HOW THE TIGER GOT ITS STRIPES
For Le Ly
We were driving back from San Diego, through one of tho spectacular Pacific sunts where the emblazoned clouds streak above the highway. Like a fire to end the world so beautiful that you might be happy to be consumed by such gilded flames.
“You not need to write this down?”
Kim Cuc had just started telling me something about a water buffalo toiling in a rice paddy. “I remember what I need.”
She took her eyes off the highway. “Don't you forget.”
“Kim Cuc,” I shouted, pointing through the windshield. She was two inches from rear ending a silver Lexus.
A young farmer stopped to take a rest from ploughing his rice paddy. He grazed his water buffalo along the banks of the field and sat down in the shade of a banana tree to eat his lunch. The water buffalo wa
商务英语翻译师s quietly chewing grass and chasing away flies with powerful swings of its huge head, when a tiger sprang out from behind the bushes. The water buffalo jumped back and lowered its horns, ready to fight for its life.
I'd left my notebook in a barn perched above Escondido. This was where I slept and wrote, hired by Kim Cuc to transcribe the ancient fables of V ietnam from a desk on a Californian hilltop.
I was housitting in Manhattan when I saw the wanted ad for 'A hard working writer with interest in folk tales and Vietnam.' Recently back from rearching a T okyo tour guide, I was hoping for something more permanent, a staff job with a travel magazine, or even a press junket writing up a Caribbean crui, so I put off the call for a day.
W hen thick snow wafted from the sky, and the city dropped a fine through the letterbox becau I hadn't cleared my patch of sidewalk, I dialled the California number.
“This Kim Cuc,” she answered, waiting for my pitch once I said I'd en the ad. “So what make you qualified?”
I introduced mylf as a travel writer with experience in south east Asia, that I'd been to Vietnam a fe
w years back. She listened as I told her about my love for folk tales. Before I had chance to ask any questions she told me that she'd fought in the war but wanted to tell stories from a time, “long before the Americans got there.”
I wasn't sure I was the man for the job, but I had four hundred dollars left to live my American dream, and the offer of a flight to LA, food and board, along with the prospective cut on any advance from a publisher, put me on that plane.
“Wait,” cried the tiger, “I'm not here to attack you, I just want to ask you a question.” The water buffalo stood its ground, and the tiger said again, “I just want to have something explained. I watch you toil in the fields for that man every day, that same man who has neither great strength nor sharp vision, nor even a keen n of smell. Y ou're stronger, ten times heavier than he and hardened to heavy labour, yet he keeps you in chains for his profit and rules you. Plea tell me, what is the cret of his magic power?”
Curled under a wool blanket on a fold-out sofa bed, the first night on the hill was frightening. Not becau of the yipping coyotes, or the rattlers, scorpions, tarantulas and mountain lions rumoured to pad through the yard. I was terrified of the silence, the time and space that had so suddenly opened
荷兰语和德语
up and shrunk me. The day I flew to LA I'd woken in the W est V illage, then caught a ride to JFK with a Mexican friend who was sitting out a dead marriage for a Green Card.
doble
“I'm jealous, bro. Freezing my ass off while you get to catch some rays.”
I reminded him I was working.
“Tapping a keyboard.” He laughed, said something in Spanish. “Come with me and dig that frozen mud.”pharos
array“I've done my time on building sites.”考研现场确认地点
“In snow like this? We'll be hearing about polar bears on Fifth Avenue.”
If I looked up from my computer in the barn I could e the ocean. North, and the faint outline of Mount Baldy hovered on the distance. South, I guesd there was a paragliding club becau toy figures dangled in the thermals, the silk chutes rising like flakes of ash. Apart from Kim Cuc, the flying stick men would be the only people I saw before noon. But this was one reason the word count was in the thousands. And as I was being fed and houd to write for someone el, bread and shelter was good motivation. Not that I needed it with Kim Cuc rapping on my door every morning.
“I awake half the night.”
