A woman finds herself on a highland road in Vietnam ominously nicknamed Death Road. Along its precipitous twists and turns, she observes life in the H’mong villages of the mountains from the back of a motorbike.
The sleeper bus brings me to Hà Giang, the gateway town to Vietnam’s northern highlands. The curtains by my little coffin bed are broken, so I can see my fellow travelers packed in like anchovies in brine. My bladder is at breaking point. I clutch my little square of toilet paper with sweaty hands, just in case we stop at a service station along the way.
We arrive at the hostel, at that peculiar time when night becomes morning. I try to eat a hearty breakfast for the day ahead: fried eggs and sweet Vietnamese toast with its un-melting butter. Afterwards, we tourists are introduced to our easy riders. They wait outside the hostel, laughing and smoking. The youngest of them looks about sixteen or seventeen years old. I locate my driver, Xuân, and without much warning we drive off. This is my first time on a motorbike and, having no idea what to hold on to, I panic and grab his shoulders. Once firmly on the motorbike, I try to relax, remembering that Xuân knows these roads as well as the wrinkles in his cracked motorcycle gloves.
The Hà Giang loop is infamous, with its roads like narrow ribbons hewn into the mountainside. Boasting an increasing number of casualties, one of them has earned the nickname Death Road. Around bends, I grip the motorbike until my knuckles turn white. But when my driver Xuân asks “Ok?”, I nod my head enthusiastically, clanging my helmet against his. Since he’s doing all the heavy lifting, the least I can do is not stress him out.
I am not just a thrill-seeker; I am also intrigued by the local cultures of the Vietnamese highlands. These roads weave through the karst mountains that make up Vietnam’s border with China. Shaped like furry monsters, the mountains are home to most of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. A page in my guidebook describes their garments: the Flower H’mong wear bead-encrusted clothing bearing the musical name of “flower cloth”; the Black H’mong dye their clothes a deep indigo; Red Dao women wear scarlet turbans jingling with silver coins; and Red H’mong women painstakingly collect all the hair they shed and weave it into a towering headpiece. I roll these names around on my tongue, fascinated.
In one of the villages, I see long strips of indigo fabric hung up to dry in the sun. This must be a Black H’mong village. But the children playing between the strips of cloth all wear football shirts. The traditional silver chains that children wear for protection against evil spirits have been replaced by Western-style rapper chains, mass-produced and bought at a market. Toddlers sit on doorsteps, watching videos on their parents’ smartphones. Even the most inaccessible parts of Vietnam’s northern highlands are interacting with the modern world. Is it possible that one day the mountains won’t seem as big to these children as they did to their parents?
Take Xuân, my driver. Our tour guide tells me that most of the easy riders in Hà Giang get married at fourteen or fifteen. At 29, it is conceivable that Xuân has been married for half of his lifetime, but the language barrier prevents me from asking it. The easy riders speak little to no English. So far, we have not gone beyond exchanging names and, by holding up fingers, ages. I find out that the name Xuân is derived from the Sino-Vietnamese 春, meaning “spring season,” and is given to babies born during the spring – a little clue about his identity.
We stop near the frontier with China, pulling over on the side of the road at a dizzyingly high vantage point. A large group of H’mong girls wearing shiny skirts seem to be waiting for us tourists. They ask if they can braid my hair, weaving wildflowers into it that they carry in large baskets on their backs. This is rather ambitious considering I sport a short pixie cut. When I point at my hair, even they look uncertain, giggle, and move on to somebody else.
“These children should be in school,” mutters my fellow traveler Bastian, frowning. He thinks the place is a tourist trap. He is standing apart from the rest of the group, smoking a cigarette and looking on somewhat uneasily. The easy riders are also standing some distance away, letting us tourists do our thing. One American couple is cooing over the children, giving them Vietnamese dong in exchange for their woven flower crowns. I join Bastian. “It’s the summer holidays,” I tell him. “And besides, they’re learning English. It’s an education of sorts.”
Bastian remains unconvinced by my arguments, and he’s probably right. Of all the ethnic groups in the highlands, the H’mong have the lowest literacy rate – estimated at 38 per cent. The main reason for this is truancy. Schools only teach in Vietnamese, and the majority of teaching staff is Kinh (ethnically Viet). Faced with a language barrier, a lack of opportunities post-graduation, and a conspicuous absence of role models from their own communities, the schooling experience for ethnic minority children runs the risk of being an irrelevant one.
Indigenous communities are often disparaged as “backward” by the Viet ethnic majority. Until the 20th century, and even beyond, the Vietnamese referred to all highland people as “moi,” meaning “savage.” Nowadays, a new rhetoric has emerged. Labels such as “barbaric” and “savage” have been replaced by “poor” and “uneducated.” Anthropologists such as Philip Taylor have pointed out that this new language, ostensibly grounded in fact rather than prejudice, nonetheless serves to strengthen and enforce age-old chauvinistic assumptions.
