2010
The Black H’Mong People of Northern Vietnam
Given the choice between electricity and plumbing, which would you opt for?
The Black H’Mong village I visited in northern Vietnam had satellite dishes, but no running water. The leech-infested trail leading there was also home to roaming pigs, goats, and enormous water buffalo the H’Mong use for food and labor. Their terraced rice farms are everywhere, making use of every sun-exposed mountain face, no matter how treacherous, and broken up only occasionally by a corn or pumpkin patch, or other crop not nearly so important as rice.
The H’Mong are a minority in Vietnam, inhabiting the upper reaches of the northwestern mountains deemed not worth settling by the Vietnamese. Their intricate, hand-sewn textiles are on offer not only in the nearby tourist town of Sa Pa, but even on the remote trails leading to and from their sleepy villages. I was quoted a price of 200,000 Vietnamese Dong ($10 USD) for a beautifully worked slip of fabric that would purportedly take an expert H’Mong craftswoman ten straight days of dedicated (“9-5”) effort to produce. Everything in Vietnam is subject to haggling (I argued her as low as 140,000 Dong), yet even at the “inflated” price of 200,000, that’s a mere $.13 per hour.
Globalization has had a surreal effect on these people. The H’Mong house I was in had a firepit for cooking, concrete floors, a barebones, barn-like architectural sensibility (you could see through the walls to the outside), and no plumbing to speak of. Yet the family sat gathered around a TV set, complete with stereo system and DVD player, watching a dubbed (into H’Mong) Vietnamese murder procedural.
