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The Valley Opens Up
When we came off the small path and hit the valley, it seemed never ending.Please feel free to watch the video before or after if you would like to see the day in some live action shots.
When we emerged from the doors of the Friendly Guesthouse Lily stood and smiled and we could feel excitement radiating from the glowing expression on her face - the day previous when she had thrust her tiny notebook of testimonials into our hands, a half dozen hand-written messages, presented to us upside-down in an inadvertant testament to the fact that she did not know what they contained, we had caught a glimpse of the stake her family held in bringing guests to the village - yet it was more than a thirst for a few of America’s finest greenbacks that lit the timeless expression on Lily’s face. What we found in this woman, strong and agile for a grandmother, albeit only in her late forties, was the endurance of human vitality, the ingenuity of the human mind, and the great kindness of the human heart - so rare in the raw competition and consumer slime of the smart-phone kiosk, designer coffee culture - on the surface a seemingly cunning saleswoman of the modern
world, inches below the great and ancient wisdom passed down from vast golden fields - from father to son amongst the dancing orange of a ceremonial fire, from mother to daughter building and maintaining a homestead from nothing but the sweat of the brow - those great secrets never to be bought or passed through something so trite as an entitlement, inheritance or title.
The sky was already a vibrant blue and the sun danced off the sparkling irrigation ditches as they wound their way to the emerald fields below - Lily and her people were the royalty of these lands, even the Vietnamese - whose language adorn the street signs, whose flags fly high above the municipal buildings - are foreigners here. As we approached a main road Lily turned and asked us if we wanted to pay for a ticket, which we didn’t - and so she led us up a dirt path which bypassed the road completely, and for the next three hours we were haunted, enchanted, bound by scenes that our 9 to 5 minds could never process, should we dare enough even to try. Below us lie the great valley where a
Waterfall
A large stream brings life to the valley below. small river served as artery feeding the vital blood of the valley to the humble villages in it’s midst, beyond it to either side sprawled magnificent rice terraces from a great dream - The dream of the gods perhaps?, cleared by hand and built with the most modest of tools, with an intensity of labor that would make soft hands smothered in scented lotions the world over tremble at the mere thought - and above the dizzying array of patterns stood those frightful towers of ancient stone - serving to keep all but the most rugged of peoples sealed out until well into the twentieth century, incandescent streams of the purest water you’d ever see pouring from their peaks, joining up with intricately designed, humbly manufactured irrigation channels which ensured the proper distribution of the vital resource - a sight before which even the greatest of pride must tremor in comparison.
Mid way through our journey we began to pass active terraces with scores of rice farmers working tirelessly, engulfed by the tremendous sludge where water meets soil - from our perch high above on the trail, it is easy to romanticize the great and ancient practice
Working the Paddies
We only took a very few pictures of the people working the terraces. It felt very strange pointing a camera at them in the midst of their labor. of the Hmong, and other ethnic groups who are the real and true claimants to these lands, their very survival dependent upon the harvest, and we with our high-tech cameras to record it, to act perhaps as if we too were a part of their world - but what a sad delusion is ours. Men, women and young children, covered right up to their chin in the foul soup of clay, earth, fertilizer, the oppressive mid-day sun beating relentlessly upon your back, the slime of the earth splashing your eyes, into your mouth, contained within your very pours until you are not so much of the earth as a part of it - tedious motions, repetition, back bent constantly until to straighten it seems the unnatural posture - perhaps they caught a glance of us, up on that hill staring down at them and oh what they must have imagined of our lives. As we began to wander through some of the villages the smell of animals, free to roam wild in the streets and fields was overwhelming, it waffed through the air, mingling with the heat, sticking to our skin and becoming one with our bodies. Children as young
Lily's First Video
The first video of herself Lily had ever seen. as three wander the villages alone, bare-ass, pissing on the road, falling amongst the rancid mud that is left in the wake, huts are constructed out of simple thatched bamboo with larger rods serving as the mainframe yet life here is improving. Had we come to these same villages even fifteen years back, the children would have been visibly undernourished, schools mostly non-existent, very few locals speaking the national language, let alone English or French. Today the children are a healthy weight, corrugated metal roofs ensure the dampness will be kept to a minimum, that locals will have a dry place to rest their weary heads at night - and the Vietnamese government has brought schools here - children are learning how to read for the first time, many to speak the national language. Improved infrastructure has steadily increased the flow of tourists, and with them comes increasing prosperity and alternatives for the villagers - some of whom can now break away from the fields and come to try their hand in the town, offering travelers like us a rare chance to view this ancient lifestyle, but at what cost? Will the children three or four generations from now still
Bridge from Hill to Hill
This bridge connected one side of the mountain to the other. With no rails it was a bit frightening to peer over the edge. smile whole-heartedly as did their ancestors? It takes a far greater intellect than mine to weigh the merits of the whole process, a path which will no doubt be filled with great triumph alongside great sadness like fire with water, or darkness with light.
