hollow-writer

[hollow-writer]

How to make plastic chairs run

In Hanoi, Vietnam, if you sneaked up on a random monobloc or plastic stool and yelled “public security”, there is a non-zero chance that they would … run. Yes, dear reader, plastic bumbles, stumbles and wobbles away. Or so I have been told. And yes, I am just as intrigued as you are, which is why I have asked around to gather why. Here it goes.

Part of the lifeblood flowing through the circulatory system of Hanoi is the plastic chairs. Of varying heights, but similar cheap plastic covered in red or blue paint, these cheap seats are not just ubiquitous but always moving. Restaurants and street vendors put them out; drunks take them home. When one restaurant lacks a few chairs, they nick them from next door, leading to a chain of theft that goes unseen and unknown to the bottoms of most thoughtless sitters. So if you see a plastic stool here, it might have been used by a street vendor, perhaps selling “trà đá” (iced tea) or “trứng vịt lộn” (fertilised duck eggs). 

The problem with street vendors is that technically their work is illegal. Every now and then, the police stoop themselves low enough to flag such minor transgressions for meagre fines. These spurts of activities often coincide with inspections by higher authorities. Regardless, if you get caught selling things on the street, all your equipment (plastic table, chair, food, goods) gets confiscated. This is more than just a personal loss for one vendor, but a collective loss of some plastic coursing in the urban veins. Hence, the street vendor’s life consists of listening and reading for potential surprise raids, and more importantly of being ready to pack everything up within seconds and run. People’s emotions and personalities tend to rub off on their surrounding environments. They say a mountain up north exploded because the village at the foot of it was filled with hotheads. If anything, the plastic chairs being on edge is quite run-of-the-mill. 

So now you know how to scare plastic chairs in Hanoi.

#fiction

[hollow-writer]

Notes on Whale (Cheon Myeong-kwan)

“Whale” seeks to emulate folktales, using the fantastical to depict a world with only specious agency. The characters' stories are sprinkled with the refrain: “This is the law of …”. The law of life, of capitalism, of ideology amongst others, served as a cadence at the end of events, reminding readers of the omnipotent hands of fate from which individuals are helpless to escape. Even the acts of humans, supposedly within the realm of freedom, were governed by the “law of rumours”, the “law of inertia”, the “law of servants”, etc. At a seemingly indifferent rhythm, the laws of the human and the non-human used, maimed, emptied then thoroughly destroyed the characters we follow.

And this is the law of gender. Gendered violence was rife in all the intertwining strands of the stories, but the author never explicitly states it. Rape and beatings and all kinds of demeaning treatments fell upon women for not conforming to the patriarchal needs, and most of the time for no reason at all other than their just being women. Those who were deemed unattractive were shunned; while the beautiful ones were herded into brothels. All creatures, male and female and otherwise, were eaten and churned up by the heartless world, but it seemed to devour women with an extra-acrimonious zeal.

It is a feature of mythology that acts of resistance against the system could not escape the laws of the world, never being able to emancipate anyone. This manifests in all the major characters who rebelled. The “old crone” toiled her entire life and afterlife to take revenge on the world. Geumbok worked and schemed and harangued her way to a male position of power – just so that she could find respite from the fear the death in the same way a man would, using status and power. As they strived against the law of the world, the law that brutally restricts and represses women, they fought blindly, hitting out at anyone and anything (the old woman) or aiming for vain objectives that were only empty distractions. They were anomalies and deviants in the world, but their struggle for self-determination still fell within the cruel laws of the world. The old crone’s hatred crystallized into the murders of innocents; in other words, not knowing what the true “essence” of the world she so despised was, she acted on its laws of gratuitous deaths and suffering. Geumbok, a victim of trauma and abuse, was so hurt for so long that her virtues of craft, resourcefulness and resilience became the vices of greed, cruelty and ruthlessness. Trying to escape the fear of death led her to become the ultimate symptom of death in human life: the Sisyphean wish for wealth and status for its own sake. She could only truly embrace this development by adopting the appropriate social role identified by such characteristics – the traditional man. As such, Geumbok, too, became an instrument imposing the cold laws of the patriarchal world.

The characters reproduced the world they detested in the destruction they wrought on others, but they did not find any redress either. Arguably, the “old crone”, in seeking vengeance, only found negative rewards – harms on the world – while the positive evaded her: she did not get to make a happy life of her own with the money she earned, never got the love or respect that she desired. Meanwhile, Geumbok was haunted by death until the very last moment, and she died horrifically after having watched everything she worked for go down in flames. At the end of her life, she was once again an insignificant, short footnote in the book of time; not only that, once Pyeongdae vanished, so did she – there was no immortality to be found in memory for there was no one left who remembered her extraordinary life.

