10/11/2006

AGAIN

A lover in Hanoi

A lover in Hanoi would justify our spread – like pork on the bed. Crayons melted in differently drawn tshirts, the fan whirling overhead. The haze misting in through the curtains. Our guise of sleep. Our guise of wakefulness. The amount we eat.


A western toilet is designed for the hairless vagina

A western toilet is designed for the hairless vagina, but I am haired now. It is apparent. Impatient as first hairs sixteen years ago. Hanoi is unhairy – Vietnam’s population under 30. When people ask you your age and you tell them they say: so young. But it is any woman over forty that will catch my eye. Some, with faces battered and battered again, grab my hand on the street to do my shirt up properly, to laugh at my skirt, to ask about the bag or the man. I wouldn’t say that people age gracefully here (a stupid expression - for what is either graceful or ungraceful about age? Perhaps twenty-eight is a naive place from which to say this: isn’t age, without death, just an inevitability? Grace doesn’t fit here.) but it is apparent that children like their grandparents. Grandparents like their children. Daughters’ lead ancient dads along the highways. Granddads’ prop their barely born grandchildren on their knees.

When looking through photos you discover an erection

When looking through photos (I) discover an erection – a small structure that I forgot I photographed. The stains on the roof were from the typhoon that had salted and stormed everything away. ‘When the sea dyke broke’, begins every story in that area. I was unjustifiably upset when people spoke of need and poverty in Sapa. Everywhere the lush, fluorescent fields gave off the smell of production. Need, of course, always, but not devastation. Not lives washed away. (Oh, put away your righteousness, lolli. The people in Sapa, Hmong and others hav,e had three years education at most. Sigh. To save the world… from what thought? Etc etc)


You take time in the morning to dress appropriately

… take time in the morning to dress appropriately but then the air is washed with sweat and so I don the dress. The woman at the temple over the red bridge, an island, mumbles angrily. Women will not look at me on the street. Men don’t wink but look confusedly from Robert to me. Robert to me. The dress in Australia is popular, homely. Now, in undies, sitting at the balcony table holding my own hands over words, Hanoi seems not to mind.

Imagine drinking this much beer at home!

Imagine drinking this much beer at home! I do.