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Dedicated with thanks to: All tired women Female dogs, laughter of sexless tragedy, The indifferent attitude of the moon, Overlapping memories that creep forward in Aloneness and Beastial merriment PROLOGUE Flowery Birth of Departure is an outcome of my passion for writing which was suspended due to my art and teaching career for many years. However, it didn’t take me too long to get back at it. Yet it was long enough to mellow the yearning for ideas, alone, just by myself, which I could not get from the roles of one engaged in contemporary art and teaching. As soon as the art exhibition An Artist Is Trying to Return to Being a Writer began at the end of July 2017, it was over, and the writing began. Memories flooded in, so rich, so overwhelming in self-investigation, back to the past, going through life experiences I had encountered. Each period, the saturated parts, the turbid, clear crystals were occasionally aroused according to combined language mood and human mood. But art itself remained still, shifting slightly in its place and path. PREFACE In the dawn’s obscure light The slender pairs of electric lamps on the posts on each side of the gate sent out a shining white light at the fence of the big house on one side of the lane, as if they were chatting across the deserted divided lane. The lane was divided into two by a narrow irrigation canal through which water slowly and continuously flowed all year round. The dialogue flowed from the pair of lamps of one house over to the pair of lamps of an older house on the other side. It was a conversation without words. In the pure pollution-free air of the dim morning time and in the clear air in the early day after the night rain was where and when the story should start. It should be in the dim light of the dawn or it should be in another scene. In view of such hesitation, such a neutral point of view, what chapter should follow next? What scene? The scene is that of a special child, the granddaughter, who sat with legs tucked on one side next to her grandmother in a brick shop house without a light on in the late afternoon and twilight. It appeared like a doll of a clipped image in the blurred atmosphere, a sculpture eroded by time coupled with fate. It was the fate of everlasting departure. It was perceived, passed over through the eyes of a passerby who was too afraid to face reality. If not starting from the two scenes of the present observation, by the roadside above, but going for a lingering scene, an old one, that was buried deep fermenting in the heart. How about the latter choice? Not knowing when, how. Perhaps it was the starting moment of a three-year-old child. The time for the beginning of a short story over 30 years ago. “The river was flowing so strong. Mom never came back.” That scene was in a night-time. “After dad carried mom in her loose nightgown down the stairs. The sound of an ambulance siren piercing the ears.” The little child was shaking in fright in her crib with soft green bars and a white mosquito net in the dim lamplight. Pictures of human anatomy were hung up on the wall. White bones, reddish brown muscles, red blood veins like a roadmap of a body. The head had two hollow circles where the eyes were, the nose sank like a cave, the rows of teeth looked exaggerated, both sides of the face looked square in shape rather than a usual round one. Before the child could climb down from the bed in the middle of the night following the last movement. Slowly down the stairs in a nowhere moment. On the porch under the gloomy moon the child with her hands on the veranda rail looked out into the vast pool of water at the back of the house at night thinking, “The river is so strong…” Where should it start, with the story itself or what? Three Female Characters A Girl Born with a petal-like vaginal unfolding. Something like a male worm coiling its head buried under the soft petal base. Her virginity could be lost since it was soaking in seminal fluid, wet, tiny spasms between the wiggling worm and the thin petal. All from the same flesh. The old trace, the persisting memories, kept revisiting or re-exiting again and again. A Teen The soft contracting muscle throbbed in rhythmic desire, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes disappointed. Days and nights in a warm well-smoked puberty itch, sounding like an exotic Vietnamese dish. Joyously spent and closed for a short phase of life. Not just love experience but also understanding it all until awareness of maiden hormone came, then came the time to “release.” Not all at once but gradually. Eventually she became ordained and abstained from sexuality and converted the desire through art and writing, making merit to beast and brute in lieu of kindness. A Woman An elderly woman moved against her body. The sharp pains in her knees and thin ankles echo in rhythmic harmony with her body and with her heart perhaps, which could hardly go anywhere. Each piercing pain with the pee wetting the Pampers like in the ads telling about the light-day sanitary napkin. And red day when it showed through and so soaking and causing worries. She hated so much the light-day of her maiden years where she calculated the cost of the woman’s right and the cost of the heavy-days all her life. As her mind was drifting away came the sharp knee pain. Again she thought, “Now, it takes a much larger size.” The neutered male and female dogs wagged their tails gleefully. We’ll have one another until death do us part. FLOWERY BIRTH OF DEPARTURE On the east side where there used to be a small pier marking the beginning of a trip to the capital, starting from the cape before day and night traveling. Before dawn, a parade of fruit farmers came with loads of produce in oxcarts, trollies, and shoulder baskets and big woven containers and bamboo for firewood to embark on the same ship as travelers with baggage made from reeds containing their personal belongings, who were turning away from their houses and familiarity, departing the land to spend nights on the uncertainty of the rolling sea. A hum of conversation and noisy buzz of all kinds broke the stillness in the dawn along with the stirring of living sustainability, duty, and connectivity to a high degree under the indifferent light at the pier, which in a short while would become pale in the rising sun on the eastern horizon. The sea beyond, away from the busy pier, was lit by the flashing lamp of each fishing boat slowly returning to the shore after a long night of searching; dark shadows on the dark sea heading toward the same pier. The impartial pier seemed to handle well the departing, returning and ongoing life. Half way back in the inland, the river flowed to the town year in and year out. The same river flowed to the sea in many kinds of moods, sluggishly in summer, angrily in the rainy season. The small town appeared in rows of two-story wooden houses squeezed very close together on the riverfront of the town with the hills, valleys and ponds in the back, including the market, temples, schools, and a town hall. On the other side were orchards and vegetable plots with a few plain wooden houses scattered about. At the bend of the river was a Christian church outstandingly tall reaching to God with a bell lulling, its sound resounding throughout the town. The bell never knew that its sound reached the receptive sense of a little child whose house was on the upper part of the river on the opposite side, who was destined to be an orphan with no mother. She was a girl. She was a daughter of a young doctor who was born while her father was studying in the United States on a scholarship. Her young mother who was a teacher at a girl’s vocational school had to raise the baby by herself. Day and night she decorated her dark wooden house and furniture, brightening them up with fabrics of all kinds. The large family bed was covered with a large bedspread made from gauze lined with white satin stitched with silk in a flowery vine pattern. A white tablecloth embroidered with tiny beige, pink, and blue flowers. A flower vase was placed on a fine remie cloth crocheted flower-like around the rim to go with the fresh flowers it contained. White dining plates decorated with pink roses along with green leaves, a tray of fruit designs like exotic purple grapes and peaches. The soft white baby bedding with lovely decoration and a white pleated hem. All of these formed a charming atmosphere in the old wooden house by the wide river, easing the loneliness of the mother and her child several thousands of miles away from the family head. Shortly as time passed, a few things remained fresh in the memory of the little child. In the child’s sight, the moving part was more profoundly memorable than the stillness, which was represented in the black and white photographs of the past. The mother’s face confirmed the stillness by itself.

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