H’Mong Girl Makes Horse Using Plant
2 September 2009 in Travel, Videos, Vietnam
Watch the video in HD and full screen for best viewing! You can push play, then pause as the video loads, to see it uninterrupted. Please leave a comment if you like this!
Ha (unsure of spelling) is a H’Mong girl living in Sa Pa, a city in NW Vietnam, not far from China. She demonstrates how to turn a common plant stem into a horse figurine in just a couple minutes. She can make several variations of this design. Notice how the “tail” of the horse is the seedy part of the plant and is never broken away. In other words, the horse is one continuous piece of plant.
The H’Mong are one of many, and one of the largest, minority populations living in this mountainous region. H’Mong have traditions and a language, all their own.
Ha is wearing traditional H’Mong attire. The clothing is all made from a particular dried-up plant called Ham (again, unsure of spelling). Women make the clothing, splitting the Ham branches lengthwise dozens of times into fine, hairlike strands which can then be twisted to form strong thread. After the clothing is made, the women soak the clothing in indigo dye to provide the bright colors. Many of the women have lightly stained green-blue hands and forearms from the work.
Phạm Đức Thành’s “The Moving Cloud” is playing in the background. His instrument is called the đàn bầu, a Vietnamese monochord.
Have you been surprised by the amount of English spoken in the places you have gone to?
Glenn, awesome question. I think about this quite a bit. I’m somewhat disappointed by the number of people who speak English. By that, I mean too many people speak English and it detracts from the “exotic” experiences I wish to have! People often apologize to me for their poor English, to which my canned response is “You speak more English than I speak of Vietnamese!”
Yes, I’m surprised. I’m in a mountainous region in the far NW part of Vietnam, not far from the Chinese border. Many of the minorities speak broken English. The H’Mong minority group (“minorities” is how the Vietnamese and neighboring countries refer to the collective group of tribal folks with cultures, languages, and traditions distinct from Vietnam), for instance, speaks their own language (H’Mong) while also speaking Vietnamese which is practically essential for them to be able to communicate with other minority groups and to take part in bigger economical opportunities. Additionally, those who sell products to tourists have an okay grasp of English, enough to sell us stuff anyways! I’m going to post another video of some chit chat I had with a bunch of these women.
Despite the very small amount spoken, the girl in this video has some of the best English I’ve heard from the H’Mong. She told me she learned English exclusively from tourists. Unfortunately, she is also illiterate.
If I get “lost,” venturing down unmarked roads into unmapped villages, I encounter people who don’t speak more than one word of English (everyone seems to know “hello”). No matter where I’ve gone in Vietnam or Mongolia, though, with a little effort to get to a main city or major road and a little time (under an hour), undoubtedly an English speaker will come along who can help. My failure to learn all the local languages is not a concern at all to me. 20 or 30 years ago, it might have been. English truly is, though unofficially, the global language. Additionally, if I go bankrupt and need some fast income, I can get a job ANYWHERE in Asia as an English teacher, and make enough to live well. everybody wants to learn English.
The US Dollar is another topic, but my answer is much the same.
How would you answer your own question based on your time in Europe?