As with many folktales, “Whale” is more about ontology than about ethics, that is more about how the fantastical world functions than about what to do and how to live within it. Consequently, it did not truly matter if a character was active (Geumbok) or passive (Chunhui), kind (Mun) or evil (the man with the scar), each and every one of them was merely a puppet in a prewritten melodrama. While stripping humanity of freedom of action and control of their own lives, “Whale” gives humans a means to go on. A brief light was lit in the epilogue: “We’re disappearing for good. But don’t be scared. Just like you remembered me, you exist if someone remembers you.”. The one thing humans have left is a social and psychological path to meaning: recognition. It is in the interdependent social network where people recognize one another as respectable humans worthy of life that they can make sense of their own existence. And it is only when this recognition lives on in memories, transcending the meagre temporality of individual life, that humans can overcome the fear of death. For one only dies if one is forgotten. Chunhui is denied recognition while alive in all manners possible, but she is the only main character who lives on in one form of collective memory: mythology. It was this world’s leaving hope in  Pandora’s box: people will suffer and they will not be free, but they will always have hope anchoring them. It is crucial though that this hope is materialized through a social world, not by an alienated individual alone.

This is the law of the human condition. What I took away from reading “Whale” was this: we may not be free, we may suffer but we must find ways to provide one another with recognition. This was the ultimate tragedy of the entire cast of characters: they were alienated from one another, bound to agony as atomistic individuals, and they died as such. It is naïve and dangerous to apply fantastical tales directly to life, and we must believe in the real possibility of freedom in our real lives. However, one lesson we can take from this enchanted fever dream is to turn towards one another for hope and recognition.

[hollow-writer]

Why were the gods on the move

As the statue sat motionless, as statues do, at the rubble that once was a temple, it thought of half of its left arm lying somewhere underneath it all, along with all of the chipped paint from its abdomen. People, and statues, often find their thought streams spiralling down Charybdis, hopelessly so, when they are in distress. 

A young girl, no older than ten, limped in with eyes transfixed on the statue. It was fear in those eyes, recognised the statue. While adults had looked at its kind with reverence and piety, children were mostly afraid. It was surprising that there was still terror at a statue of any kind in this state, though. Not now. Not after the gods are gone, surely?

The girl carefully lowered herself against one of the surviving columns, keeping her left leg straight, landing with a small thud. She was covered in dirt; her hollow cheeks flushed from the piercing cold of northern Vietnamese winter. Here in the mountains, the temperature could get subzero, enough to make the statue shiver, let alone an emaciated little child in rags. She curled up as much as possible while still sitting back against the column.

***

The deities once worshipped here were a couple from the 7th century. The husband, whom the statue is supposed to embody, was a Tang literati sent to the region to administrate the unruly lands in the south of the empire. Colonisers often get influenced by the land they subjugate. This bookish bureaucrat fell in love with the land, lived the last 40 years of his life here and settled down with a local Viet woman. He was, as the legends told, completely fluent in local languages (for there were more than one ethnicities in the region), lived in a simple vernacular three-room wooden house, ate the local produce, cut his hair short and wrote songs that remain in the region’s folk circulation still this day. By all means, beyond his official post in the colonial regime, he led a life that was as native as possible.

Every year, during the festivities in honour of his memory, elders told stories of his just and wise administration. If these folk tales are anything to go by, not only was he skilful in his navigation of local politics, but also he was shrewd enough to know that as long as the people were allowed to keep their customs and culture and had their livelihoods secured, rebelling was never on their mind. 

So he and his wife became local deities venerated by generations, despite the continual flux of history. The statue, being the physical manifestation of the worshipped spirit, and the object of intense faith of the natives, gained a soul of its own. It could never speak back, but the old mandarin and his wife talked to it as if it were their child. In spiritual terms, it was indeed juvenile, merely 102 years old.

***

The sudden sound of bullets whizzing past startled them from their winter slumber. 

The girl dashed for the statue as quickly as she could, crawling desperately for cover. Only after she got behind it did she let out a small cry. There was no space to straighten her left leg. 

Two men rushed in while their rifles eagerly searched for a target. Given that they had seen someone and decided to fire first, it was inevitable that the little gap behind the biggest standing object would eventually be checked. 

A roar.

