sa-pa, cat cat and the terraces of the hmong

Quick readership survey: hands up if you don't love it when the world suddenly turns around and surprises you by revealing some detail about itself that you'd never previously suspected, heard about or even dreamed of.

Ok, now hands up if you do love that.

Yep, it's as I thought … we're more or less unanimous )))

Of course, it does depend on the kind of detail we’re talking about. I mean, if someone came up to me in a bar tomorrow night and asked “Did you know that the State of Kansas hosts a 5km running race every April, which is one of the most popular in the whole of the USA?”, I wouldn’t be going “Wow, that's amaaaaaazing!!! The world is such an interesting place, isn’t it?”. At least, not unless there was a twist ... as for example, you went on to tell me that competitors are required to throw buckets of pure alcohol over each other before the race, then set themselves on fire at the starting line so that the audience – watching overhead in hot air balloons – could get high on the fumes that rose skyward, as sprinting fireballs sent intoxicating clouds of ethanol into the air. In that case, I'd be reaching for my laptop and getting hold of every single available Youtube video before you could say "sick imagination" ;-) 

Generally speaking, though, I'd consider myself a reasonably big fan of discovering-stuff-you-didn't-know-about-the-world (especially if it's of the weirder variety). It's usually small things, of course; you put the puzzle together piece-by-incredibly-tiny-piece, knowing you’ll never have the full picture but enjoying the process, as here and there little areas resolve themselves into something you can almost make out. However, on the odd occasion you do find something fairly big, and that's ... well, pretty damn cool.

A case in point: this year at uni I've been studying East and South East Asia as a 'language area', looking at the languages spoken in that part of the world and learning about some weird/interesting characteristics that many of them share. You can divide most of these languages into 'families', like the Sinitic (i.e. Chinese) languages, the Tai-Kadai family (including Thai and some other formidably difficult monsters) and so on.

Quite a lot of SE Asian languages are rather obscure, exotic and not yet fully documented, and lots of them have features that seem completely bizarre from a Eurocentric point of view. I s'pose the most famous of these is 'lexical tone' – i.e. where saying a word with different intonation completely changes its meaning.

As luck would have it, last month I moved to a country where the national language has this weird lexical tone thing, and I've enjoyed encountering a few multi-function words in Vietnamese. My favourite is "ga". This little midget of a word turns out to be quite versatile, with a range of meanings from "chicken" to "railway station", depending entirely on the intonation. And because the tonal system is so difficult for foreigners to master, if you try ordering "com rang ga" (rice fry chicken) in a Ha Noi restaurant, you can quite easily end up asking for fried rice with a railway station. Or else you can go the other way, and ask a taxi driver to take you to Ha Noi's Central Chicken.

*pause for giggling*

Really not sure why I find this so funny. I just do.

Sign of immaturity, I guess.

For me, though, the most exotic languages I've come across this year are a family called 'Hmong-Mien'. Like other SE Asian languages, they tend to contain loads of exotic stuff like lexical tone, classifiers* and (for Western folk) virtually unpronouncable consonants with weird descriptions like "retroflex" and "uvular stop". But the main reason why I found them so interesting to learn about was simply this: there are something like 100 languages in the Hmong-Mien family, and I'd never even frikkin’ heard of them before.

I mean, in one sense this isn’t in the least bit surprising: Hmong-Mien languages are mainly spoken by so-called 'hill tribes' in remote parts of Vietnam, Laos etc., so not exactly the kind of thing you’d regularly come across in everyday life. But still, when you consider that 90% of all the languages in Europe fit into just three families (Germanic, Latin and Slavic)**, a whole family of languages is a pretty huge thing to hide from a Word Nerd for so many years.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found myself actually talking to people of the Black Hmong tribe last weekend, as we trekked side-by-side with them through the hills around Sa Pa in northern Viet Nam. It was quite an adventure: I visited their villages (pigs and buffalo were notable features), injured my head on their low rooves, learned a couple of Black Hmong starter phrases (like ka mun qi for “Hello” and o chou for “thank you”), admired their amazing kimono-meets-cowboy traditional clothing, bought a Hmong jacket which I’ll probably never wear, and had my taste buds thoroughly tingled by their delicious apple wine and their sticky rice with lime, salt and peanut paste, barbequed on hot coals inside bamboo bark. Yum!

