Advice for Swedes (and other folk) travelling to Laos

First, don't worry about the bad things you may hear. You will not get blown up by leftover American bombs or hurled over a cliff in a mudslide or contract malaria.

It's true most of the roads are made of dirt, or if they're paved they're in a pretty sorry state- that is, if you like sleek new roads.

If you like rainy jungles and villages where no one's seen a camera and boys play a volleyball game with a homemade ball using nothing but legs and head, you'll like Laos.

Also if you aren't too worried about getting muddy, getting leeches, or getting anywhere fast, you'll like Laos.

If you aren't worried in general but like sitting at the foot of huge forested mountains eating bananas in a thatched roof bungalo to wait out the heat of the day, then Laos is for you.

Have you seen the pictures of the Lantaen, the Hmong, or the Akha people? If you don't know who they are now, as soon as you get to Northern Laos you'll find out.

Lantaen people are more beautiful than any fashionable women of Paris. They come to town on the backs of pickup trucks.

Don't let their hairdos scare you or their serious mysterious faces. It's just that they live so perfectly well in the jungle they don't need the same things you do to reassure them.

They walk, tall and lean, in the robes they make themselves out of the cotton and indigo plants. They wrap their calves in white and cover their bodies in deepest blue-black with fuschia colored trim.

If you're not afraid of their stretched-out ears and their wide set eyes you will start to love them and follow them discreetly whenever you see them. You will notice their long, slender necks and you'll figure out the elaborate way they set their hair in a clinging halo that vines up the back into a glossy bun, pinned with a silver coin.

Don't buy from the Akha women trying to sell you opium.

Don't buy their weed but don't mistreat them either. They are old and worn like tough leather. Don't buy them the beers they ask you for.

The twenty cent bracelets aren't so bad, the women spin the cotton themselves on their little handheld spindles that look like tops or double sided buddhist stupas.

When you get to Laos it doesn't matter what you do here. As long as you give up your insistence on being right you'll get along fine. Lao people speak softly so don't raise your voice to them or you'll look like an evil spirit.

Most boys hit puberty and are sent to the monastery till they're twenty or so which seems to make them gentle and quick to laugh as they get older. They love the Buddha and don't eat until someone gives them food, so give them food. The Buddha taught them mercy so they don't eat meat, so don't give them meat.

If you ask them they'll quickly tell you all about their lives. They've been training for three years. They have two brothers and a sister. They've never left the province. No, they don't like the town, they'll say, because there are too many women here.

They'll quickly ask you as well about your life and the world, and if you're at a waterfall they'll ask you where the water comes from. How the rocks were born. Why there are seasons some places but not in Laos. What makes earthquakes.

They'll ask you to come to prayers with them in the evening just after the rain, maybe, and the barefoot kids will chase you halfway to the temple laughing and shrieking out SABAI DEEE!!

Floor to ceiling and top to bottom Laos is a beautiful country, so your route's really less important than your state of mind.

Many travellers make the mistake of arriving in Laos by airplane and hopping between cities with airports. This is understandable because the highways are often mud strips and prone to problems (landslides, impassable goopy ground), but don't go their way. Laos isn't in the cities.

Laos doesn't live in those places you can drink cappuccino. It's out there across the river, past the first ridge of mountains and into the hazy horizon, out in the viny jungle you're scared of, yes, with the elephants and the people who hunt with slingshots.

You'll catch glimpses of it, easy, as you ride the slow rickety boats down the Mekong; as you sleep in the grass roofed huts where the crickets are louder than engines.

Read all you can before you come so you can be an educated and respectful guest-- but of course, that goes without saying.

Know the taboos so you don't break them, pointing your feet at people and showing off your nice tan shoulders and cleavage.

Learn the basic history so you more keenly appreciate the warm reception you find everywhere. Today's tranquil Laos is not the Laos of thirty years ago. Its green resurrection after ten years of agent orange and clusterbombs is a testament to the goodness of the people and the land, and perhaps to the might of Lord Buddha.

If you're travelling awake and aware you'll find all these things out yourself. The more you look for the more you'll see.

Just come to Laos with patience and plant yourself like a tree, rooting down and listening. Receive what you get with both hands open, and soon Laos will be there like an unexpected blessing, and it will never leave you no matter when you go back home.

Spitting Fire, Changing Face

In the Sichuan Opera there is, among other dazzling sights, a performance by the "Spitting Fire, Changing Face" magicians who rush out onto the stage from smoke and fanfare like multicolored demons. The two scariest ones blow huge plumes of fire from their mouths to the sound of gongs and old Chinese music.

