The Golden Triangle

Abstract

The Golden Triangle Nay Saysourinho (bio) Here opium blooms at night, vaporous arms lulling villagers to sleep like a dutiful mother. Here poppies grow in the morning and unfurl before noon. This field is the last poppy field in the Triangle. Why move away? People know a good thing when they see it. The surrounding hills only grow coffee—soft citrus and floral notes, note the coffee sommeliers. No one could have predicted coffee would bring in so much money, even more than heroin, even more than morphine. The world wants to stay awake to see how the Anthropocene ends. In the poppy field, things do not end and they do not begin. The same villagers have lived here for hundreds of years. They wear the same clothes and eat the same food and do the same work they have always done. Sometimes tourists find the village and take photos. The place time forgot, they will tell their friends. It is authentic. Sometimes they take a few flowers back with them, but the petals always turn to plastic outside the Triangle. On the green stem, an inscription like a spell: Made in Tam Pa. It is a mistake, the tourists think. They make their friends guess where the souvenir really came from. The villagers in the Triangle like playing games, too. They draw tigers on lined paper, and the next day the tigers appear. The tourists cannot see the tigers because they are not drawn in their language. Sometimes a tiger will leave on a tourist’s shoulder, but the tourist will not realize it. The tigers do not turn to plastic outside the Triangle. They do not understand whether they are authentic or true or unproven. They simply exist. Numerous times throughout the history of the village such a tiger has returned from its long journey. The villagers throw a feast and sit down to eat as the tiger unspools everything it has learned. Did you know, it tells them, that the king has left? Did you hear about Nixon? Did you hear about the new dams? The Mekong is now gone. Palestine is now free. England has sunk into the ocean. Chocolate doesn’t exist anymore, but everyone remembers the taste of it. [End Page 69] The villagers discuss whether they should plant coffee in order to make more money. They envy the tiger its newfound knowledge, the excitement of the wonders out there. All the movies it has seen, all the books it has read, all the sneakers it has bought. It is tempting. Perhaps, the elders propose, they will plant coffee once the tigers stop returning. Until that time comes, they can rest a little longer. The villagers agree. Yes, they will wait until the tigers no longer return, and when that time comes, the elders will plant coffee and the young ones will leave the Triangle in search of the Great Awakening. They will order espresso and biscotti at the counter and tell one another in hushed tones that the biscotti is a bit stale. [End Page 70] Nay Saysourinho NAY SAYSOURINHO is a writer, literary critic, and visual artist. She was a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell in 2020 and is currently a Berkeley Fellow at Yale. In addition to the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story, she has received fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the Writers Grotto, the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and Tin House. Her writing was a recent prize winner at the Tucson Literary Awards and has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Ploughshares Blog, Khôra, and elsewhere. As a Southeast Asian kid growing up in Montréal, my childhood was steeped in Lao oral traditions and Québécois folklore. In time, I came to understand that the transmission of these stories was a conversation that had begun tens of thousands of years ago, from the moment we dreamt of a birdman in Lascaux to the butterfly dress worn by Billy Porter in the latest Cinderella. We hold on to fairy tales because we continue to wrestle with what it means to be human—and humane. What it means to live with uncertainty, with cruelty, with...