The Fan by Mike Bozart - HTML preview

A garment factory just outside of Vientiane, the capital of landlocked Laos in Southeast Asia. That’s where 39-year-old Aelan now worked 72 hours a week. She had lost count of the Nike^® swooshes that she had machine-sewed in her first two weeks of employment, but her fingers unmistakably – and often painfully – knew that the number was already in the thousands.

Forty-one-year-old Analu worked 66 hours a week at the local brewery. He felt lucky to have the job, though the case-carting-and-stacking days were long and fatiguing. His lower back had now begun to bother him once again. However, the six-pack of lager that he was allowed to take home on Saturday evening helped, temporarily at least.

Aelan and Analu had two kids, a super-contemplative son named Kapona, who had just turned fourteen, and a lovely, focusing-on-drama daughter, Kamea, who was sixteen. Both had transitioned relatively well to the new high school in the city. Though, they sorely missed their own space that was afforded to them at their rustic, rural residence next to the rice paddies outside of Nang Ha.

Both parents had the same single day off each week: Sunday. It was their family-together day. The four of them would go into the town center to have lunch and later stroll along the banks of the Mekong River. Kamea would catch the stares of young, and not so young, men. Kapona would wonder about the depth of the lazy, olive green, national-boundary watercourse. How many meters deep is it in the middle?

One hot, humid, hazy summer Monday evening, Analu brought home an old, four-blade fan that looked like an antique. It provided a little bit of relief from the oppressively steamy air in their un-air-conditioned, beige-painted, bare-walled, twelve-square-meter (10 x 13 feet) rented room – the room where they all ate, drank, conversed, and slept. The tenant-shared bathroom was down the hall.

The following sauna-esque Wednesday, Kapona was alone in the room in the late afternoon. His sister was participating in an after-school activity – rehearsal for a Lao folklore play – and his parents were still at work. He quietly did some homework and then drifted into reverie as he gazed at the oscillating vintage fan on the open, screen-less, oh-so-slightly-slanted window ledge.

I wonder where that fan was made. Somewhere in Europe? Berlin? Rotterdam? Lyon? Coventry? Maybe so. Or, was it made in the United States? In Kansas? Is that factory still making fans? Or, is it out of business now? Was it bombed into oblivion? Who made that fan? How many workers were involved? Are any of those workers still alive? Probably not. Dad said that it was made in the middle 1930s. That was before the Second World War. That’s a long time ago. Those workers would be around 100 years old now. Maybe older. They’re all dead now. Well, maybe one of them is still alive somewhere – somewhere lying on a hospital bed. Yeah, maybe the youngest worker is not dead yet. Maybe he started working in the fan factory as a teenager. Maybe at the age of 17. Maybe he is awake at this very moment, thinking back to when he was a fan-factory worker. Or, maybe those days are now long-forgotten. The teacher said that very old people often get dementia, and forget parts of their past. ‘Memory fractures and fades, students. It’s not an absolute constant.’ I’ll be 17 in three years. Really don’t want to work in a factory. But, what else is there to do here? Maybe I can continue to get good grades. Maybe I can somehow go to a college. What would I study? Why not study electricity? I could become an electrical engineer! Yeah, that would be cool. Learn about electrons. Electricity is the power source of that fan and so many other things, like the hotplate. ‘Electrons move the modern world.’ The science teacher is right. But, which way do they move? Didn’t he say that they flow from positive to negative in a circuit? But within a battery, the direction is negative to positive. Weird. Does that fan turn in a positive-to-negative direction? Or the opposite? Need to ask the teacher tomorrow. Should wait until after class. Might be a silly question. Don’t want to be embarrassed in front of my classmates. Alternating current is powering that fan, not direct current. Teacher said that it very quickly goes back and forth. Does the fan blade go backwards very quickly? Imperceptibly? No, that’s crazy. I bet that I could have a good career in the electrical field. Personal electronics are everywhere now. Cell-phone repair is in high demand. Sure would be nice to have my own place someday. Those houses in the American movies are so nice. They must be very expensive. Maybe I could leave Laos someday for another country to pursue an electrical career. Someday after mom and dad have passed away. Well, if sister is doing ok. She may move to Thailand anyway. She seems to like Bangkok. Maybe she met a Thai boy online. I bet that’s it. She’s so boy-crazy now. Wonder what that surviving fan-factory worker is thinking at this very moment. Is he thinking about the thousands of fans that he helped make in the factory? Doubt it. Wonder what the average length of employment was for a worker in that fan factory. That incessant back-and-forth motion. There must be some special cog or cam that controls that. Sure would like to disassemble that fan and see the parts. Would be neat to see what affects what, and what is linked to what.

The fan then suddenly began to wobble. Sparks were streaking out from the hub. It started to slide on the windowsill. When it swung back towards the street, it toppled out the window. The plug snapped out of the receptacle. Oh, my! I hope no one below got hit by it. That fan is fairly heavy. It could easily kill someone from this [3^rd-floor] height.

Afraid to peer out the window, Kapona ran down the internal stairway, passing his startled sister without saying anything. What’s he up to now? / Wonder if Kamea saw it. Is he/she unconscious? Bleeding?

Once on the sidewalk, Kapona was relieved to see no injured persons. The mangled, major, metal, no-longer-attached components were bent, broken and scattered. Thank God it didn’t hit anyone.

As Kapona crouched down to gather the fan parts, he saw some English writing on the inside of the cracked-in-half motor housing. The black-ink cursive on gray primer read:

Wednesday, June 19, 1935

A day that wound up not much unlike any other.

– Wayne Wheeler, a windings man