One man yelled triumphantly in a foreign language, as he grabbed and pulled the girl out. She fell awkwardly onto the ground, strangely silent. As the two soldiers rapidly exchanged words, she just sat there, eyes looking into the night. Most people in these wretched lands have learnt that pleading and begging were no use against beasts who only spoke the language of lust. 

The statue eyed them worriedly. The dark-skinned one seemed to be arguing against something, though he never raised his voice. His white colleague was practically screaming from the second sentence. Increasingly agitated, he was barking what may have been impatient words louder and louder from beneath his massive moustache. Suddenly, the black man stopped and pondered, then gestured towards the statue, mouthing something that must have meant:

 Would you please have some respect for the supernatural?

Bang. The white soldier instantly turned and shot the statue. Having left a hole in the torso of the wooden idol, he looked at his companion provocatively. 

Respect for this?

As the man kneeled down by the girl, no one at the scene was oblivious to what would happen next. For many of the troops, who couldn’t speak the language, and who look incredibly alien in a foreign land, desertion was not an option. Instead, all the pent-up frustration with the war was released in violence. And, unfortunately, for a lot of them, sex and violence were just two faces of the same coin. Thus, soldiers slaughtered enemies and civilians with a sexually-driven zeal, and they raped women and children with a violent rage. 

As they wrestled, the girl was still weirdly silent. The other soldier looked away, then studied the battered, dilapidated state of the statue. The white soldier got rougher, and at last, prompted sounds of agony from the girl.

It was praying to all the deities. To its surrogate parents in the spiritual realm who have long left. To the god of mountain Tản, the most powerful and revered mystical entity in the diverse pantheons of all the people settling around here. To anyone really. For it, a statue, a dead, inanimate object to gain the power of motion. For it to do physically what its parents have done in the ages past spiritually, to protect. 

The dark-skinned man stood mesmerised. He too had heard stories of natural spirits back in his homeland. The mythical creatures lash out in their death throes, biting the white beasts. Men died of mysterious circumstances. Obviously, it was pitiful at best. What use were curses and magic against the all-destroying machines of absolute rationalisations, of modern weaponry and of the enlightened creed of atheistic self-interest? He heard all that. His own elders told him to fear the land. Fear nature. They protect but they also attack. It will… They will…

He rushed at the beast. Black hands restraining white body, how new. The white French growled and tried to land a fist in return. The dark arms were steel-like, not budging until a dagger flashed quietly. Knife in flesh, the blades eagerly licking the blood of a child of magic. The black soldier lost his temper, and 

Snap!

They collapsed on the ground, white on black. The white man twitched once, twice and then stopped, neck bent. The black man was panting, each breath lifting the white soldier on top, then lowering him, then raising and dropping then… For a while, the statue and the girl watched, until the breathing ceased.

In the following dearth of motions, it was cold. There was no snow, but it felt like there should be snow. 

***

When they left two months earlier, the old couple felt sorry that they had to leave the statue. The taciturn wife only stroked its head. The northerner, who cherished this place enough that he continued to watch over it and its people even from the other side, had much to say. In his usual soft and soothing voice, he talked to the statue all morning, for they travel at night, the spirits. 

“Most deities protect what they like. They were not assigned an area by a higher regime. They were the souls of lovers of the natural world, adorers of the peoples and customs of the land or sometimes they were just the wishes and wants of a place in spiritual forms…”

“When do the gods move? Sometimes, when there is nothing more to protect. When whatever keeps them here in this realm, be it a people, a tradition, or the wild natural sites, vanishes, they go over to the other side. Worshipping past this point would be idolatry of dead woods and empty vessels. This gives rise to twisted forms of unhealthy spiritual existence for the unfortunate caught in it…”

“Occasionally, when the people move, the deities move with them. After all, so much of the supernatural world is the desires, hopes and fears of these very individuals channelled into a collective spirit…”

“What is happening now is different. The gods are on the move because there is no place for us anymore. Temples are being bombed by both sides. People are too famished and impoverished to even begin to tend to their spiritual needs. And when they do, we can do little. Now that men are the new gods, we cannot protect them from themselves…”

***

Movements rippled through the landscape again. Boots crushing dry leaves, cracking twigs on the ground, hushed voices layering on one another until the amalgamation of all the sounds was no longer quiet.

The group of men walking towards them were Vietnamese. Kinh ethnics. They were wearing casual clothes. Most brandished a grenade or two on their belt, a few had pistols, and a Chinese AK rifle hung on the back of the leading man. 