The young ones leap and spin around like birds with sequined capes and elaborate headdresses, and with each clap of their hands or stomp of their feet and without touching anything they change their mask from red to blue, from a sad to an angry ghost face.

The music goes faster and the demons jump higher and kick and with each kick they change face again, to orange, to white, big-eyed green and red-rimmed black.

One after another they change their faces quicker than blinking and suddenly they're unmasked and smiling humans. Then again as they whirl around and back again it's the glowering monster, a surprised silver clown.

One came towards me and shook my hand and just as fast as I could give it to him he went from demon to man, and I was startled because i couldn't see anything at all that snapped his face up or down.

"No Chinese people know how they do it," said our friend afterwards as we walked home in the dark. "It's a family secret that's been passed down for thousands of years," he said, the secret of the Face Changers.

And so goes this country, changing faces as it dances around the wheel of earth. It pops up and now it's a menace, a tyrant, now a harmless old woman, a dreamer, a firebreather, a hermit, beggar, scholar, warlord; dancing all the time.

Underneath is something unchanging; the same stories told and the same gongs crashing through all the ruckus of time. Unmasked, it's the same girl smiling, playing her tricks, milennia old, and China knows this.

China knows all things have passed and will come again, and in this red dust, life is always the same.

at the bottom of china

Soon we'll leave this country and take away our pictures and our trinkets and tales. a month and a half along i'm used to china's foulest toilets and the long bus rides, the packed train cars, crossing the street boldly in front of oncoming traffic.

China's been good to us and hasn't thrown us over the cliffs, given us tapeworms or poisoned us in any way. We see the unfortunates dragging themselves down the streets, laying in puddles begging for change with their deformities exposed and shivering. We see the people scrounging up a living out of sticks and trash bins and the muddy grass by the rivers.

We see them, but China hasn't brought us low, she hasn't made us kowtow, we've lived with coffee and sugar every day and we've eaten on cloth covered tables high above the intersections with a window view.

But what about that little girl putting the sock-covered iron bar in her mouth, biting down and pushing up one leg, then another, straight in the air, grabbing her ankles and spinning, spinning fast as those cheap neon tops they whip in the square?

It seemed like no one was watching. They all hurried by before the downpour. It was thundering in a light cold rain.

She was there in the morning too, when I'd gone by hours before, and I wondered why she was alone there under the eaves of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. She was so small and it looked like she was playing, but no, her face was serious and her wide brown eyes were set. She was working out some problem, setting up some contraption.

What about that little girl? Where will she go? She'll stay here with the flies and the shoeshine men. She'll spin for the crowds who pass by pretending she's not moving. Sometimes old men will throw her a quarter. And in the winter that's coming will she do the same?

Lijiang is not what I expected. It's old, yes, and made of big stones and canals. And yes, Naxi people live here and sell handcrafted jewelry, paintings, carved doors and windows, yak horn pipes, and bricks of fermented tea. But they'd rather speak Chinese, one waitress told us, although she still speaks Naxi at home. She wants to learn English.

When they dress Naxi the young women wear red velvet vests and the old ones wear blue, with a sheepskin cape attached with white straps to prevent their baskets from hurting them as they walk loaded down with produce or firewood.

Almost no one reads their pictographs anymore, like the ones that are written on all four walls of the temple of the Dragon King where a huge bronze dragon sits and roars and people leave incense offerings and tobacco and fruits.

Here in the Naxi city the Chinese military parades every morning doing drills while the school children make their way to school. The Chinese people come by the busload, led by people carrying triangle flags, and they walk from shop to shop in tight groups, and they snap photos of themselves at famous places and of foreigners from the West eating noodles and pork cubes, and they spit and smile and get the lowest low price for all their yak meat and jade.

People flood into the old town of Lijiang and the Naxi girls wear their traditional clothes to serve in the bars and they sing pretty songs to get people inside, opening their wallets and dumping out yuan in puddles here, whirlpools there.

Strangers come to Lijiang for a few days and they don't know what's left behind in their wake; where little acrobats go to sleep at night, what the Naxi people talk about in their old Tibetan language, what real life is running its parallel course through these same stone streets.

What is Lijiang, really? I don't know, but it's not just this bustle and spectacle of wood work and red lanterns. They say it's 800 years old and the Himalayas begin just at the edge of town; that 200,000 Naxi live here and always have.

