On Non Communism

10-26-11

Sapa, Lao Cai Privince, Vietnam

There’s not much to do in Sapa proper. The four or five streets that make up the town are crammed with hotels, restaurants, market stands and travel agencies. An hour and a half of pounding the pavement and you’ve seen everything there is to see without spending money.

But you don’t go to Sapa to see Sapa; the draws of the French colonial town are the breathtaking natural beauty in the surrounding Hoang Lien Son mountains and the hill tribes that populate the area.

In this part of the country, the indigenous population consists mainly of Hmong and Dzao people. Relatively speaking, they are latecomers to these parts and natural selection left them with the highest, most difficult altitudes to scratch out a living.

Which is why everyday in Sapa, 100s of women dressed in traditional indigo Hmong robes mill through the city: the young ones in small huddles, the stooped and wizened elders trekking solo down the narrow alleys. Make eye contact with one, linger for even a moment, and you hear a refrain that becomes familiar very quickly.

“Hello. You buy something from me”

It’s hard to tell if a question mark belongs at the end of this sentence. Sometimes if feels like the squadron of young girls, some carrying babies on their back, others with pregnancy inflated torsos, are commanding you to peruse their hand embroidered bags and mélange of intricate silver bracelets. These are the hardest to refuse, because you have a direct line of sight to the infant whose already difficult life you are refusing to improve.

 

Other times, a sole seller will catch your glimpse and blurt out an auto-piloted, semi-deflated “youbuyfromee?”

Pretty soon, it becomes easier to say nothing than continue repeating the refrain: “No, thank you.”

“Bracelet for you girlfriend.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” smile.

“Oh you have one soon.”

From these little back and forths it’s easy to identify an inaccurate correlation between heavy tourist travel and actual English comprehension by the local people. It becomes quickly apparent, if you actually stop to talk to the women with the pleasant eyes and warm smiles, that they all repeat the same questions with a practiced sequential promptness.

How many brothers and sisters you have?

How old are you?

How old you parents?

WhatYouName?

The last one is interesting because after answering: “Daniel,” it’s natural to turn the questions back on them. “What’s your name?” “What’s your family like?”

This is how I met Ma and Te, two Hmong women with very easy to pronounce names.

As I walked down a road that lead past the last stretch of hotels and out to the edge of town, they flanked me, asking questions and cracking jokes on me in their own tongue. They offered to take me to their village, “Lao Chai”

“You walk this way? See my village!”

“How far is it? Is the walk long,” a question I instantly regretted, realizing that these two women probably make the round trip hike daily.

“Not far. One hour,” Te holds up her index finger, smiling.

One hour. Easy, and a good way to both see some of the country and get to know to people beyond the cursory give and take of market haggling.

 

The latter part proved more difficult than the former. Most questions I proffered brought out the same answers. Either, “this way, Lao Chai village,” accompanied by a vague sort of hand wave/finger point. Or else an unrecognizable group of unpracticed sounds and punctuations that was evidently meant to be understandable English. Soon. I stop trying to speak and start just listening to their conversation.

The Hmong don’t speak Vietnamese. A difference they themselves will point out quickly and with no small amount of pride.

“Many Vietnamese visit down that road,” Te points at one path, proudly distinguishing herself, Ma – and by extension me – as more knowledgeable about this section of Vietnam. I feel like a member of an exclusive club. If only I could understand their language.

A beautiful language. The Hmong tongue is almost more song than speech. Intonations fluctuate with mini-vibratos and pauses come at unexpected but decidedly rhythmic spots. Pitch rises and falls as precipitously as the hills these people have made their home on. At one point, overcome by the tonal beauty, I sneak a video of the two of them as I walk abreast.

What our journey lacks in pennable dialogue was more than made up for with visual intensity. The  one hour walk I was promised turned out to be a three hour scramble through muddy trails, terraced rice paddies and solitary hill shacks. It was stunningly beautiful, and the blue boat shoes I had worn for a stroll around town became stunningly stained with mud.

 

The hills of northwest Vietnam pierce through the clouds. From 4-8,000 feet, a perpetual fog ebbs and flows, sometimes smothering you only to break and reveal an unctuously twisting valley below. The natural cuts and curves built through millions of years of geological evolution are laced with the agricultural advancements of the last 1000.

 

Everywhere you look, climbing up the mountains like a giant’s staircase, green and gold rice paddies march across the landscape. From afar they look as though they may have been penciled in with a compass by some deified architect in the sky. Up close they are even cooler.

Our tiny group plods directly through at two paddies with farmers working. The flooded terraces stream trickles of diverted rainwater from one to another, flooding the individual terraces and drowning any potential nutrient-siphoning weeds. Water buffaloes plod through the wet muck, munching on grass and fertilizing the planting area with their nutrient-rich manure.

 

Standing at one level and looking uphill, the cutback stairs of earth create a magnificently imposing foreground to the ethereal mists floating across the horizon, which let tiny drops of sunlight peek through.

 

Our forest trek ended at a bridge, and a fork in the road. From the other paths came the main road. The one we intrepidly avoided on our hillside crawl. At the other side of the little suspension bridge lies Lao Chai.

After three hours of relative solitude in the company of these two women, part of me is disappointed to see in Lao Chai the return of white people and travel guides and the sound of spoken English language.

 

Walking through the village takes the better part of an hour, including a stop at the local kindergarten to watch and play with unnaturally cute little kids. At the end of the road, Ma promises to organize a motorbike ride back to Sapa. But first:

“My friend, you buy from me now.”

I see how the game works now. I’m miles away from anything that could be considered a road, with only a vague idea of how to hike the six uphill miles back to my hotel. They are holding my ride ransom until I pay them. I cant decide if they are brilliant con artists or just cutthroat capitalists.

Some sort of moralistic reasoning takes over. These two just spent a good chunk of their day navigating through a jungle for me. How can I say no to giving them five bucks between the two.

I pull the money out grudgingly, purchasing an embroidered wallet and a brass harmonica. Of course, as soon as I pull some cash out, I’m instantly surrounded by a score of yelping girls holding bags and bracelets and earrings and shouting at me. I plead for the nearby motorbike driver for help but he just smiles. He won’t give me a ride till I hook his fellow villagers up.

Disgusted and angry and feeling exploited (over $5, little bit of an overreaction on my part) I bulldoze through the crowd and march across the bridge and up the long dirt path to the “road”. I hitch my way back to Sapa. The 30 mph mountain wind in my face and hair calm me down. 

You kind of have to give it to these ladies. They got me. They want money and they know how to get it. In a communist country enterprising individuals find a way to make ends meet. The rugged solidarity of their situation demands that they pull out all the stops. I can’t help but respect them.