two things.

There are no things only facts, said Z and that’s the truth.

Everyone talks at once. No one listens - same as Cambodia, Yeah, yeah with a side order of indigence.

It’s biological DNA malfeasance.

Men constructed an oil platform in Giresun harbor, the cheapest port along the BS. Pump money into economy.

A giant erector set. Takes a month, Derrick. Pull it out to see. Drill. Pump black gold.

Pump me baby. By low sell high. The more you drill the more you bill. ABC.

That explains everything said a female student in Giresun speaking with courage and clarity why stupid immature men would rather spend their money on fancy designer clothes, expensive cell phones and go hungry.

Thread follows needle, said Kairos.

Ah, said Lucky, artificial life. Yes, said Courage dancing with Curious, it’s insecurity, ego and fake visual abundance.

A muttering Giresun man stopped Lucky on the street. Look at my shiny patent leather shoes, crisp shirt and chrome-plated self-winding geodesic dome watch and lambskin leather jacket. See my new 45-caliber automatic. It holds a clip joint of fifteen. The only magazine I read is loaded with armor piercing titanium bullets. Look at my luxurious cell phone. Are you jealous? No? Ok, I am calling my mother.

- Hi mommy dearest, watches for lunch? Did you clean my room with your sad broom? Did you make my favorite manta meal slathered with greasy hazelnuts and wet yogurt? What’s for dessert? Turkish delight? You can’t be serious.

(Mom yaks....)

- Yes, yes, yes, bye mother, yes I love you and I will love you forever and a day. You are my world. Leave a light on. I’ll be later than never.

He turned to Lucky. Want to buy some time mister? Look at this big shiny fake gold watch. See idle hands sweep time. Cheap. For you I make special price. Brings me good luck.

Thanks, said the stranger, I have all the luck I need and your luck is running out faster than a cloud obscures a sundial in the sands of time.

I don’t get it, said Idiot. I am good at two things: eating and sleeping. Whining and juvenile bravado is a close 3rd oh and one more thing, taking Xanax improves my attitude, personality and character disorder. You don’t say, said Lucky.

Men and boys played chicken on narrow steep sidewalks. Non-verbal said, Get out of my fucking way or I will kill you with my cheap 45. Resistance is futile.

Buy the text, yelled educational robots. We eat grammar breakfast, lunch and dinner. We need grammar to pass an examination and get a certificate so we can file for unemployment. We paid for our innate stupidity.

Bend over said Deep State.

That’s an unpleasant fact, said face2face. 

The Language Company

Shit Detector - TLC 44

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends.

Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said Zeynep.

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and landmine survivors in Cambodia and Laos. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction-from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station. Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

The Language Company

Live Twice

Greetings,

"You only live twice. Once when you're born and once when you face death."                                                   - inscription on a Zippo lighter at the HCMC museum.

 

I see history. Struggles, wars, debris, artifacts, diagrams, maps, tanks, planes, final assault plans, old cars used to haul the dead, dying, wounded, ammunition; statues of men making making pistols, old medical equipment, typewriters for propaganda material, flags, posters, pamphlets, burning monks (1963), photos, villages, corpses, soldiers, politicians, dog tags, gas masks, knives, weapons, tools, radios, helmets, baskets, pots and pans, shoes, shirts and...

Metta.

Means of Production - knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer control elephant, stick

Thich Quang Duc protesting against the policies of President Ngo Dinh Diem, 1963.