But there's another story behind this story and it has to do with street kids and coal mines and shirtless men with water buffalo. It has to do with dams and receding forests, with teenage girls wanting to speak English. It has to do with the Chinese army marching every morning in the square, and buses and dances for tourists and mostly it has to do with winter, with what happens in the winter.

Where does Lijiang go when it's still and quiet with snow? And when it dreams in the dark womb of December, does it still dance for the Dragon King, or does it dance for Chairman Mao's 100 yuan bill?

coal mines

I saw them dancing slowly
on the slag piles below the mouth of the coal mine
women and old people,
like they were trampling grapes over the Yangzi
where the land was all dead and brown

where the trucks lumbered up and down day and night
and load by load
the mountain gave way.
I saw them dancing slowly in the grey muck of rain by that
bleeding mountain, the sulphrous river.

They were sawing rocks for China
the coal was tumbling down the face of the mountain.
A dirty dog sat on top of a black coal hill
in the smoke and rubble while
The People danced on the bones of the land
slowly in a circle
sawing the rocks on the tortuous road to Lijiang.

the new black coal tumbled down the mountainside
and rested for miles on the backs of itself in the yangzi
and a penny colored stream rolled down it from
top to bottom, thin like a stream of tears that
didn't stop from sky to earth

and that land moaned
it moaned, couldn't they hear it as they circled, sawing,
digging, moving
ripping the mountains down
rock by rock

couldn't they hear it,
the agony of the giants
as they died forever

forgive them i prayed as the rains came
heavy
please forgive
for we know not what we do

a rainy day in Lijiang

In this brown town she's wearing a purple shawl and picking her way up the stone steps carefully in the rain as if on tiptoe. And the rock and brick and wood resonate with the sound of warm guitar though mid September's already got its chilly hat on, pulling the sweater tight.

I know the seasons are changing and chasing me south, but I can't yet admit it's not summer. Since July I've only slept in strange rented beds and watched spellbound as the land faded in and out of water and mountains, city and field and darkness or the lesser darkness of Chinese day. I've watched helpless as it all went on behind the speeding windows or right next to my body in some language everyone in the world understands but me.

Seeing the women with their baskets full of apples and split-open pomegranates, families huddled over steaming bowls of rice, the trembling branches and the small hopping birds, makes me lonely. It's lonely to hear them all singing while all I can do is smile, pull money from my pocket, eat and piss and open my umbrella when the thunder sounds.

September 10

Overnight, fall has come to Chengdu.

With the overcast skies a cool breeze blows around the city and it's just the knd that will be picking up brown leaves in a few weeks. Raindrops fall randomly and individually or in sets of three or four. The humidity is gone and last night in the dark street outside my friend's apartment I thrilled as i caught the scent of Barcelona as it rose from the pavement.

Maybe busy, happy cities rest at night when the roads are abandoned to dreams and the people stop walking and shouting. In the cool of autumn, in the quiet of the very early morning, maybe these festive, restive cities exhale the same fragrance which is half sickening and half sublime.

Chengdu is an unexpectedly enjoyable city that's kept us in her sway for 10 days; much longer than the quick stopover we'd planned. About 4 million people call Chengdu home.

If it's true that geography is destiny then Chengdu was fated to be a varied, relaxing and artistic city bursting with life. It's the last outpost before the steep Tibetan plateau takes over and the white sheet of the Himalayas tooth their silent way upwards, ensuring civilization must give up its relentless project at their gates.

Who can pass by that grand iciness without trembling? Everyone knows that land is where God says a mighty "No" to all but the hardiest, because She's busy there working; dreaming new continents, weaving her webs. The Himalayas are not to be disturbed.

At the extreme east of Sichuan lies one of the most fertile plains in all of China. Sichuan is home to 80 rivers, 7 minority groups, and countless mountains holding everything from Panda bears to rare azaleas and Tibetan macaques. It has cloud forest and semi-tropical gorges. It has rivers tamed 1300 years ago by monks who carved a huge red cliff face into the world's largest image of Buddha.

The countryside is green and healthy from the generosity of Sichuan's earth and sky. Here, even in the rush of city life, there's a certain serenity and content that's part of the tea house and mahjong culture, the cause or effect of trees and parks and rivers that define the space here. It's somehow wrapped up in the operahouses dotting the city where actors wear exquisite embroidered silk costumes and the most elaborate masks and headdresses, and they tell ancient stories to young and old as well as entertaining with comedy and amazing acrobatic and magic feats.

