| Muller | Hitchhiking Vietnam
Page 120 |
The tourists arrived in white minibuses, dazed and stiff-legged from twelve cramped hours on the winding, wretched road. Other, more courageous souls flooded the train to Lao Cai and got fleeced by the bus conductors on the long ride up the mountain. They arrived late Friday night and filled the rapidly expanding guesthouses to the bursting point. They left Sunday afternoon, their film duly exposed, each clutching some piece of intricate embroidery a tribal women had labored over for many days. They left behind a small mountain of banknotes that was turning the economy on its head, and affecting everything from dowries to death rites.
I set myself up in a forgotten corner of the market, shared a small bag of peanuts with a grateful water buffalo and tried to make myself invisible.
Virtually every Hmong woman carried a basketful of embroidered clothing on her back, ready for sale. They descended upon the tourists brave enough to forsake their balcony rooms for a ground-level view of the bustling market. They spoke not a word of English and only a smattering of French, enough to say, "Jolie, jolie!" as they clustered around the towering white strangers, tugging on their sleeves and reaching up to slip indigo skull-caps on bare heads and tunics over broad shoulders.
Oddly enough, the clothes they sold looked nothing like the clothes they wore; lovely tunics with multicolored stitchery and delicately sewn seams. The tourist garments were a patchy shade of purple and made of poorly matched panels that puckered and sagged. I snagged one for a closer look and realization dawned. They were reworked secondhands. The women had torn the collars out of old jackets and cut the broad, embroidered edge out of their tattered skirts, then stitched the pieces hastily together. The sack-like jackets were then immersed in homemade dye to disguise the battered embroidery and clashing colors. The same was true for the popular skull-caps made exclusively in foreign sizes. The bumpy embroidered patch across the front was really an old collar, baptized in a vat of dye and stitched to a piece of plain blue cloth.
The Hmong did brisk business selling their grungy clothes to grungier tourists who seemed to welcome the second-hand look. I wondered how they kept themselves supplied with used clothes. Surely they had cleaned out their own rag bins months ago.
The answer arrived in the form of several men with bulging sacks who set up shop outside the apothecary. They were immediately inundated with native women who snatched up the best pieces, squinted at them briefly in the sunlight and tucked them into their bodices before they could be seized by other dye-tinted hands. It was all over in minutes, the women drifting away from the tattered remains. I wandered over to have a chat with the frazzled-looking men.
They were from a hamlet on the far side of Lao Cai, they told me, and business was good. They had long since emptied the surrounding villages of old clothes, and now traveled two hundred kilometers on horseback through the mountains in search of new sources. Some of the skirts were fifty years old, having been passed on from mother to daughter. The traders were getting desperate, and rich. Dwindling supplies had pushed prices up six-fold, and even the most ragged clothing now found a ready buyer.
I asked if I could go with them on one of their treks if I brought my own horse and gear. They turned pale and shrunk in upon themselves, shaking their heads like angry buffalo and insisting that my mere presence would spoil business. Not even an offer to pay my way with tobacco and rice wine could bring the color back into their cheeks, and they didn't look healthy again until their bags were packed and they were safely on their way.