The down side: the Hmong people haven’t yet mastered the art of the Soft Sell, and I was quite annoyed at times by their pushiness. (Imagine the phrase “Buy some’hing fom miiiiiiiiiii????” being screamed into a megaphone by an angry parrot.) But never mind … you take the good with the bad.

Sa Pa itself, meanwhile, is a far-northern mountain community, just a handful of kilometres from the Chinese border. It’s full of tourists, but the hills and mountains around the town are home to some absolutely jaw-dropping, expletive-producing scenery. It’s certainly the prettiest part of Viet Nam I’ve seen, by a factor of at least two to the power of 25, possibly more.

We caught the overnight train there from Ha Noi, and as the sun rose, we found ourselves in a minibus, ascending along winding roads with the silhouettes of rice terraces creating dramatic shapes around us. In some cases, nearly an entire mountainside seemed to have been carved into terraces, one above the other, hugging the contours of the landscape and forming imaginary Mayan pyramids in the mist.

Later in the day, when the air had cleared, we got a much clearer view of the terraces – a little less mysterious, for sure, but no less

beautiful. Then our chance came to see them up close: we trekked for “five kilometres” (I put that in quote marks because it’s what the travel agent told us, but there’s no way we did less than eight!) down a mountainside to the Hmong villages of Lao Chai and Ta Van at the bottom. It was a stunning walk.

Along the way I had one of those 'movie set moments' that one occasionally gets while travelling. In this case, the thing that inspired it was a couple of Hmong houses hidden amongst impossibly lush vegetation on a river bank, and the movie in question was Apocalypse Now***. I almost expected Robert Duvall to turn up any moment and deliver his "napalm in the morning" line. Guessing I'm not the first traveller who's had that thought ... or indeed the follow-up thought, which was basically "How the Hell did we ever convince ourselves that it was ok to bomb the f!#$%k out of a country that was a) so incredibly poor and b) so incredibly idyllic?

But, y'know, travelling in places that used to be considered 'enemy territory' will do that for ya. Which is one reason why I recommend it ))) 

Anyway ... the journey down the mountain was rather challenging – I got a touch of altitude sickness part-way down and had to stop frequently to prevent my insides from imploding – but the rewards at the bottom more than justified the pain. Long, low wooden houses sat in rice fields half-submerged in muddy water, gardens and yards were strewn with animals and farming equipment, and sheaves of corn hung drying out under wide verandahs.

All this was set against a backdrop of terraces ascending towards cloud-covered peaks, with a river snaking through the whole scene, occasionally breaking into stretches of rapids. This place was definitely like none I'd ever seen before ... so, y'know, that was a good thing )))

The next day we hiked in the opposite direction to another Hmong village, and this time I liked the place even before we got there, on the strength of its name alone.

Unfortunately, although the village of Cat Cat was very cute, and the surrounding scenery once again fantastic, it seemed to Yuliya and I that the whole place had 

been turned into a kind of living museum exhibition. The people of Cat Cat were living what I'm sure more or less amounts to a traditional Hmong lifestyle, but all of it appeared to be done a little self-consciously, in the presence of an unending trickle of tourists wandering through their village and going "Ooooh" at the general Hmonginess of it all.

Actually, the general status of the Hmong around Sa Pa raised interesting questions about the meeting of 'traditional' and 'modern' (which is to say wealthy and industralised) cultures. As I mentioned, Sa Pa is a tourist town full of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and the usual palaver. Hmong women hike up to the town every single day in full traditional costume, babies on their backs and daughters alongside. They stride up the slopes, long strands of hemp fibre wound around their wrists, weaving the strands together as they go*** and looking for foreigners to sell stuff to. You get the feeling that a significant % of the female population spends their whole day like this, wandering the hills and speaking English to foreigners.

The daughters of these women, meanwhile, grow up surrounded by travellers from all over the world – hearing their stories and their foreign perspectives on life, picking up the slang expressions they use, and getting used to living in 'international company' from a very young age.