The Chinese say don't come to Sichuan when you're young, because you'll never want to leave. Maybe this was just an enticing rumor spread by a depopulated province, but more likely it's a proven, time-tested effect brought on by the gentle and lovely pace of life here.

Sichuan, more than any place we've been yet, has seemed like an opium dream. Things are just so nice here, why should we leave? It has trees wrapped with vines that grow moist roots out of their branches. We could easily stand here too, for a hundred years or so, by the river or at a mahjong table, in a gazebo in people's park, and i suspect we'd sprout some nubbly little roots too from our elbows and necks.

Sichuan is the size of France and it has food as spicy as Mexico. There's no end to its potholed roads through lost villages where people wear yak skin coats and blow strange horns. No end to the changes of its clouds over the mountains. It seems Sichuan has no end in time or space.

Maybe we stumbled into a hole somewhere and here we are at the bottom of the world- or was it the top of heaven? We'd love to stay in Sichuan because we're young and she's tempting. She has a lovely climate and fleets of bicycle rickshas to take you gently around the city. She's got her own wild monkeys. And wouldn't we like to know Tibetans? Meet the Quiang? See Moxi religious services, learn the Yi language and what it is they love?

Each bend in the river, each mountain valley is a new world.

nice god

All this time I've written like i loved everyone
like it was barrrrcelona or korea or tokyo
sichuan or mexico
that i loved like a lover

or it was a lover that i loved like a lover
but its just my lovely God that i love that's all these
mountains, fir trees, city streets
coffeeshops, beautiful and terrible things.

All along it's only been
God
playing around,
pouring out this music
and i've been desperate to hear it
swooning.

And sometimes more than others
i take off all my clothes and i peel off my old silly skin
and lose my hair in handfulls and i rush
a sack of bones and sinew
headlong at the cool waters below the precipice
(don't i, don't i do it
darling yes, i do)

i take off everything and run to God
to the arms of the one i love and say in a fit of faith

"i love you and always will,
i've known it was you all along,
everyday,
my jolly buddha,
my pierced christ crying

i've known it was you in Mary's upturned eyes,
in the empty winds of Shinto shrines,
in the canyon's vast night
in the fog and the rain,
in the lightningbugs
of my most blessed Eastern summers.

i've had you to drink day after day
and i've loved you and called you only water,
wine,
coca cola,
coffee,
oreo milkshakes,
but it was you all along,
you foolproof foolish thing

you're disgusting and glorious like me
you bleed and confuse like me
you're just a lover and a lovely thing

God you are free
like me"

and i leap and leap in the dark
it's for no good
it's for my delicate race to sanity
it's the end result of years of disbelief
and a lifetime of asking the questions
only an alien sees fit to ask

Chengdu.

Chengdu, Chengdu, Chengdu.
They say your name's really "chung-doo,"
but whatever it is you know i love you.
i love me in you,
i love your big, slow mirror telling me everything's gonna be alright...

isn't that what we all came for, came all this way for
to your streets that harbor everything

isn't travel just seeking out an empty vessel
a blank page a thousand miles wide,
wide as the sky,
wide as we wish our minds could be
but aren't anymore after the harsh hello of adulthood

today in chengdu is finally our stolen moment of Free.
And all day long i've just
walked with the songbirds and i've been
smiling at the little ones with their bums in the air
catching turtles in the pond.

i've been tapping and dancing
to the songs of the old ones with their hair put up
and pearls around their necks
and scuffed up worn out red shoes

i've loved chengdu and it's loved me right back like
fireworks or a waterfall
i've let myself open my arms and
sail off its little cliff

it's been a lovely day in chengdu or
its been a lovely day in Aja
in my eyes the weather's been fine

im strumming a guitar
there's no reason to fear or hope
or wish for anything other than what's at hand

to watch those karaoke women dancing and these men
belting out love songs with
big mouths full of sound.

there's no reason to leave and
nothing better than to sit and drink tea by this lake with the old men fishing
with the willow trees and the mahjong tiles clicking.

today everything rolled and laughed; even the ricksha drivers
seemed slow and placid.

I was a happy camper and hung my laundry piece by timely piece
above the courtyard
i watched the cigarrette smoke and heard the laughter from below
and wasn't it all a mood
wasn't it a glorious day inside my soul
wasn't it as bright as can be

Bright as any day can be.

out of Xi'an

We left Xi'an with a little stone of regret in our hearts. Our last day we asked a man hunched over his cigarette if he'd take us on his motorcycle ricksha to the temple of the Eight Immortals just past the eastern gate of the city.

