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all of its everything ~ March 12, 2003 - 8:34 p.m. there's a heaviness about me tonight. something going on in my heart. I think it's some flavor of lonely, but one so complex and difficult that I don't know what to call it or how to hold it in my hands. let me tell you this: there is a boy, a lao boy. I have a crush, and one I don't know what to do with. he has a girlfriend, I think. think, don't know. and that's not the only problem. in lao, it is actually illegal for a foreigner to have a sexual relationship with a lao person, unless they are married with the consent of the government. I know, it's bizarre. to make love illegal. I mean, it's a socialist democracy of sorts, but really it's more or less a communist country. and I think it's somewhat towards the end of eliminating the sex tourism that plagues the rest of southeast asia. and maybe it helps, since you don't see it nearly as much. but you do still see it. especially in namphou, the tourist quarter where I come to watch movies. and that's another thing: the prostitutes. or, more to the point, their clients. I feel compassionate towards the prostitutes, but I don't know what to feel about their clients. the white, western men who come here to purchase beautiful women as if they were souvenirs. they make me angry, but then I wonder why I am angry, when they must be so sad and fucked up about love and sex and beauty. I stare at them. sometimes I glare. I want to tell them they're pathetic. I want to spit ugly words at them. they make my skin crawl. I want to change the world that puts them where they are. I want them to live in an impoverished country as a young brown girl with nothing to sell but her body. of course, if you believe in karma, and I do, you can trust that they will. and that's why I can't reconcile my anger. I want to see them as lost and sad and sick. and then there's my friend joe. an expat american,lately of ireland. I like talking to joe, we have great conversations. I am not attracted to him in the least little bit. and we were talking about the prostitute thing, and my feelings about their clients, and he said that while he could never explain or justify, he could understand where the guys were coming from, because once upon a time, in another part of the globe, he'd indulged in the same temptations. and I felt sick, and sad, and didn't know what to say. he is still my friend. I still enjoy his company. but I just don't know how to feel. so that's a thing. and back to the boy, who makes my stomach flutter dangerously for no reason that I can actually pinpoint... the day he and I met, hours after we met,he swung by on his motorbike as I was walking home. my late night walk, from namphou to naxay. after the movie, before bed. my route of regulars calling sabaidee! I think they think I'm a little crazy. I imagine them calling me walking farang. no one walks at night. certainly not women, alone. not because it's dangerous, but because it's just not done. so he pulls up next to me, the way boys on motorbikes do during my walk. and I am about to smile, and brush him off, and suddenly I realize that this is a boy I know, the friend of the kid I share land with, me in my big empty house and him in his tiny cabin. so my friend offers me a ride, and I hop on the back of his motorbike, sidesaddle like a proper lao girl because I'm wearing a skirt. and suddenly I'm the girl on the back of the motorbike, and loving it. see, I've developed this soft spot for asian boys. with their corey-hart-meets-japanese-anime hairdos and their smoldering-glance poses. I especially love to watch them flirt with their girls. everthing is so charged when you live in a country where public displays of affection are considered offensive. every glance, every touch, is loaded with subtext and innuendo. so I climbed onto the back of his bike, and was intensely aware of my shoulder pressed against his back, the warmth of his body radiating from that one brilliant point of contact. and then we pulled up at a red light, and as the other motorbikes pulled up next to us, I realized that everyone was turning to look. at us. next to the delicious golden brown skin of my friends and neighbors, I sometimes feel so white, I feel like I'm one of those transparent frogs where you can see the heart beating inside its jellified belly. and I thought I felt him tense, just a little. and asked him, a little ways down the road-- do people look at you funny with a farang on the back of your bike? OH yeah... he told me. we said goodbye at the gate, and there was a sweetness in the air, with nothing more passing between us than a gentle glance and no lah fon dee..., the lao 'sweet dreams' that feels like music when I say it. so there is that. and there is toan, the sweetlovelyintelligentselfaware boy I fell into lust and love and loveliness with during one long and sweet day and night, on a boat on ha long bay in vietnam. ever since, we have been exchanging deliciously silly sweet romantic e-mails, I and this boy I know hardly at all. and he wants to come and visit me in lao, although he needs to get a passport first. and he's invited me to come back to vietnam, he wants to take me to the countryside where he grew up. and I dream about him sometimes, and I fantasize about him often, and I don't know how much of him I've imagined and how much is real. and then there is the boy who crawled up to me at the fountain last night. the namphou fountain where I sit sometimes, eating banana roti and listening to the water flow, watching the lao families who come to let their children ramble around the fountain's edge. he crawled up to me a moment after I'd handed a beggar woman 5,000 kip, and I was about to reach for my money again when I realized that he hadn't asked for any. he was crawling because of his legs, withered stumps below the knees, the knees wrapped in bandanas to help the wear and tear. hello, he said. and made small talk, about what I was doing in vientiane, and for how long. I saw you by the mekong yesterday, he said. you are so beautiful... and something about the way he said it just tore my heart open. because he meant it, and it touched me, and in that moment I felt how long it's been since someone made me feel beautiful. and this boy was just aching to be loved, the way I sometimes ache to be loved, the way I probably ache deep inside more often than I know. and I wondered how much it must hurt, to be twenty-seven years old, to see a beautiful woman you want to talk to and to have to crawl on your hands and knees like a dog to say hello. and I felt how little I had to give this boy. I couldn't give him the love he's aching for, all I could give was a little of my time, a stretch of small talk filtered through the rushing fountain water. the smile of a pretty girl. but he smiled gently when I said I had to go. he crawled down the steps, past an asian tourist with a cell phone who stared openly, wide eyes following him all the way down. he climbed on the back of his friend's? brother's? bicycle, and I realized that the friend, the brother, had been waiting patiently for us to finish talking. as they rode away, the boy waved, called see you later! and he seemed happy. he really did. and I don't know what all of this has to do with anything except my heart. and everything I am feeling lately about love and sex and friendship and lonliness. I don't know what any of it means. it's just my heart, in all of its everything.
(((rings))) |