When we arrived to Lily’s village we stopped at a small store, we paid a dollar for a large block of tofu and Lily bought five packages of instant noodles. By this point Lily knew about where we came from, our jobs and our lives, we were soaking up as much of her culture as the sponge in our skulls would allow - we knew of her family and she knew of ours, so rare in these times that you spend three hours just speaking to someone, and better yet listening in the true sense of the word. We had already learned more phrases in Black Hmong in our hours with her than we had Vietnamese from our week in Hanoi - she could just as well have been Aunt Lily, fussing over her niece and nephew who were in for a visit from out of town, I peered down to the shop-floor
and a boy of two years sat in the dust with a vegetable peeler in his hand, working the blade aptly across the membrane of a cucumber. I put my blue-lens sunglasses on Lily and she positively marveled at the blue world, she inquired where she could get a pair and I had to inform her that they were handmade at a small cafe in Nakhon Sawan Thailand, a gift from a true friend before we’d parted ways. She walked a great distance in those glasses and I worried for a moment that I might have to ask for them back. When we reached her home up a high-hill in a small village - a simple one story wooden home with two larger rooms and a smaller room / hall adjoining - so humble and unassuming a little place was this that Siddhartha the Buddha might have walked in right out of the first century BC and felt right at home. I tried to take off my shoes but Lily wouldn’t have it. In the first large room sat two red plastic chairs and a small television set, a young boy sprawled out in front of the cartoons, a few
photos of small groups who had visited taped frameless to the walls. In the small adjoining room there was an elevated bamboo bed with a thin mattress where two or three more children - nieces, nephews and cousins - along with Lily’s youngest son lounged, seeking refuge from the increasingly oppressive sun. I realized in this part of the world family is not the same concept that you or I imagine it, forty or so different people might pass through those doors in an hour, just as welcome as ma or pa or brother or sis for certain, and since there are no doors on the structure, people don’t seem to understand or have use for concepts such as knocking.
We sat down by the fire to watch Lily cook, a charred metal rack over an open wood fire, smoke rising up to dry the fire wood stored above. There was no ventilation chamber for the smoke to depart, instead it just mingled in the air, burning at our eyes and soaking into our clothes and Lily with her face right to the fire, grabbing scalding cast iron handles from the fire with bare hands thought nothing
of it. A chicken wandered in and pecked around at the floor. First some shelled but unprocessed rice was boiled in a large pot, next some lard was put into a flat pan and the tofu sliced into thick chunks and fried in the lard, then a giant pot of green vegetables fresh from the garden, boiled in a large pot and finally the instant noodles which were soaked in boiling water, then fried in lard before being stirred in a big bowl with the seasoning packets. Finally, some fermented chili peppers were crushed up in a bowl with MSG and a little bit of the cooking water from the vegetables and this was to serve as the dip, no other flavorings or sauces used in the process. The entire spread was set out on a portable metal table which was rolled out of the corner and set in the middle of the floor in the main room. Five small bowls were set out and the main courses in the middle, each of us were given chopsticks and also two bowls of the chili MSG sauce were set out. Lily and her two oldest sons joined us, they spoke no
Grandma Seeing the World in Blue
Everyone who tried them got a kick out of life through the blue glasses, perhaps no one more so than Grandma. English - only the women learn English and French here to serve as tourist ambassadors, while some of the more business oriented men learn Vietnamese - but smiled while Lily went on and on with stories of her village. She filled our small bowls with rice. We watched her sons as they took a piece of tofu, dipped it in the sauce and - with their bowls almost touching their mouths - literally shoveled the food in with their chopsticks in deft, almost imperceptible motions. Lily followed suit, taking a small bit of food from the common serving bowls, dipping it into the sauce, then shoveling with the rice - no more than a bite of food is placed upon the rice at any one time. The food was simple and with the chili MSG sauce surprisingly delicious, it was the first time in quite some while that I really tasted just the essence of the food pure and simple, myself being an avid condiment aficionado in Thailand, the land of condiments mind you.
When we could eat no more the sons disappeared as did Lily, who soon reappeared with three shot glasses and a reused plastic
Lunch is Served
A simple spread for our lunch at Lily's. iced tea bottle and boy did we know the content, it being rough local rice ‘wine’ if such a strong brew should ever be called a wine, and we each were poured a shot. Before we put them to our mouth I asked Lily to teach me how to say cheers in Black Hmong which was surprisingly difficult given the relative ease of most of the phrases we had learned. The words 'Bpee Dtut Chee Jhudt Jher' rolled off her tongue - we repeated with a pronounced lack of the language’s natural grace - the shots went down, Tara nearly gagged, she asked for no more and Lily who damn well understood poured us each another and so Tara gave in and suffered through about three shots, after which she firmly bowed out. Lily and I now plowed through the plastic bottle and I began to witness in fact the Black Hmong people returning wearily from the fields under that oppressive sun, just as millions of ancestors had done throughout history, a history far more fascinating than nations tearing from the earth's flesh in a gluttonous desire for resources or wholesale slaughter wrought for petty philosophical squabbles . This right
here was the History of mankind, told in these very fields, around makeshift tables in humble abodes with extended families and friends, where people truly schooled in the meaning of work and what it means to produce can speak to you of celebration without the need for speech. Just as I used to observe my father and myself as we worked side by side, along with other builders and construction workers at the end of a long hard day, covered in filth and sweat and grime, making our way to the modern day watering hole, the satisfaction of the first sip of cold drink, the momentous laughs and the great comradery of producing with your hands. I saw it as if it were a straight line connecting that which still holds on precariously in the modern world, traced back to these ancient cultures, bleeding the same blood and sweating the same sweat. Perhaps those who seem to us to have the least to celebrate, enjoy most heartily just below the depths of our perception. As glass met glass in these timeless hills and the rough brew sent vibrant warmth through our bodies I could see the simple huts of the
Hmong people under deep dark skies, an orange glow from the open windows, simple conversations, smiles which held back nothing, no need for veils or guile - that which perhaps has never been known here. We repeated once again that Ancient language of the hills and I fantasized that I had really come to understand something of these people, then we gathered up our bags and Lily presented us with two gifts, a metal bracelet and a small hand-woven change purse, a warm embrace and we turned away and went back to our lives.
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gina rachmaninoff
non-member comment
fantastic
I have been watching your blog and I AM SO JEALOUS!. Enjoy. We are so busy giving slo tests had to stop teaching content as kids are going to have to be taking tests out of class. Ridiculous. Where are you guys going next?