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.