Seems to me there are at least two ways to look at all this (and probably some more I haven't thought of). First you could ask whether, and to what extent, such extensive contact with the external world risks corroding the culture of these previously isolated hill folk. Or you could view it from the opposite end and ask: does the need  

to 'Hmong it up' for the tourists, with all the trad clothing and weaving and rice-harvesting and so forth, keep them stuck in a kind of developmental tar pit, in which they can't move their lifestlye forward because it would take away the 'primitivity' which is now their major source of income?

I s'pose the answer depends on how shrewd, tough and determined the Hmong people really are. In my brief encounters with them, they seemed to have all these qualities in spades ... but I guess we'll see what happens.

Btw, just like with the flaming alcoholic runners, there's an added twist here too. Notice that everything I said just now was about Hmong women and their daughters, not men or boys or all of the above. That's because the male folk have no part at all in this interaction with foreigners. Outside the villages, I saw maybe two in two days. They stay at home, presumably tending the rice terraces, feeding the buffalo and what-have-you. So, I mean, where does that leave Hmong culture? Don't you find that kinda weird ... that one gender spends all its time with foreigners, and the other has no outside contact at all? I just can't quite imagine the effect (if any) this would have on family life ... but in any case, I'm intrigued.

One last random and intriguing thing about the Hmong, to which I've alluded a couple of times but haven't really explained: they make almost all of their clothes from hemp, which they get from the marijuana plants that grow in and around their villages.

Our guide in Cat Cat invited me to pick a leaf from one of these plants and check that it was 'the real thing' (though I'm not sure how I was supposed to do that, not being terribly wise in the Ways of The Ganja). I asked "Do people here use marijuana for purposes other than making clothes?", and the guide said "No, because they know that if they get caught, the government will take the plants away, and then they won't be able to make their clothes".

So there you go ... if my guide is to be believed, it implies both an Indo-Chinese govt showing tolerance towards the cultivation of 'drugs', and a people who live surrounded by marijuana leaves and yet never chop them up, roll them up and smoke them.

Once again, I mention this for no particular reason apart from that it's yet another example of the "Hey, weird ol' wide ol' world we live in" thing that I was talking about before.

Ok, time to end this rather long ramble and get some sleep. Next up: Angkor Wat.

("Angkor what?")
("Yes, wat.")
("What?")
("Mm-hmm, that's right.")
("Huh?")
("Wat.")
("Yeah, that's what I'm asking. What?")
("It's, y'know, part of the name.")
("What name?")
("I've already ... oh, forget it. This is turning into the George W Bush / President Hu joke.")

Bye!

* Btw, in case anyone's remotely interested, classifiers are extra words that precede nouns in some languages, providing information about what kind of thing the noun is. To get an idea, imagine if you had to precede the word "umbrella" with the phrase "long, pointy, stick-like thing" in English ... but also imagine that we had a single word which meant "long, pointy stick-like thing". If the word was, say, "smurg", you'd say "Dammit, I left my smurg umbrella on the bus again!", to indicate that the thing you left on the bus was pointy and stick-like. These terms don't fit into any of the 'word classes' (noun, adverb etc.) that we discuss in relation to European languages, so they're fun in the sense of being totally alien. Least I think so )))

** Of the others, three (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian) belong to the fascinating Finno-Ugric family, and there are also a few mysterious ‘isolates’ like Euskara, spoken in the Basque provinces. If you have a taste for weird exotic theories and academic mysteries, check this one out. It has baffled linguists for decades, and the more ‘respectable’, and some wild theories have been proposed. My favourite: that Euskara is a cousin of the Ainu language, spoken by the minority indigeous population on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Seems unlikely, but if a connection between the two were ever definitively established, it could challenge some of our ideas about humankind’s early global migrations, and thus about the genetic links between European and Asian people. I love fringe theories like this… which, y’know, probably just proves that I should get out more ;-)

*** Film about the US/Vietnam war, but completely different to all the others I've seen (and the only one worth watching i.m.h.o.). An extremely atmospheric, surreal, drug-laced and disturbing film that nearly sent its creators insane. (I'm not kidding.)

**** (to make the thick hemp thread from which most Hmong clothing is woven)