He grunted at us and when we asked how much, he pulled out a big stak of bills and flipped through till he found a five. He pointed and held up four fingers and said "si."

The bike sputtered to life when he pulled up hard on the strin (like a lawnmower, Sky pointed out) and we were off, headlong into the chaotic stream of Chinese street traffic sitting in a handmade box held together by rusty bars that swayed perilously from side to side with each bump and shudder of the carriage. He kept smoking and it blew back in our faces along with the car and bus exhaust. We saw he had a crutch wedged into his seat just by his left hand.

We passed the city walls and men sitting in the dirty street doing nothing, spitting. We swerved around pedestrians in the tree-lined bike lanes that ran parallel to the street, and he said, "Ey, hey Ey!!" in his brusque way instead of using a horn.

He didn't stop for anything or anyone, not oncoming buses or bicycle rickshas carrying huge towers of bags, although they were pedaled slowly by skinny old men who strained their whole bodies with every awful downward push. Their bags were piled three times higher than they were tall, lashed down with plastic string to their little carts.

Our driver cursed and cut them off so close we could've pushed them over with our elbows.

He drove us onto the curb and over the sidewalk where some women had spread a sheet with sandals woven out of straw and other colorful things. People were moving everywhere all the time. Past the blue tarps where they were digging up the roads we got into a maze of funky alleyways tumbling over with people and their garbage, projects, animals, kids.

It was like taking a tour through a dream of China. We met so many eyes and lost them again just as fast. The sky and the buildings were concrete grey. An old man sat by a wall with its bricks exposed. He was dressed in white with a long white beard pointing at his belly and a fat white topknot on the crown of his head. His face was classic... he looked like Lao Zi before he got on his water buffalo.

The barrel ovens were on full blast with flames shooting out of their bottoms and wooden steamers on top. Men with hard hats and women with babies gave us long glances.

We sputtered along until he jerked the carriage over and stopped, his arm flung out to show us we'd arrived.

"Should we give him a tip?" we wondered. "Yeah, of course!! How about 6 yuan?"

We pulled out the extra yuan from our wallets and passed it up to him saying our thank yous with smiling faces. It was such a fun ride and we were in a pleasant mood.

He shook the money at us and was saying something gruffly, but we said, "no, really, keep the change. It's for you," as we climbed down out of the carriage.

He kept talking loudly as he clambered down off his seat and took up his crutch, and he followed us quickly on his one leg, and grabbed Sky's backpack and yelled that we owed him 15 more.

Sky was bewildered and gave him a ten and he yelled for five, and a crowd had already gathered and stood laughing and pointing. I said to them "does anyone speak English? A little English?" And the one-legged ricksha man bared his stumpy brown teeth and growled at us for more money.

I got angry and threw my hands at him saying, "NO NO NO NO NO!!!! NO NO NO!! You said it was 4! We gave you 15!!! That's twice as much as a real taxi! Fuck off! We won't pay you a dime! Go away!"

If i would've been more present of mind i would've taken back our ten and left him with five, but i was so mad he kept standing there yelling at us i didn't know what to do.

Finally we pulled away from him and went into the temple. We could hear him bellowing as we bought our tickets. Someone was arguing with him and he was yelling back like a wounded animal, like we'd mistreated him terribly.

The temple was beautiful.

China's a Crafty Lady

24 Aug 2006.

China's yelling at us all the time in her weird, throaty sing-song language.
She's spitting and wiping the sweat from her sun-browned brow.
She has a billion babies to look after and dirty little puppies snuffling along in the weeds with the chickens.
China's dusty and cranky and she always wants something. She chain smokes, she honks and curses and dresses only in red or in tatters that are well past any color.
China's growing smokestacks and nuclear cooling towers from all her limbs
she's waving them around chasing after us trying to get us to buy this necklace
plastic buddha with a sutra, good luck charm, only one yuan!!
ONE YUAN!!!!

Hello?!

Her eyes are brown in the whites and she
does this every day, she's a young woman who looks old and she's
an old woman
who asks for empty bottles, who has no shoes, whose stringy white hair isn't combed.
She's endless rows of sidewalk vendors, razors, tires, clothes no european would buy.
she's doing backflips at 6 years old dressed in bright orange, she's wrapping a chain whip around her skinny neck and snapping it through the air,
she's putt putt putting down the road in a tractor that's gonna break 10 years ago.
She's huge sticks of incense, she's fields of corn
she's angry, she can't stand up straight
she's working a scheme with mischief in her eyes.