The sight of the two dead colonial troops soon alerted them. The weapons spread out, leading the men, hunting for men. Realising there were none to be found, the weapons sheathed themselves as the men gathered around the girl, now sitting on the pile of rubble, back against the statue. She is even more bloody, and filthy; her rags do not cover much anymore. The leader approached as his men gawked. 

As he walked up to her, he felt two sets of eyes on him, her eyes low, the statue’s glare high. 

“Are you hurt? Did they do this to you?”

She opened her mouth, but only meaningless sounds came out. Nods. There were no words in the first place. The statue knew. They were the same. 

The men quickly convened and decided she was to be taken to their base. As one of them offered to carry her on his back, she didn’t budge. She wrapped her arms around the statue as they tried to pry her off. It was an odd sight. The men didn’t need to do this, but they probably wanted to help. One would think that after what happened with the French troops before, she would have happily followed the communist troops. 

The words that weren’t there, those that couldn’t be said were only heard by the other mute at the scene. The statue heard the story of how the village next to her own was razed by the communist cadres suspecting Viet gian (traitors). It could hear her telling the stories of farmers persecuted, some executed during land reforms. As it looked helplessly, the statue thought of something the old deity said on his last night: “In times when the old ways are discarded, when old gods are slain and new gods battle, there is not much to do but step aside…”

“There could be no just nor right deities in war.” 

She told it no gods could be trusted, definitely not the human ones. 

As it thought of this, it prayed for the capacity to move once more. Spiritually reaching out into the world, it pleaded hopelessly. The girl held on; the men pulled. The statue suddenly moved with a loud noise. The men tried to back off before the tilting statue fell onto them all. No use. The statue seemed to be growing in size exponentially and falling more rapidly in the few seconds before impact. 

There were no sounds as the statue broke into a million pieces. 

[hollow-writer]

Original trolley problem: 'Suppose a runaway tram is heading towards a track on which five people are standing, and that there is someone who could switch the points, thereby diverting the tram onto a track on which there is only one person.' (Foot 2002, pp. 85) 

Variations:

What if you are the trolley?

What if you tie moral philosophers onto the trolleys running into inevitable doom?

What if you build tracks that either cross over the path of one or the path of many?

What if the previous day you were converted to fatalism/determinism?

What if Steve, the sole guy on one of the tracks, actually met you briefly years ago, in a bar, back home, when you were down, and gave you a pat on the back?

What if on one track there is that version of you that you are right now and on the other all the versions that you could be?

What if the people on the tracks were all your fellow classmates in last week's class on the trolley problem, and all of them either had really strong opinions or no opinion at all?

What if you tell her yes you were right I was desperately in love with you and I now know that I was afraid of you, I, you and I and everything; and then she said what about the trolley?

What if in a dream, you chose one way, but you don't really trust dreams, you don't want to be dictated by your unconscious, so you want to choose the opposite and now you don't really know if this is a free choice or a mere infantile pout at your master?

[end of first draft]

[hollow-writer]

 Hypnos is the brother of Thanatos. 

How curious is the reaction sleeping evokes in the addict! Like the man teetering on the edge of life, he sees everything clearly. Every day before sleep, he reforms fully and wholeheartedly, vowing to do all the things he had never done, all the things he could have done. He kicks himself for the wasted time, the lost opportunity to truly live. Of course! If one escapes death, he would embrace life to the fullest; he would not stop at the distractions. He would do the things he ultimately desires and fulfil the potential of his existence. Come morning, a miracle will have happened, the addict would stop being an addict thanks to this epiphany. The religiosity of it all may even bring a tear or two to his eyes.

In sleep, the addict finds solace as it is temporary; it offers hope. With this determination, he ran into the realm of Hypnos, only to emerge the same despicable fuck he was the previous time, and the time before that.

Is it because Hypnos is the gentler of the two? Not all who escaped the grasp of Thanatos reformed either. Both of them signal the end. But one comes at the end of a day, while the other comes at the end of days. Generally, death – indifferent and infinite –  is more powerful in putting things in perspective. Tough love works.

Thus the addict is stuck in a cycle of hope and disappointment, recovery and relapses, severed only by periods of sleep. Desperate, he blames it on memory. Yes. It must be his memory which does not fully preserve the moment of transcendence before darkness; it does not convey the overwhelming resolve he felt. So he scrawled in any pieces of paper he can find: ‘please remember to live’ in order that he might actually escape the cycle.

[hollow-writer]

The man opposite John had a stern look. He could see John’s dirty clothes, and his rugged, unshaved chin. It was not a flattering sight. 

