Power House
“Burrrrrrrp!...... Zzziip!”
The sounds of the air conditioner burping, and the TV screen being vacuumed into a black hole were the signal forthe draw-bridge of my castle slowly being lowered. Soon, the beds and sofas would transform into a thick, humid Vietnamese jungle, my room would become the secret, hidden chamber and the floor I was standing on would turn into a mighty soul-sucking swamp filled with trolls and three headed snakes. Then, I would set off for a journey around this mysterious, dark world in search of the lost treasure of my king.
Often when adults asked me to make a wish, they usually burst into laughter after hearing my response. The first thing that came into my mind was a ‘power cut’, not a new game boy, a pony, or even a brand new football. To me, power cuts were something better than amusement parks. They were something much better than any video game or cartoon. They were the Super Mario and the Pokémon, the Rollercoaster and the Space Rocketof my innocent childhood.
Living in Sai Dong, a very rural and isolated part of Hanoi across the Red River, electrical constructions and power failures were a very natural part of my bucolic life. In fact, they became the highlight of my rather boring, and repetitive life. Power cuts would first bring chaos within my house, as the whole family would go bumping and fumbling around the dark in search of torches. Afterwards, we would all gather in the living room and laugh at each other’s helplessness with no light. It didn’t take too long for my parents to become bored with nothing to do and soon, I would find myself at theneighbor’s house. The house always seemed like the whole village had crammed into it, where the adults sat around the glass table each with a glass of beer, and around them, children barking and racing past every corner of the house like wild dogs let free from their chains.
Power cuts meant freedom. My free time during the day usually ended at 6 o’clock in the evening, when I was expected to go into my room and do my homework. I detested this time of the day, where I would have to sit in front of army after army of letters and numbers that frustrated me each night. However, power cuts were an exception. Power cuts made my parents extremely lenient, and the whole evening became my free time as it was impossible to read a single word in the pitch black darkness. Thinking back, I realized that this freedom was perhaps the reason why I enjoyed being struck by a power cut, escaping from the repetitive cycle of each day, and especially from the boring, painful study hours.
With no parents disturbing us, the children all stuffed themselves into the smallest room in the house. Then, the oldest girl among us would bring out a scary story with her face lit up like a balloon by the torch underneath her chin. To be honest, I hated scary stories, and I never actually listened to those endless tales of meaningless ghosts and the rise of the undead. However, the feeling of having all my best friends sitting and lying right beside me, and the moments where we would scream, laugh or tremble together mitigated the horror and the darkness that pervaded the world around me.Other times when a new family had recently moved into the apartment, there would be boxes out in the parking lot that the family had thrown out after unpacking. However in our hands, trash became treasure, as these boxes became the walls and roofs of the greatest castle in the world. And having built the tremendous castle, we would take turns being the legendary knights that defended the castle gate or the vicious ninjas that tried to overtake the throne. Despite who played which role, our stories always endeddramatically with the victory of the brave and heroic knight.
When I was alone, things became much more intense. My own dark, imaginary universe was coloured with games, books, cartoons and even small parts of my dreams that I was able to recall in the morning. I would often dress myself with a small thin blanket around my neck, swaying around a jungle as a gigantic killer butterfly, or sometimes whizzing through the thick forest of tall skyscrapers as a flying super hero, or even sometimes crawling under the blanket, to disguise myself from the evil patrol guards just like I had seen in ‘Lord of the Rings’.Other times, me and my brother would gather in front of a tall candle, and became special martial artists that took turns turning out the fire in our own ‘cool’ styles. The classic method was to use the wind from flicking our fingers, together with a fancy arm movement imitating Kung-Fu that was inspired from one of those old, Viet-subbed Chinese films. From then on, we would constantly challenge each other to perform a fancier, and a more difficult movement to turn out the fire.
However, the most exciting part of power cuts, was when I got to light the gas stoves. Obviously without any electricity, it was impossible to light the gas stoves using the knobs that usually clicked the fires to life. Instead, during a power cut, I had to use real fire. After endless pleading and whining when my mum finally allowed me to do the job for her, I would disappear into my room, turning all my toy boxes upside down looking for my ‘Scream’ Halloween mask. With the mask over my face, wearing a thick winter jacket, I pictured myself as a bomb disposer dressed in what looked like a spacesuit, slowly approaching the bomb tangled with red and blue wires. And carefully, like choosing one of the two coloured wires, I flicked on my lighter and lowered my hand towards the darkstove.
“click ……. click …… click …… click…”
In front of my own eyes, a ring of bright blue and yellow flames burst out. Then,like a cavemen, I would dance around the stove showing off my accomplishment to the whole family.
According to my experience, the name “Power Cut” was never an accurate name. They never enervated me or cut me off from power, but instead empowered me with freedom and an absolute control of my own exciting and adventurous world. The absence of light, the absence of the sizzling TV and the absence of the buzzing refrigerator, that had a hiccup issue, formed a whole new, different environment. While I was able to see nothing around me due to the lack of light, on the other hand, it also meant that there could be anything around me through my own imagination. Power cuts became the paint brush and the clay that I molded and painted to create my own world and my own story filled with my own colours and my own shapes. Even finding my way to the bathroom became a mysterious and thrilling adventure where the only thing I relied on was the small beam of light from my torch. Through the absence of power, my imagination too became the wild dog let free from its chain. Coincidently, the dark dystopiawith no lights that people think of nowadays was actually the utopia that I and the ‘Sai Dong Children’ used to imagine of seven years ago.
Power cuts were not moments of emptiness or scarcity but wereepochs of creation and freedom. They were much more valuable than any other lessons or any other games, and they have become the pure black pearls of my childhood memory. It needed no greed, no pressure, no limitations and no hatred; yet the blackness of the power cuts in my memories remains bright, colorful and inspirational. As I grew up and have become more dependent on the fancy tablets and the expensive smart phones, I no longer build castles out of boxes, or share scary stories with the neighbors, or leave on a journey to find the lost treasure during a power cut. Actually, Ioften find myself quite upset and frustrated without any internet or electricity. However, sometimes when I walk through the door and see the ceiling dyed in red by the flames of the candle, I can still feel the small jewel inside me sparkle just a little, quite like how it used to seven years ago when I first heard the air conditioner burp and the TV screen zap into its back hole.
“Burrrrrrrp!...... Zzziip!”
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Tae Jun Park 22nd February 2013