update

Well, Pha-Aw’s 18 year old daughter has returned, with boyfriend, declaring that they loved each other and wanted to be a couple. They went straight up to see her parents in the mountains and peace reigns once more. The general consensus was that she could have done a lot worse. Not that his family were very pleased, though. They pointed out that when it came to housework the young lady showed neither interest nor ability. We shall see. Anyway, these events were overshadowed today by a bird depositing its droppings on my arm as I stepped out of the car. If this happens to a Lisu, they immediately consult a shaman and sacrifice a pig to appease the spirits who have chosen this way of showing their displeasure. As it was, I just washed it off and felt grateful it happened dropped in the ice cream I was eating at the time. Avo nervously hoped that as I was a farang nothing terrible would happen.

trouble

My siesta was interrupted by a neighbour making a noisy phone call to her father in his mountain village. The gist was that a farang had asked her to marry him and she wanted her father to tell her how much she should ask for. 100,000 baht was the answer. Meanwhile, Pha-Aw’s daughter has vanished. Pha-Aw learned that she was seeing a young man with the same surname (though it was acquired from his step father), which is a Lisu taboo. When he called her and angrily told her he’d bring her back home and tie her up, she took off. Until recently, a young man’s family would suggest a possible wife to him. If he liked her, negotiations between the two families would ensue. Not surprisingly, people here find the Western notion of ‘falling in love’ odd. Love, Avo told me, is something that grows after you’ve been with someone for a period of time, not something that strikes you like lightning.

Pha-Aw’s daughter

calling home

Avo had a mixture of news from home today. Her elder sister was in tears as the rains ten days ago had rotted the bean crop, their only source of income. A 19 year old nephew was coming home drunk and truculent nearly every night. He woke Avo’s mother up at 3am shouting something about the water being too far away. A young woman from the same village had got her revenge on a wayward husband by sleeping on two occasions with a wealthy drug dealer who had rewarded her handsomely. Meanwhile, another nephew who leaves his wife and young children sleeping each night to work in a gay bar, had met up with an elderly farang gentleman who had bought him a second-hand pickup.

Chantira’s story Part 2

Read part 1 first!

In her mid twenties, at the suggestion of a neighbour, Chantira entered the town’s busiest brothel. She still had the face and body of a child and proved popular with the clients. She was able to buy herself a house and one for her mother, erect a pillar in the village temple and ‘lend’ a large sum to one of her brothers who swindled her out of it. She was afraid of farangs and would always hide if a Western customer appeared, until one day she saw one who looked kind. They hit it off and she gave up work to live with him. Her last day the manager called her in and asked her with great concern why she was leaving. Was she not happy there, was there anything he could do, was she sure about this farang and so on. At first all went well; they were both quiet people and friends thought they made an ideal couple. Her 6 year old nephew made a very perceptive comment on her: “How is it,” he asked “that Auntie has no knowledge but so many ideas?” For ten years nobody could have asked for a more loving or attentive wife. But her husband said he felt suffocated by her love and eventually left her. She went back to her mother’s house, trying hard to conceal her disappointment. Three months later her mother died and she opened a little shop where she works from 6 am till late every day to make a dollar or two profit. She looks after stray cats as she says they stop her brooding on things.

a mistake

The other day Avo and I along with Avo’s closest friend, Alima, went to an event that was described as a  ‘concert of hilltribes music’. The large hall was packed mostly with people from the various minorities many of whom had come down from their villages just for the occasion. Things started one hour late, which gave Alima time to take her pills. Along with a careful diet they have kept her Aids at bay longer than has been the case with most of her contemporaries. The event was being televised and after the customary interminable (and inaudible) speeches, there was a series of performances by groups of gracefully nubile young ladies in fancy costumes accompanied by rather mournful vocalists who doggedly strummed their guitars. After three or more of these events Avo and I exchanged glances. ‘This is a load of crap’ is the gist of what she said. We were not the only ones to leave but most of the audience, for whatever reason, seemed to have decided to stick it out. The prettiness of it is far removed from life in the hills, whether it is music or preparing lunch.

bizarre beliefs

I asked Avo how she was enjoying going to church. She said most of it was pretty boring but one part had shocked her. They asked people to eat a bit of cake that was some holy person’s body and drink fruit juice that was his blood. ‘We Lisu have some strange beliefs’, she said ‘but nothing as disgusting as that.’

Chantira’s story Part 1

Chantira is one of 11 children, eight of whom survive. Her father died when she was two. When she was a small child her mother did not have enough money to buy her clothes and worked all day with the other children in the fields so she used to leave Chantira with no clothes on and her leg tied to a post so she couldn’t wander off. There was a small bowl of water in case she got thirsty. Later, her elder sister occasionally took her to school with her, where she would sit in the class without understanding what was going on. When she was 11 her mother sent her to a well-to-do Lahu family to work. She lived there, got up at 3.30 am each morning to fetch heavy containers of water from the well and worked without a break until late at night. She cried so much that eventually her mother allowed her to come home and help in the fields or selling pathetic little clutches of herbs or fruits from the forest in the market. This lasted until her early twenties, apart from an interlude of two years when her mother sent her to school; she proved a studious child.

sorry!

It’s sometimes difficult to get people to tell me how things are said in their language. I had to ask several Akha people the equivalent of ‘sorry’ before I found one who explained that it was translated by a rather complicated phrase. Palao, who’s Hmong, told me categorically ‘it doesn’t exist’. ‘What do you say if you’ve done somebody wrong?’, I insisted. ‘I don’t say anything’, he replied. ‘I run away as fast as I can before he kills me.’

  Palao

a visit to the zoo

Yesterday I took Avo and her mother to the zoo. It was Avo’s mother’s first visit. Afterwards I asked her what she thought of it. She said she liked watching the animals but the smell was terrible. It turned out she had been standing in a queue behind a Frenchman.

    Avo’s mum

twins are bad news

Mai is something of a rarity: an Akha mother who kept her twins. Twins are regarded as a sign that the spirits want to punish the community and in the past one would be strangled and the body hidden far away in the forest. Since then, one of the twins has usually been given away. Some Lisu still believe that twins are a couple returning to another life and should be separated so that they can reunite as a couple later on. On seeing the catastrophe that had befallen them, Mai’s husband promptly left her and neighbours urged the young mother in no uncertain terms to dispose of one twin. Mai was having none of this and, with her mother’s support, kept brother and sister, suckling them both simultaneously in defiance of the traditionalists.