China
she's sitting on a little stool playing mah jong
she's definitely in the street shining shoes, pulling teeth, fixing motors.

Shes a hustle-bustle cling-clang woman

she's got some temples
but she's got more dreams of riches than all the bodhissatvas in heaven.

she's lost and on the lookout, she's always been a push-and-shove lady.

she's got a suitcase full of tricks and a big banner that says
'Welcome to Deng Feng, National Sanitary City and National Excellent Tourist City"
though every word's a lie.

She doesn't really need soap, she's got amoebas in the water, she doesn't care
that her meat's got flies on it, that her milk's all spoiled.

She'll sell it anyway to some careless person,
she'll sell it and laugh that cigarette laugh and her kids will fall asleep
on wheelbarrows full of shoeboxes, they'll keep right on
peeing in the streets, shoving their way through traincars packed with people like livestock, yelling.

China's halfway up the mountain
flapping the stump of her arm
begging for alms.

She's got a digital camera and a lexus in Qingdao,
she's a movie star.

She's sitting on train tracks with a pointy hat on
and her rib cage showing just under her skin.

she's got a desert lapping at the door of beijing
a bulging wet belly ripped up by the hurricane and clouded with locusts
she's got a massive curved spine where every crop's died in the milennial heat.

She's lifting a big red star over the pagoda in Zhengzhou
right by the McDonalds where the man
paints calligraphy with brushes he's attached to a yellow helmet
he has no hands

her red star rises high and lights up at night
and the shoppers go out to the eight corners of the earth
and the vendors vend
and all her children make their living in the chaos way that she's given them

all her children live as long as they can and most of them are the color of dust
china's a mean mother and she doesn't mind seeing them
trample each other

she's a crafty lady,
she's known all the tunnels since long ago,
you can't fool her
but she still laughs and smiles at you
once in a while.

She does her best to keep a billion babies going
her billion hearts beating
she's barely got enough room to breathe or enough time even in eternity

but she keeps going.

somehow, even limping, thirsty, ground down almost to her own original dust
Mother China rolls on
honking her horns and trying to clinch that last deal.

if she gets it maybe she'll buy some dumplings
maybe a gun.
No one in the world knows what's next for her
and wild Mother China's not telling.

Goodbye, Korea.

August 11 2006.

Goodbye Korea with your fish smelling markets and flies eating watermelon.

Goodbye to your old brown women squatted in front of roots and vegetables, scraping the bark off with thin little knives.

goodbye to your bare feet on styrofoam box tops,

goodbye your wrinkled faces and bright white smiles.

Goodbye korea with your desert sun over rice fields

how's it happen that the land is so baked hard and still so green, such loud cicadas, big mosquitos.

Goodbye to your land and rolling hills and lovely rivers.

Goodbye to the big white birds at hazy sunset.

Goodbye Korea with your famous warmth, your beautiful tall girls, your strong handsome men.

Goodbye grains of rice in the color of every stone

and the lovely buddhist relics and the churches of today

like magpies in every city

roosting their red neon crosses on all the streetcorners and back alleys.

You smelled like sewage, Korea, your stairwells were full of beggars

you were loud on the highways and your trucks shook the sidewalks.

I'll miss your old men because they don't look kind

their gaze looks angry and powerful like tigers

but I wasn't afraid because Korea

your young men were kind and I know the old men

are just them grown old

having seen the bloody hell of war and times of poverty.

goodbye Korea

to all your imperfections, your public displays of unsightly emotions,

goodbye to your pride and your extinct empires

goodbye to your museums that hate Japan and love the Koreans of 2000 years ago.

Goodbye to your neon, your subway trinket vendors

your take-a-chance water.

Goodbye to your kitchy 50's style

to your coiffed, high heeled ladies

goodbye your boy soldiers in camoflage everywhere

goodbye your soft language that sounds like calm water

goodbye your spicy food and your unexpectedly kind welcome.

If I didn't know better

I'd say I met you before, some long ago day

when you were the center of the world.

If I didn't know I'd say everyone came from here

that your dirty streets and noise were the mother of us all.

If I didn't have this life already laid before me I'd keep you for my own,

and I'd stay and toil with you and laugh and

stand with you in the dawn and through the day until midnight.

Goodbye Korea,

that somehow I've loved and somehow known

though I hardly saw you, I couldn't have really

but I did.

