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It is early morning, and this town is very vocal. All night long.  Truckers and other all night workers stop here and look for food at the all night food stalls with the chairs outside. Drew and I got caught by some women selling expensive green mango seasoned in salt, sugar, and red peppers. They told us to take up a seat in the all night out benches and chairs.

But it was the beginning of all night, and the children were still awake and rampant. Already, when we arrived at our lu guan at around 3pm, fat boys with husky shoulders and skinny ones with ripening bass gushed out of the white tiled industrial apartment opposite, looking into our open windows and shouting, “Hello,” in unabashed, take-the-moment-by-its-beard-hairs, Chinese style.

 This was clairvoyant.

When they started to follow Drew and I down the road from the market, it did not surprise us to hear the pitter patter of little feet tapping the unpaved road like the beginning of rain, the beginning of night and all those passing through until the warning of purple dawn floats furtively around the mountain to expose those who didn’t make it to bed on time. The children know of this banshee, this screaming Blood Wedding moon in cahoots with old lady death. They still have their occult sixth sense, the umbilical chord to the black earth, the mystery we lose once we’ve seen too many moons.

Perhaps, this is why we seek them out in the little rambling towns that roll around the hills and the cascading rice fields and dribbling creeks. They hold that Tantric Tibetanesque secret to the community. They answer questions without any adult psychosomatic premeditation. They are raw. They catch us at clandestine campsites, always on the heels of the last one of us to roll our bike up the path.

Sometimes, they come with treats: things that dropped from the trailer, a soccer ball,oranges, things lying on the ground. Children are closer to the ground. They see things like ball bearings and old snail shells, things we miss as we look out and onward into the air, sliding glimpses at booted ladies in garments too flashy, too grown up for little plastic towns replicating themselves after big plastic cities.  Children are waist high, and we meet glimpses in the middle, bracing our eyes against brazen pimply teenagers with bleached hair on motorcycles, yelping with their nasily basses, “Hello.”  We don’t like this obnoxious hello that is not really a “hello” that is a joke. It is too adult for us. It is jarring.

Sometimes, they come with dolls or ribbons they want to give us. We have no space to carry them, but somehow, we find room. Any gift from a child is a merit of honor, of understanding.

Emily Dickinson had a keen interest in children in her cloistered life. She found innocence in them that she could not find in surrounding adults. In their laughter, she heard truth.  Poetry milk.

We play soccer and Frisbee with the little people at our clandestine campsites, juicing them for connection, for imagery, for memorabilia. We become a part of their childhood experience, shaping their little memories. Perhaps, when they’re older, we will be the great blue-eyed dreadlocked 2 meter tall foreign giants that came for a week and played with them. In the small memory of child, everything seems bigger.  A day is a week could be years. Like the memory of the universe. The era of human life is the blink of an eye.  

They are the dark before dawn we seek. They are the memories of youth, before we realized that we could manipulate situations to go in our interest. They are illusion before disillusion. They are all night magic. Dreams in Technicolor before postmodern cynicism, a mainly Western concept that makes us hesitant to suspend our disbelief.

 We see them darting behind the bushes, racing along beside us as we ride between towns. Dirt smeared babies playing in the middle of the road, emerging from a field of water buffaloes. Little ones dragged behind older siblings to catch up to the spectacle. Hen gou de wai guo ren. Really tall foriegners. Feijo ren wa! African wow!

I think of the scar between my eyes that was carved there by a piece of broken glass bottle i fell on when i was four and dragged behind my 7 year old sister. We were running, panting, splashing through mud puddles to get to a friend’s house and back before my mother returned from work, expecting to find us clean and calm, watching TV or reading a book.

We hunt children. And they hunt us.

I am weary of them and their wide eyes. Their innocence attributing a certain acute evil. Their truth, darkness, as if they know something I don’t. As if they don’t know enough of what not to do, how not hurt people.

In Milan Kundera’s ”The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” they lived on an island where they made the rules. They had childlike curiosity that wouldn’t let up so that when a lady protagonist took refuge on the island. These malevolent angels probed her body for answers, feeling her breasts, caressing her hair, curious in the adult female body like artists studying a nude, studying the curves and crevices, the shadowed sex that bears children, the back that steadies the load, like God pregnant with Earth. Freeing her body from its ties to love, of soul.

Yesterday, they surrounded Drew and I as Drew gave an impromptu English lesson, and I, giddy from beer, shone a flashlight into his transparent blue-grays to demonstrate how pupils dilate. They clobbered us with a wind whipped by 100 heads leaning forward at once, the child-like thrilled adults hiding their nosiness behind the brazen bunch pouring out their souls to listen. After realizing that we had to get out or they would never leave, we excused ourselves saying that we’d return to our lu guan.

This did not matter. They followed and followed us still. An army of little waste high people scrambling up the stairs to our third floor room. They scampered right past the lu guan boss, and up past the internet bar undeterred by our gentle foreign polite suggestion that they shouldn’t come up. They flowed like unabashed, unmanaged children do, into our rooms, sliding up and around bikes, onto and behind beds, fondling our things with their little slippery child hands, filling spaces like Chinese traffic, frantic honking busses that do not wait, but honk to warn you that it is coming up right beside you.

If there is a space to be filled, they will fill it. These are the laws of nature. The ebb and flow of quotidian life like a people without a government, or a government spread so thin that its little propaganda signs do not matter, its warnings unadherred to, its construction signs moved out of the way so that a biker can get through.

These are night laws.  And they make us giddy for sleep. When the truckers have free roam over the earth and the night cooks laugh crooked laughs full of metal teeth, and all night, on my way back from trips to the bathroom, I can lean my head out of my shoddy hotel window and see the orange mood light from the midnight stalls forming perfect disco smoke through the hot pot and noodle steam.

And I feel safe. And can crawl back into Technicolor child land.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Nakia's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.