S.K.
Kelen
| House
of Rats They're up there all right, in the roof playing scrabble, listening to scratchy old Fats Waller records. They started out a gang of desperadoes escaped from a laboratory, arrived via a garbage truck up overhanging tree branches elbowed their way in & soon the colony is an empire of rats who eat the insulation batts chew wires, through the ceiling to ransack the kitchen take bites out of everything & carry off furniture. I can hear them scurrying with bits & pieces, hammering & sawing: they're building houses - a model rat town - with imitation garages to park stolen toy cars in. After munching down another box of double strength poison the rats are back at work with a vengeance, thump around the rafters insulating the house with rat shit. Or hard at love writhing, squealing like sick starlings or kicked puppies. The weaker explode and TV screens fill with rats' blood but there's more where they came from. Teeming over mountains, down valleys, jamming highways, falling off bridges to scurry ashore up storm water drains. Exterminators arrive dressed as astronauts and poison the house for ten thousand years. It's time to move out. But the rats have laid eggs in your pockets, stow away, follow you from house to house. The curse enters its exponential phase. Tentacles unwind from the ceiling, dirty great moths and leopard slugs take over your happy home. Soon you are a trellis. That's just what the rats say. I'm down here listening to radio messages, oiling automatic weapons, building rockets. Living in a rat's belly. Hanoi Girls Hanoi most sensible of cities— at night the traffic finally does stop and a great hush of sleeping descends: a curtain drawn down by good spirits and ghosts about to start work. Not a sound for kilometres except a cough deep in a house a lonely bicycle bell, a word called out from a dream, a stray bird drunk. It's dark on the pavement but the sky glows with smog. Quiet all night until a rooster crows sunrise somewhere in the rice fields behind the rebuilt suburbs north of the river. The people who sleep in the street hammocks are first up and busy. Everyone's going to work in an office, school, a sweatshop or a street stall, hot days get louder with all the talking it's as if everyone's shouting. Slow rivers of traffic meander. Suddenly the girls are there, dozens then hundreds riding motor scooters braking gently at the traffic light in Ly Thai To Street now the traffic flows like ripples on a quiet lake. Cyclo drivers and labourers might stop for a moment, consider the day's hot slog is almost worth it, to see their city's young women growing beautiful and rich. They remember to be kind to strangers who try to compare their less cultivated worlds. What greater joy could there be than to see Hanoi girls ride motor scooters, pillion sisters sitting side saddle. When the traffic slows they gossip like tigresses with girls on the other scooters. Silks and nylon made sure the war was won by the miniskirt allied with knee-high leather boots or diaphanous sandals. Hanoi girls out-glamour the Italians they fit imitation Gucci so much better and bring a sense of reticence to leather. Their mobile phones ring urgently— lightning strikes Hanoi's holy mountain friendly rain clouds gather. Dial an ancestor—mothers and grandmothers were the bravest women warriors Vietnam had seen for centuries. They fought the invaders and lost husbands, brothers and sons, sisters and daughters. Everyone lost somebody when the heartless and stupid ruled America sent over soldiers and bombers. The war ended, and lots of granddaughters, lots of grandsons came into the world. Over time the hard times got better there was food for almost everyone. The population skyrocketed, as they say, and Hanoi's granddaughters grew up and dressed to kill. Commuting on their scooters they chatter: are love poems more romantic more sincere than a gift of flowers, or just cheaper? There's the wicked past of a Government Minister who used to be a Saigon pop singer— too wicked to mention. French football stars are heading to Vietnam to help improve the local game ha ha it won't work – the boom in Hanoi's real estate goes through the roof, So-and-so is starting up a new business, the new style of Hué cooking is not so new, those horoscopes in Sport and Culture magazine are so vague to be nearly always right and the interview with David Beckham is almost the same as last month's. To ensure good daughters have everything their mothers and fathers missed, the sacrifices made are tougher than to much loved ancestors— money to buy a good scooter comes harder than fake banknotes burnt at an altar. Hanoi girls pull up at the traffic light knee-high boots and sheer sandals rest on the road, mobile phones ring in a business deal, an old apartment to renovate, lunch at West Lake. As grandma said, 'when no bombs fall on the polity it's fine to indulge frivolity'. Hanoi girls are serious, study and work their way to the top if that's where life leads. And by magic, motor scooter and miniskirt they make the city truly powerful. >>>Stephen Vincent
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