我爱你 西班牙语Her English was pretty choppy, and that was why I had a the job. But she never failed to
communicate.
“My grandmother ghost come to my dream. She tell me another story.”
support是什么意思
Her dead relatives woke her daily. If it was light enough she'd hoe the dusty soil outside her little hou, planting vegetables and pruning, gardening until the sun came up.
“This should be the man job, but you writing, and my boys, they gone.”
Her two sons were married off, living in cities that she complained she had to fly to when she wanted to e them.
“In Vietnam, the daughter in-law, she come and take care of the mother. But who do that for me?”
Pictures lined the walls of her living room. Photos of her sons in high school football teams, graduating from college, then getting married to golden haired American women. Both the boys had
grown into handsome young men, a mix of the almost feline, high cheekbones of their mother, and the square jaw and strong no of a Caucasian father I couldn't find on the crowded walls.
But beneath the framed snapshots I did e the cracked and faded portraits of her parents, black and white photos of her late mother and father, crumpled and precious pictures she would honour with burning incen.
“To be honest,” said the buffalo, “I don’t know anything about a magic power, only that I shall never be free becau of something he has called ‘Wisdom.’”
I'd watched the weather change from the plane window, swirls of cloud above the mid-west, to
scars of dert road and dusty peaks, a landscape more atlas than earth, the breadth of America.
I half expected to e the state borders drawn in, names of towns and rivers.
T hen I touched down in LA and met a woman who once stole guns and t booby traps for the Viet Cong.ah
“Wisdom?” said the tiger. “I must ask him about that. If I could get this wisdom I would have even gre
ater power over the other animals. Instead of having to hide and spring on them to get my dinner, I could simply order them to keep still.” The tiger thought about this for a moment then smiled. “I could choo the most delicious animal any time I wanted.”
男生穿着打扮
My only real experience of V ietnam was two humid days in Da Nang. I'd arrived by ship, floating up an iridescent green channel between humps of iridescent green hills. And all the stereotypes were reprented. The fishermen in conical reed hats, rice paddies and water buffalo. Even the pretty girls in silk dress riding sputtering rickshaws. Usually I'd walk a city and undo the guidebook portraits, but I was still sweating out some fever I'd picked up in Shanghai, and took a motorbike taxi out to the Ho Chi Minh Muum where each exhibit is dedicated to a different massacre at the hands of the Americans.
So a motorbike taxi, A Short History of US W ar Crimes, shots of velvety coffee sweetened and creamed with condend milk, a marketplace where I bought nuggets of dried banana and pirate DVDs, along with a drunken night out at a beach bar turning down marijuana and prostitutes was all the experience I had against the weight of newsreels, Platoon, Deerhunter, Born on the Fourth of July, Good Morning V ietnam and Apocalyp Now.
“All dreams,” Kim Cuc had snapped when I'd asked her what she thought of Hollywood's take on the war. “You can't smell a dead body at the cinema.”
Between the fables, river dragons with golden axes, men turned to lizards, the warring lords of the mountains and the a who fought for the hand of a beautiful princess, and who still fight now, bringing lightning, rain and floods to V ietnam every summer, Kim Cuc talked about soldiers razing villages.
“Just you try and imagine, the giant men come through your hou with the flame thrower.”
But on a California hilltop, the aromas of sage and buckwheat blowing through the screen windows, the horrors of a war I knew from T V screens and film ts was as grounded as one of her miraculous folk tales.
“Well!” replied the startled buffalo. “Why don't you ask the farmer about his wisdom?”
“I might just do that,” answered the tiger, already walking over to the young farmer to ask his question.
Kim Cuc would come down the hill with her notepad, stepping around the rabbits that had gotten so
ud to her footsteps on the dusty path that they'd nonchalantly carry on chewing grass.
“Morning, rabbits.” They'd twitch their nos, then she'd bang open the barn door and shout up the stairs to where I slept on the lumpy sofa-bed, laid out between her assortment of Buddha statues. “You awake? I got another one.”