The rugged northern highlands continue to be seen as a place inhabited by strange peoples and peculiar traditions, none more so than the H’mong custom of “bride snatching.” The H’mong, one of the largest indigenous groups in Northern Vietnam, emigrated from China in the early 19th century and settled in the highlands. In their language, hmong means free. They have resisted assimilation with the Viet majority and remain fiercely loyal to their customs. Though on the decline, one such custom is bride snatching: once a girl has spent three days sleeping under a boy’s roof, they are considered married. Younger girls are particularly vulnerable to this. In their study of H’mong communities, researchers Nguyen Thi Huong, Pauline Oosterhoff, and Joanna White described how teenage H’mong girls deliberately avoided wearing traditional clothing: “Modern clothes protect us against rude male behaviour, such as slapping girls’ bottoms, or touching girls’ breasts. With my modern look they do not know if I am Hmong or maybe a mix, or Kinh.” For young H’mong women, choosing to wear modern clothes is a way of unsubscribing from traditional practices.
Once married, divorce is not an option. The woman’s soul belongs to her husband’s family, and by separating she might anger her ancestors, who might then punish her. The only way out of an unhappy marriage, some H’mong girls say, is eating “heartbreak grass” – a fatally poisonous plant that grows locally in thickets and scrubby forests. The bright yellow petals and beautiful bell shapes bring to mind a sinister cousin of the dandelion.
“Heartbreak grass” is not the only plant that grows here. On the Hà Giang loop, we visit Sa Phin valley and explore the mansion of the Vuongs, wealthy landowners worshiped as kings by the H’mong. Their fortune rested on poppies. The opium trade flourished in the highlands until the 1990s, when it was prohibited by the state. Elders can recall a time when the borderlands were crimson with poppies under the December hoar, and raw resin was harvested and exchanged for food coupons. Now, the mansion is home only to pigeons that nest in its 64 interlocking chambers. With the cultivation of opium banned in the highlands, this resplendent mansion is a relic of a bygone time.
Around the same time as the opium ban, foreign visitors began to trickle into Vietnam’s northern highlands. Now, hospitality is booming. Signs advertising homestays crop up like mushrooms after the rain, inviting visitors to spend the night with an indigenous family. I arrive at my homestay in Du Già village soaked to the bone. It’s August, monsoon season. Flooded rice fields reflect the grayish sky. The homes are hopped up on legs, like chicken feet houses from fairy tales. An electric-green grasshopper tries to make its way through the mosquito net that wraps around my bed. But despite the beautiful rooms upstairs, the owners and their children sleep in the open air, in a sort of tent. While homestays offer an “authentic” experience, the tourist experience is vitally different from the locals’. For us, the food and drink are never in short supply. We are served rice and bamboo shoots, freshly harvested in the rainy season. Buckets of alcoholic “happy water,” fermented from maize, sit on each table. As it is the final night, I drink with the other guests, with the easy riders, and with Xuân.
The following morning, we stop in a H’mong village, and I watch the women make clothing from hemp. A gaggle of young H’mong girls with sparkly hair clips are learning how to embroider. During the New Year celebrations, girls who have reached puberty wear their finest sets of clothing to show off their embroidery skills and attract prospective suitors. At weddings, the bride wears an elaborate dress set. She will try to preserve the skirt, to be clothed in when she dies. This burial skirt allows a woman’s ancestors to identify her in the afterlife. Both men and women are buried with small squares of hemp cloth and hemp-lined shoes, crucial accessories for a successful sojourn into the afterlife. Women also wear hemp skirts when giving birth. This is thought to remind the newborn child of their ancestral origins.
The oldest woman in this village is 105. Her fingers are gnarled like tree roots, and her thumb is bent over backwards. Using black beeswax, she draws straight lines and beautiful patterns freehand. As the H’mong have no indigenous script, embroidery remains the chief way of communicating folklore and spiritual beliefs. The geometric motifs used in textile embroidery often depict historical events, or reference animals and plants significant to H’mong livelihoods. Some even say that the pleating of H’mong skirts symbolizes the hills and valleys where they live. The H’mong believe that the landscape’s forests, lakes, trees, storm clouds, rivers, and thunder all have souls that must be respected and appeased. Illnesses are thought to be caused by a dab qus, H’mong for “wild spirit.” Healthcare revolves around the services offered by local healers and shamans rather than medical clinics. Both men and women can be shamans, but men tend to undertake rituals like buffalo sacrifices, while women specialize as herbal healers, maintaining bountiful garden plots with as many as two hundred plants to supply the ingredients for curing a malady.
Nearing the end of our trip, the easy riders drive back to Hà Giang at breakneck speed, and I wonder if they are in a hurry to spend some precious time with their families before the next tourist group arrives. From Hà Giang, I take the bus back to Hanoi. Four hours later when I wake up, I open WhatsApp and take a selfie for my mother. My face, confused and discombobulated, stares back at me, my cheek tattooed with the flowery bus seat pattern. This accidental tattoo transports me back to the highlands. There, local livelihoods are mapped out in the flora – in the maize and bamboo shoots, in the indigo plants used to dye garments, in the poppies that have been blotted from the landscape, and in the delicate “heartbreak grass” that can take lives but offer freedom.
