By Liane Arno
RECENTLY I visited the military cemetery in Mai Chau, Vietnam. Visiting Mai Chau is like stepping back in time. Paddy fields are ploughed with water buffalo guided by men in rolled up trousers thigh deep in mud. Each evening the water buffalo are walked back to sleep underneath the family home. The homes are on stilts where animals shelter under the building and the people climb stairs to sleep under thatched roofs. Women gather leafy vegetables by hand, filling baskets held on their backs by a strap around their foreheads.
RECENTLY I visited the military cemetery in Mai Chau, Vietnam. Visiting Mai Chau is like stepping back in time. Paddy fields are ploughed with water buffalo guided by men in rolled up trousers thigh deep in mud. Each evening the water buffalo are walked back to sleep underneath the family home. The homes are on stilts where animals shelter under the building and the people climb stairs to sleep under thatched roofs. Women gather leafy vegetables by hand, filling baskets held on their backs by a strap around their foreheads.
The White Tai ethnic community live in the valley and the H’mong people live in the mountains that tower over the fields. Where the White Tai wear brocaded tops matched with long black skirts covering their slim bodies, the sturdier H’mong women wear beautiful heavily embroidered and pleated skirts and tops.
After the White Tai have finished in the fields, they return in the evening and weave their traditional brocades. Not to do so is to be ineligible for marriage. Before they marry they must have produced all their clothes, blankets and pillows as a dowry and proof of their worth.
For a H’mong man to find out whether he is acceptable as a suitor, he will “snatch” a woman and take her to his home. Tradition says that she cannot leave the house for three days. At the end of three days, if she refuses to marry the boy, she would offer him a bowl of wine, thank him for picking her and ask for his friendship. If she accepts the marriage, the boy’s family would start preparing for the wedding – a huge ceremony with many offerings – affirming love and desire.
And it is the H’mong who also believe that only devils and animals have white teeth and so before they marry, women undergo a week-long ceremony where they cannot eat or drink while black lacquer is applied to their teeth which will stay with them for life.
I have been living with these people for the past two months.
Before I left for Vietnam, I was telling the wife of a Vietnam War veteran where I was going. Quick as anything, she quipped, “Oh my husband didn’t like it very much.”
This man, like hundreds of thousands (61,000 from Australia), went to fight in the Vietnam War. The locals here refer to it as the American War – if they refer to it at all. The precursor to this war was the First Indo China War, where the Vietnamese fought against the French. In the late 1880s, the French started to colonise Vietnam and established borders between Vietnam, China and Laos. In 1953, the French made their army headquarters in Dien Bien Phu because of its importance on the way to Laos and Cambodia, which were also under French control. In addition, the French used the high ground to their advantage with their airplanes, which the Vietnamese army, then known as the Viet Minh army, did not have.
Mai Chau was used by the Viet Minh army on their way to the final battle at Dien Bien Phu. The locals supported the Viet Minh with night transportation and helped the soldiers to hide from the French. The wondrous limestone caves that I have explored in Mai Chau were used to shelter troops and supplies, including explosives. The French were ultimately defeated in 1954.
But there was only a short period of peace before the world was at the height of the Cold War and used Vietnam as a test of Socialism versus Democracy.
And so to the Mai Chau cemetery. It was like no other I had been in. The vast majority of headstones, in fact scores of them, showed the spaces for name, unit and date of birth, and the date and place of death. And next to these there was no engraving – no name, no identification, nowhere for a family to grieve.
And so, these people in a little-known valley, ploughing their land a world away in both space and time from the Bass Coast of Australia, just smile at me as I pass. They bear no grudges, they have moved on. They worship their ancestors in personal shrines which groan under the weight of offerings of food and rice wine – but they don’t seek vengeance on their behalf. There are fields to be tilled, and food to be grown and a new generation to teach to weave.
Liane Arno is working with the White Tai community of Mai Chau on a project to attract tourists to the region without ruining its charm.
After the White Tai have finished in the fields, they return in the evening and weave their traditional brocades. Not to do so is to be ineligible for marriage. Before they marry they must have produced all their clothes, blankets and pillows as a dowry and proof of their worth.
For a H’mong man to find out whether he is acceptable as a suitor, he will “snatch” a woman and take her to his home. Tradition says that she cannot leave the house for three days. At the end of three days, if she refuses to marry the boy, she would offer him a bowl of wine, thank him for picking her and ask for his friendship. If she accepts the marriage, the boy’s family would start preparing for the wedding – a huge ceremony with many offerings – affirming love and desire.
And it is the H’mong who also believe that only devils and animals have white teeth and so before they marry, women undergo a week-long ceremony where they cannot eat or drink while black lacquer is applied to their teeth which will stay with them for life.
I have been living with these people for the past two months.
Before I left for Vietnam, I was telling the wife of a Vietnam War veteran where I was going. Quick as anything, she quipped, “Oh my husband didn’t like it very much.”
This man, like hundreds of thousands (61,000 from Australia), went to fight in the Vietnam War. The locals here refer to it as the American War – if they refer to it at all. The precursor to this war was the First Indo China War, where the Vietnamese fought against the French. In the late 1880s, the French started to colonise Vietnam and established borders between Vietnam, China and Laos. In 1953, the French made their army headquarters in Dien Bien Phu because of its importance on the way to Laos and Cambodia, which were also under French control. In addition, the French used the high ground to their advantage with their airplanes, which the Vietnamese army, then known as the Viet Minh army, did not have.
Mai Chau was used by the Viet Minh army on their way to the final battle at Dien Bien Phu. The locals supported the Viet Minh with night transportation and helped the soldiers to hide from the French. The wondrous limestone caves that I have explored in Mai Chau were used to shelter troops and supplies, including explosives. The French were ultimately defeated in 1954.
But there was only a short period of peace before the world was at the height of the Cold War and used Vietnam as a test of Socialism versus Democracy.
And so to the Mai Chau cemetery. It was like no other I had been in. The vast majority of headstones, in fact scores of them, showed the spaces for name, unit and date of birth, and the date and place of death. And next to these there was no engraving – no name, no identification, nowhere for a family to grieve.
And so, these people in a little-known valley, ploughing their land a world away in both space and time from the Bass Coast of Australia, just smile at me as I pass. They bear no grudges, they have moved on. They worship their ancestors in personal shrines which groan under the weight of offerings of food and rice wine – but they don’t seek vengeance on their behalf. There are fields to be tilled, and food to be grown and a new generation to teach to weave.
Liane Arno is working with the White Tai community of Mai Chau on a project to attract tourists to the region without ruining its charm.
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