The chair creaked loudly as John fidgeted. His father was like this too – never screaming, just silent judgement. This man too had those oddly expressive eyes, conveying a million emotions at once. Disappointment, sadness, regret.

‘Well, what do you want me to do? What could I have done, huh?’. Dead silence. No reprimands. A wry smile and a shrug. 

His father had never scolded, he just let John beat himself up over and over again. It was as hurtful as anything he could have said.

‘Just say something! Stop staring at me like that!’.As he grew older, John started to sense more pity than disdain from his father. Guilt too, maybe. 

‘STOP!’. He punched the mirror hard, breaking it into hundreds of pieces. He did not dare to open his eyes lest he saw his father’s eyes in any of the glass shards on the ground.

[hollow-writer]

 The night already fell off when John face-planted on the hard concrete outside that shitty pub that everyone in town went to. Being kicked out of the pub for discharging all sorts of different body fluids, wasn’t new. No. It was almost a ritual between the only pub in town and the sad fucks that came because there was nowhere else selling hard liquor: they would drink till piss or vomit started flowing, and then the bartender-cum-bouncer would throw them out on the pavement. 

Tonight would have been no different if John had not caught sight of a familiar figure. He stumbled towards the man walking on the other side of the road. It was him, but sober, walking with zest like he was going somewhere. John caught up to the man and tapped his left shoulder.

**

John was happy when he was stopped by a man in his 40s who smelled like booze and vomit. The man asked him a weird question (“Is your name John?”), an odd question (“Did you study in the big city) and a strange one (“Did you buy that coat at Martha’s?”), to which the answers were all “Yes.”. John just then noticed that they had the same coat and the drunk looked slightly familiar.

The man gathered himself, then resumed the barrage of questions, and John answered them cordially because he was just that nice. Is your mother still alive? Yes, why wouldn’t she be? Are you dating Donna? Uh huh (coming home to give her a new necklace right now), how do you know her name? Do you work at the local bookshop? Yep, the best job for people in between jobs. Do you plan to pursue a career in anything interesting, like creative writing? Indeed, how did you know? And you’re going to marry Donna? 

And there John paused, not to think of the oddity of all this, but to take in a deep breath, and proudly say: “Yes, I intend to if she would take me in.” 

The man collapsed and started, sobbing? Well, he was drunk. “No, I’m not drunk.”, he said, “I know you’re me, haha, I knew there was a version of me somewhere that is actually living.” 

“You’re drunk, mister.” John pushed away that weird feeling at the back of his mind. 

“Please live properly. For the both of us. For all of us,” the drunk man gestured at, um, everyone on the street. “I see it now. At least one of us can be all that. Is this salvation?” He said as he looked up and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. 

John snapped and shook off the cold hands of the drunk. He darted into the dark.

[hollow-writer]

And then I said

And then I said

“Alfred, you’re coming with me”

Alfred didn’t say a word. Traitor. “You too Alberta”. No answer either. Not you too.

“I think Alfred and Alberta like it here, honey”. A lot of winks and giggles. 

I put Alfred and Alberta in the pink backpack. People who are angry must be decisive.

“I’m going to the pet store. Jenna said I could work there.”

Mother laughed. Father laughed. She cooked. He read the news. I went to the living room to get the framed family photo taken at grandma’s, stomping all the way, because, you know, that’s what angry people do.

I grabbed the harmonica which none of us could play and shoved it in as well.

“GOODbyeeeee”

They waved and smiled.

And then I reached up towards the doorknob, slowly, waiting for something to happen. I turned the knob as hard as I could, opened the door as slowly as I could, but it wouldn’t creak. Slowly crept out, all the while keeping my eyes peeled and my ears perked. Nothing, so I slammed the door shut. Because that is what angry people do.

But then Alfred and Alberta said

“I don’t wanna go”. 

So I listened to the traitorous bears and walked back in, trying to be silent this time. 

They were still waving and smiling. I shuddered. Alfred and Alberta didn’t say anything anymore. I backed out and shut the door again.

When years later, I came back from years of not working at Jenna’s, without Alfred and Albert (traitors) and looked through the kitchen window, Mother was still cooking, occasionally brushing aside strands of white-grey hair. Father wore those huge glasses and held the computer as far away from his face as possible.

“It’s so funny that she thinks she can work at this age” One voice went.

“She doesn’t even pack any clothes, but brings her teddy bears” Another chimed in joyfully.

They cannot see me. Said then I “And…”