the last a thing a fish knows
is water
light bird song
she remembered struggling in Shanghai
with no formal education
searching for the perfect love
writing her story in Chinese
following her heart
after the rush of stimulation orchid
settled down into lassitude
misfortune wedding children
polite monosyllabic conversations
Greetings,
The bent nail gets hammered down, yelled a Chinese teacher next door to my classroom.
The Maija artist accepted the photo from the grieving relative set up his easel, using a magnifying glass to see the face, using a pencil to capture the 8x10 likeness. On the chipped plaster walls were examples of his work; peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives and young and old Pioneer communist members with tight, tight red scarves knotting their necks suffocating their passion.
Today he was sketching an old unsmiling stoic woman. A sad resigned peasant. These were people who had suffered. They’d suffered at the hands of the nationalists then the communists, then the new economic revolutionaries. The indignities of old age.
An old three-string wooden musical instrument hung on the wall near red streaks of paint inside this fine art museum. A black fly on the left shoulder of the artist rubbed its feelers together. Tasty.
An old man with his emaciated skeleton face and paper thin arms carefully opened a bag of tea and poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand. He dispersed this into an old chipped blue pot and added water. We shared tea watching the artist work. The artist was good. The likeness was close to perfect. The tea was delicious.
The same kind of images decorate the altars in Vietnam. They sit in various temples around the cities. Death is a big deal. Ancestor worship.
Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge all the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths and request a little peace and quiet? On anniversary death days they meet all the other ancestors inside narrow mazes of alleys where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicious liquids drain into punctured cement holes flowing along narrow passageways slanted toward the middle where voices become echoes? Yes.
The dead formed a rubber stamp committee to address family noise. ‘It’s come to our attention dear comrades, dear people, dearly beloved family and friends...that we have a communication issue here in the neighborhood.’
‘Silence! We are trying to sleep. The long peaceful and restful sleep. Leave us be.’
Metta.
Greetings,
Inside every family’s deep dark Hanoi space was a main room and altar for dead relatives, candles, fruit, burning incense a spirit food, and the black and white and color images reminded me of the Chinese artist in Maija, the poor pig village near the Fujian university where I lived for two years riding my bike across hills up and down narrow dirt back roads,
watching butterflies mate in the dust, old people threshing rice in fields, a woman lugging piles of white cauliflower to market in her bamboo baskets suspended on a bamboo poles, down long small tight dusty paths past athletic shoe shop sweat shop factories filled with morose girls and women hunched over threading clacking Butterfly machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until I reached a narrow street to sit drinking Chinese green tea with a man in his little shop.
Further up the hill were small wooden shops with appliances, family market stalls, street food, electrical stores and butchers. In a small mud and brick place was an artist. His job was drawing pictures of dead people.
After someone died a relative gave him a common small black and white image, the kind from 1949 when the country declared itself free, independent, and open with 3 Represents and benevolent Chairman Mao (our grandfather bless his heart) smiled at the masses.
Before he told the peasants, “Eat Grass.”
It was an image used throughout their life: in documents for residence, work, school and party politics. The people had the three iron rice bowls. A guaranteed living space, guaranteed work unit, and guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal. Everyone was treated the same, wore the same clothing, said the same thing and followed the leader, like kids playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade.
Metta.
Greetings,
One day I’m sitting in the garden balcony. There’s an invisible guy next door and they have an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids, like the man yelling at his infant until the kid balls. Tears stream until mother rescues her darling from the emotional abuse. Yelling affects their self-esteem and their well being. Children will learn how to reject this yeller. How to close down.
They, in turn will learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They will be passive, then turn on the yell. As they age they turn off. They turn off their ears. Their ears are assaulted non stop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reaction recreation speaks.
The adult savors this power. It’s a throwback to his parents, a generation raised with fear and intimidation and suspicion and insecurity and poverty and informers and empty promises and empty hope and loud voices. Some voices are real and some are pure nightmares.
Hope is the last thing that dies, yells his wife. Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with the infants. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You will raise them to yell with the best of them.
They will yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep cackling crows breaking palm branches sending shivers down your spineless self pity, with regrets and anger and fear manifesting inside narrow tight lives under long florescent lights, this shattering glare.
They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers. They will bury you and take your photo to the artist who will memorize your face. They will look you in the frozen face and give you offerings of fruit and water. They burn incense so your spirit has something to eat, so it will not be angry and return yelling, demanding, pleading.
One day in the not-too-distant future your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, then words, phrases, sentences called talk, then louder until they will achieve the decibels required to re-join the family. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.
Someone - a parent, boss, lover, stranger - will yell at them and they will ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the human, beasts and gods. Old yeller will yell again, a little louder. No answer.
I wait for them to really get their yell going, louder says the listener, hiding inside silence.
Greetings,
Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barb wire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years.
The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat eternal spring walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, shards of glittering glass composed of miniscule myopic minimal, musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the Day.
Eventually the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels well below the surface of appearances. Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family all the way back to a dynasty encroaching on walls and shrines inside brown temples welcomed the silence. During the day they worked fields before going underground where nightingale arks brought carpet bombing, napalm, agent Orange. Forever.
‘Quick into the tunnels!’ They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath, their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.
The sweet silence, save all the crying, wounded after all the foreign devils packed and left, fleeing in terror as peasants streamed down from the mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking all the oceans in their creation myth, draining lands of blood, forcing them back into the sea. A blue green sea danced in blood.
This easing down of their voice flowing between crumbling sand, crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but the sound of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at the reality of life’s twisted reality. Their memory was a fiction and this fiction created their memory.
Metta.
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