Indigo Valley Girls, Vietnam

Story by Carol Devine http://www.dignitasinternational.org/articles.aspx?aid=303

Photographs by Sandy Nicholson http://www.sandynicholson.com/

They are sitting arms entwined on a fence, chewing on bamboo sticks, laughing.  The girls are on the fringe of the town soccer match, uninterested in the game itself.  In the bright late afternoon sun adults and children are in a huge field watching the teams in green and yellow polyester shirts run and slide in the mud.

 

I notice how carefree and confident the girls are.  They buy ice creams next and sit back on the fence, amusing themselves. I say hello, recognizing them from the night before. 

“What makes your clothes blue?”  I ask.

They shrug their shoulders.  I ask a man in a suit standing beside us if he speaks English. 

“What makes their clothes blue?”

***

In Sapa the mist beckoned us into the valley.  The further we got out of town, the fewer people we saw except the Hmong wearing their traditional navy-blue clothing.  On some navy green hillsides, they were dark specks working

In the wet morning rain we arrived at the Sapa hill station at Vietnam’s border with China.  It was built in 1922.  We became smitten with the Hmong--particularly their flax clothing. The blue dye of their clothing transformed different parts of their bodies.

There was information on the Hmong in the town cafés frequented by tourists: “ethnic minority tours” we shied away from.  The Hmong are of the Sino-Tibetan family, one of Vietnam’s 60 minority groups.  In parts of Southeast Asia, Hmong are identified by details of their clothing: Red Hmong, Black Hmong, Striped Hmong, Flowery Hmong, etc. In Northern Vietnam, there are an estimated 500,000 Hmong.

We encountered only the Black Hmong although I thought their clothes were more blue than black.  

We walked down the road leading out of Sapa into a valley, passing some Hmong who ignored us and we them, and others with whom we share a smile.  One woman with a group of women stopped us, saying ‘Jolie, Jolie’, holding up embroidered clothing to sell.  Her neck was stained grayish-blue and her teeth were brown.  She had the bluest hands and fingers imaginable.

This Hmong woman put a ring on my finger and held my hand.  My hand was so pale with turquoise rings next to her lapis lazuli coloured hands. She wore a thin silver ring with a flat engraved diamond shape. 

The women wore a band of linen wrapped around their hair swirled into a bun.  Their shirts had long sleeves with yellow and red embroidery. Most wore a vest with the same embroidery at the back of the high neck.  Some vests were muted blue flax, others shiny, almost black with a silver hue.  They wore shorts above the knee. Several women had straw-green thread hanging in a big loop over their shoulder that they wrapped tightly around one hand.

Men’s legs were muscular, tinged blue-grey.  They wore the same blue cloth; pants with flare legs.  All blue.  Everyone wore plastic sandals.  Two men sporting little black tams walked thoughtfully with their hands behind their backs.

At the roadside buffalo were eating and goats walked unaccompanied. 

This was a fog world where people adjusted their speed to match that of the rolling clouds.  We encountered another group of Hmong who were preparing a stack of large aluminum shingles for carrying into the hills.  Slowly they arranged for each person to take one panel on his or her back.  Four big-eyed children watch the adults. 

We met the girls later that evening on a narrow market street in town, when they helped translate the price of some silver for us. The taller one spoke some English in a soft voice.  They were friendly and beautiful: the pinkest cheeks, thick black hair with red highlights and three pairs of big aluminum earrings and a wide aluminum collar necklace each.  What were they doing walking around in the rain that late?

In the brown foggy and damp night stumbling home, we were tipsy from Chinese beer and Sapa fruit wine.  We got lost on a walk into the tiered town under construction, up stairs and past piles of mud and sand that squished underfoot like unbaked bread.  The silhouette of a man lighting a cigarette in the street was so sharp that it appeared his cowlick and cigarette pierced deep into the night, magnified by the fog.  

The next morning was sunny and bright.  We walked out of town into another direction.  The mountains were glorious.  Brown jagged lines ran through them like veins on a leaf.  A hanging bridge of bamboo straddled a valley and clear water ran out of a roadside waterfall.  

Before the road ended we spotted something compelling in the distance.  Navy blue clothes lined a fence down in the valley.  We continued down the winding road on the red soil still damp from the previous night’s rain.  A Hmong man walked with us.  We were silent.  A black pot-bellied pig passed us. 

We were hesitant to go too close to the farm to see the clothes.  Our curiosity wound us through the valley.  A woman sitting on a little bench was surrounded by a band of children.  A little boy with a knife slung in a wooden holder over his back crouched at a stream nearby, filling a green jerry can with water. 

The boy struggled to take it up the hill.  We offered to carry it.  The family was watching us, eyes inviting.  They started to laugh when they saw us with the water can.  I gave the oldest girl a little bouquet of flowers I’d picked.  She took them in her hands and smelled them.

We asked if we could look at the clothing on the fence.  Several children guided us up.  A bamboo fence encircled a bean garden in front of a long wooden house.   The midnight vests, shirts and pants were still wet.  We were surprised to be invited in.  

Inside it was dark and window, one large room with  loft. The only light was a stream of sunlight pouring through the crack between two boards, and an orange fire at the far end. The floors were dirt. A woman poked a piece of wood in the fire.  

I gasped when my eyes come into focus and I realized what was beside me at the front door.   I looked closely and there was just enough light to see a foaming mass of pale bluish bubbles.  This was a huge wooden barrel full of dye!

I asked but still couldn’t determine what made the blue.  I guessed it was indigo or a like plant, but no one nodded when I pointed to a plant and then to the vat, so I imagined something mysterious and magical making the blue colour. 