Korea you're bold and brave

and I'll keep thinking of you

and maybe someday I'll come back to fill in the blanks

of what I haven't seen

you noble country,

touchable country

Goodbye, Korea.

Soldier Boys

12 August 2006.

The Korean countryside is passing by our train window. It takes from early morning to late afternoon to get from Gyeong Ju to Seoul.

All Korean boys are put in the army right out of high school. You see them everywhere, in camoflage head to toe with sleeves rolled up crisply and hats drawn low over their eyes, shiny tall black boots. They all walk the same, sit the same, they're all straight and young and healthy, 18 or 19 or 20, with clear, bright skin.

They all do a few week long tour at the DMZ, and they live in tents and don't get regular showers, and they are ordered to shoot people who climb the wall from the North, or so we're told, and they do sometimes.

Koreans and Koreans face each other down and tell the tourists at the front not to move, don't take pictures, any sudden movements could send the bullets flying. It is, after all, still an active line of combat in the most bizarre standoff in East Asia, a 60 year arms race and staring contest.

After world war II the powerful countries divided Korea for reasons all their own, and stuck the Northern brothers in the attic with Stalin and their own proto-tyrant, left the South to permanent occupation by the piranhas of the eastern Pacific.

The powers poked and prodded Korea from each side, and ugly iron communism overran the border first, took Seoul quickly with Soviet tanks, pushed through all this green country the whole way to Busan,
and in perhaps the first war of the cold war the capitalist world pushed right back and put landmines everywhere, like the one that blew my cousin's eyes out decades later,
and the General in charge was frothing at the mouth to turn it nuclear. That's when he was forced out by a president who wasn't quite so ready to destroy everything in Korea, or maybe launch a third world war.

These things I'm learning slowly. It's hard to conceive of the twentieth century. It flung my generation out like a slingshot, before we were ready and before we could come to grips with where we were.

The twentieth century poured out its buckets of blood and ash and airplanes, its internet, refugees, space missions, corporations, liberations, psyops, chemical fertilizers, holes in the ozone,
and it said, here you go kids, this is how we've blessed you. Here's one hell of a fucking mess on your hands. You figure it out.

In the west there's boredom and luxury, hedonism, there's a drug war and corporate rule and everyone's sleepily waiting for the Apocalypse. At any small provocation we have little fits of fear and stockpile duct tape, water, guns. Then we forget about it and go back to watching the people we pay to be more beautiful than us live their beautiful lives, date each other, have babies, lose weight, get in trouble, get old, get surgery, die.

We don't know what's going on. When we talk about living in the "real world" we show how far we've flown from anything close to that.

In Korea boys put on military uniforms before they're taught to think. Before they're allowed to experiment with peace they're indoctrinated into making war, into watching out for other Koreans who might scale the wall bestowed on their country by foreigners two generations ago.

If they go to college they go after learning how to march in a line, handle a rifle, shoot a stranger because someone says so. They go certified in Tae Kwon Do, driving tanks, inspecting missiles, eating vaccuum sealed food, shining their tall black boots till they look like black mirrors.

The big problem with humans is we live too little and such a preciously short time. By the time we're half concious of our actions and their consequences we're too invested to get out. It takes too many years of study and inquiry to get past even the most basic layers of bullshit, misconceptions, prejudice, and propaganda to see "our people" for what they are.?We don't have the time to figure out our place in history and what's really happening, to figure out how and why Korean 19 year old boys stone up their faces and stare across the DMZ at other Korean boys, and why they'll kill and die at the whim of other men who don't even know their first names.

Tanabata

july 7 2006.

I start this journal of my travels through Asia in high spirits. It's a lovely warm evening, just after sunset, and I sit in a small cafe on Kofu's main pedestrian street.

Tonight is tanabata, the festival of the stars, and all the beautiful young men and women are out in their summer yukatas arrayed in bright colors; pink flowers, yellow dragonflies, purples, blues and greens of every shade. The little children are dressed up too, holding their mother's hands and clip-clopping along in their wooden-looking plastic shoes.

This area is filled with all the trappings of every festival in Japan- stall after stall of food vendors selling fried noodles, octopus cakes, omelettes and sweets; plastic toys, inflatable dolls shaped like Disney characters, games to win goldfish and tiny rings with red lights inside.
The street is thick with people and above everyone's heads fly long streamers made of metallic foils of every color. They are suspended in circles of paper flowers and make a rustling noise in the breeze.

On this day, the seventh day of the seventh month, two stars are said to meet in the Milky Way. These stars were lovers once, children of gods, who were condemned to separate when the girl's father found she loved her husband too much to keep producing the beautiful silk robes that clothed all the heavenly beings. Her father, the main god of heaven, cursed them to live on opposite sides of the starry river, and said only this one night each year could they come together again.

Children and young lovers write their wishes on little strips of paper and tie them to the branches of freash cut bamboo. These wishes are supposed to be carried away by cranes, who live 1,000 years and are the only creatures on earth that can fly all the way to the root of Heaven, which they do tonight, taking the wishes with them.

It was on this special night towards the end of World War II, after the children had tied their wishes to the bamboo and everyone got ready in their most lovely summer kimonos and went out to the festival, when American soldiers set up floodlights in the circle of verdant hills surrounding this city and opened a firestorm on the people below, raining down phosphorous bombs from the air and shooting the people as they ran from the flames. In just over 2 hours, the small provincial capital was utterly obliterated. All the buildings were burned to ashes, and out of 300,000 people living here, 100,000 died in the attack.

Those who went in the next day to clean up the devastation said bodies were everywhere; that many people had been burned alive while running, and were found in the same position.
All this happened just two generations ago, when my grandmother was just a bit younger than I am now. And it was not unusual, what happened to Kofu, but was so commonplace that it barely merits a mention in the collective memory of that war.

My grandmother jumped over the burning bodies in the streets of Tokyo. Other people's grandmothers did so in Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, Kobe, Hamamatsu, Kofu; places so small no one in America knows their names.

I read somewhere that 85% of Japanese cities were razed to the ground in this manner, with primitive napalm dropped so diligently and in such quantities that hardly a house or a human was left.

In the faces I see in the streets of Kofu as it stands today, rebuilt as a monotonous string of concrete and artless steel crisscrossed with telephone wires, there is reflected the whole diversity of Japanese people, like the diversity of all people.

There are utterly small women with angelic faces, school girls flaunting their long straight legs in their miniskirt uniforms, school boys with their shirttails pulled out and baggy slacks hung as low as they can, swaggering around in packs. There are young families with moon faced toddlers orbiting around their parents, pulling them this way and that as best they can with little pudgy fingers pointed at whatever moving, sparkly trinket catches their childs eye.
There are hard faces, happy faces, laughing, bored, distracted faces. Faces of shy, ashamed people. Haughty, worried, giddy people. Hopeful, irritated, drug-glazed people. People with secret dreams. People with secret lusts. Old, stooped over, seen-everything people. Tiny, amazed, staring-eyed people. There are tall muscular men with spiked blond hair and deep tans. There are women as thin as the pen I'm writing with. There are business men, tired, always tired, smoking cigarettes, dishevelled in their proper looking suits.

These are mainly peasant people; rice farmers, construction workers, truck drivers, mechanics. It's always been this way in Yamanashi. Here people have always eaten horse meat without cooking it; grilled bee larvae, boiled bear and boar stew.

What happens when 100,000 peasants get burned alive in one night?

Not much. They grieve and they suffer in their towns. They collect the bodies, they perform the burial rites, they move the debris. They collect themselves, they hunker down, they do what they can. The men push with their shoulders and the women with their hands. They throw themselves into the business before them and not much is said, not much is written.

Sixty-two years later their grandchildren walk on new streets, live in their hasty houses made of grey blocks, and come out at night on the anniversary of the Great Murder, dressed in their cotton kimonos covered with cartoon elephants and with plastic flowers in their hair. And they are happy, and they write their little children wishes to the cranes in the belief and the hope they will go up to the sky and sprout there, among the stars.

And the old lady with the bent back pushes her cart slowly down the street between the yakisoba stands and the groups of teenagers laughing sitting in the parking lots, and the young woman takes the white haired womans hand, and they are both in kimono and wooden shoes, and she smiles at her and leads her across the street in front of cars.

After the peasants die, they go on, and their lives go on, and their children and their children's children after them. I was thinking of this amazing simple strength in this reborn city, and I wondered at the beauty of the children who know nothing of what was here so long before they were born, how pure they are and how that's how they should be, and I was thinking of all the people who died in agony years ago tonight on this same soil, when a woman stepped in front of me with her hair piled high and cut off shorts and high sparkly heels, and her black shirt said in silver sparkles

"sadness and gladness succeed each other"

and she swayed as she walked, and her little daughter pulled at her hand for a bite of sweet bread.