The children giggled when I dipped my fingers into the vat.  I kept them there a minute or two until my nails turned bluish and my fingertips greenish-blue.  There were two large sticks dyed blue in the vat, and hanging above was a blue-tinged basket used for lowering the clothes.

The boy with the knife jumped up and down in the beam of sunlight, as if he were conscious of the tingly sensation his smoky silhouette gave us.  I handed him a pair of small scissors from my backpack. He seemed to appreciate sharp things.  The children sat down and began cutting up bits of paper. 

It was time for us to go.  We were honoured to have been invited in and tried to show our thanks.

“What is in the loft?” I asked on our way out.

“Seven-foot bamboo baskets for sleeping in,” said my traveling companion.

On the walk home to Sapa I looked at my dyed nails on one hand and smiled.

 

***

 

The man in the suit who translates for me at the soccer game says the blue comes from plants far away from Sapa.  What is the name of the plant I ask.  “In Vietnamese,” he says, “chàm”.   

We introduce ourselves and ask the girls if the plants are near Sapa and if they can show them to us.

Thi says that they make the clothes in their village, seven kilometres away.  It is getting late in the afternoon, the soccer game is at half-time.  The plant is in their village.  I am hesitant about having them walk several kilometres to show us the plant.

But soon they just start cheerily pulling us along. 

“How old?”

“Fifteen,” says Thi.

“Twelve,” says Dong.

“Sisters?” I ask.

“Friends,” they respond in unison. 

Dong is wearing a digital watch, and Thi has a Canadian pin on the pink turtleneck she wears under her embroidered blue vest. 

“Your English is very good,” I say.

“Practice in Sapa,” Dong says.  They go there everyday to sell silver and handicrafts, and hang out.  

“Canada?” asks Thi.

“I’m from Canada, he’s from Australia,” I reply.

I ask more questions. The girls live in the same village.  Dong’s mother makes clothing.  Thi lives with her three older brothers, a younger sister and her parents. 

The girls are savvy also, with sweet laughs.  They must be the household traveling entrepreneurs. 

Dong holds my hand, which surprises me at first.

“How much?” asks Thi, pointing at my watch. 

“Too much,” I say.

“How much for that?” she says, pointing then to my silver ring.

 “Not bad,” she says when I tell her the price. 

“Do you go to school?” I ask.

“No.”

The sun is lowering, reflecting on the spider-web streams running through the velour mountains.  We have only walked five minutes when Dong disappears off the main red soil road to a steep footpath.  Down we follow.  We see Dong deftly descending the path. 

Soon she returns to us, her face glowing as she hands us a bunch of greens like basil, with purplish roots.  She holds it up and says, “Gha”.  We are in a steep field of chàm  or gha, indigo (persicaria tinctoria) that ends at a stream cutting across the valley.

Immediately Dong starts to rip two leaves into little pieces and rubs her hands together, rolling the greens on her palms.  Thi also starts to do this.  At first I do not see anything but flecks of green leaves on already blue-tinted hands.  The smaller girl, Dong, takes my hand and starts to crush leaves into it. 

Miraculously my hand turns a shocking summer green.  Already Thi is squatting by the stream trying to wash the new green from her blue hand, but it stays green.  A few minutes later, the edges of the ripped leaves have turned a dark forest green.

Dong acts out the dyeing process.

She holds her arms out wide, saying, “Many, many leaves into the pot.” 

“Four, five days.” Then she makes big stirring motions. 

“Rip up the leaves?” I make the hand motions.

“No, no, all.” She drops a plant into a pretend vat.

“How long in the pot?” I ask.

“Two weeks, then turn over” Dong replies.

“Who makes the vest?” 

“Mother,” as she imitates weaving.

“How long to make?”

“One month or three months,” says Dong.

“And the embroidery?” I point to the beautiful red and yellow pattern at the high neck of her vest.

“Mother.” She points to all the stitching and rows of different coloured squares of different colours. “Long time”.

“This blue is from Hanoi.” She points to her shirt, which does not have the shiny gloss of the hand-woven vest.  In the Sapa market place we did see large pieces of the midnight blue flax for sale.

When Dong finishes her lesson, it gets awkward.  We try to thank Dong and Thi for showing us the gha.  We offer a gift; I take off my turquoise earrings. But Thi, the older one, refuses them, saying she has lots of earrings.  She puts them on a rock in the stream and walks away. 

Do they want money?  It feels uncomfortable now, a simple human moment transformed by the material barter for the experience.

It is clear in Dong’s enthusiasm that she likes teaching us “how to make blue”, but Thi is the boss, and tells Dong to hurry up and to refuse a token of thanks.  They do not walk with us even though we are all heading up the same road back to Sapa.  Thi is actually a bit funny in her obstinacy.

Later by chance we see Dong and Thi as we are waiting for the bus back to Hanoi. 

We buy a silver bracelet and embroidered juice-harp from Dong and Thi, not really sure what effect this will have.

We all hang out a bit watching people in elaborately woven red and green clothing, other “minority” groups, coming for the weekend Sapa market. I show them some photos I have.  

“Can I have?” Dong asks when she sees my photo.  When I offer them a photo each, they fight over which one they think is better.  With blue-green fingers, they pick out photos from my pile.  

I write on the back of each, “Thank you so much for showing us how to make blue.  You are a clever girl.  Use your wits wisely.”

I am a bit scared for them, but they are smart, funny and real.  They are the blue valley girls.  Teenagers sent to peddle silver rings and their charm.