Trekking to Trang & Tea’s; Trang’s Traditional H’mong Jewelry

I wasn’t sure we’d make it.  Between the recent soaking rains and the prevailing hilltribe conviction that switchbacks are inefficient, the steep route ahead look unforgivingly slick.  Especially for my 79-year-old mom.

Trang and Tea’s home in Lao Cai Province.

Our friend and guide, Sho Lythi (featured in Newsletter #6), led the way.  “My brother-in-law Trang is just up the hill,” she chimed.  “Maybe 20, 25 minutes more.”  Of course she weighs about 80 lbs. and has danced on these slippery slopes since she could first walk.  “This is no problem – I will help your mother. I will pull her from above, and you can push from below.”  My confidence was not increasing.

Sho and Ari helping Grandma across a slippery, steep slope.

10 minutes later, Sho’s sister, Tea, came gliding down the thick mud slope.  Incredibly, not a spatter of muck touched anything but her thin flip-flops.  She laughed as she looked at our trepid stance.   Tea said something coyly in H’mong to Sho and quickly fell to pushing and pulling us up to her modest home at the very top of the habitable mountain-side slope.  Fortunately, we encountered no crisis that the laundry couldn’t resolve.

Trang crafting an earring while the cat warms by the fire.

Tea’s home nestled on a carved terrace ledge overlooking the valley; each 10-foot wide terrace had an abrupt wall-edge that dropped several feet to meet the next terrace.  Scraps of wooden branches were cleverly woven into fences to protect the precarious mud-walls from the pigs, buffalo and humans that might damage the sculpted farmland.  Being winter, the terraces lay mostly fallow save for a few pumpkin plants and a rich array of leafy greens.  Spring would see corn, rice, and other crops filling every fertile corner.

Tea’s husband, a talented Black H’mong metal-smith, greeted us shyly, then returned to his crouched position next to the slatted window that allowed sunlight to illuminate his workspace.  A variety of small hammers, pliers, and metal punches sat on a work stump.  He worked quickly, methodically, efficiently; metal shavings littered the ground at his feet.  He was eager to complete the “fern-frond” earring set before lunch, knowing he had one more sale if he could finish the task.  And, in truth, we bought every necklace and set of earrings he completed.

Tea wearing earrings and hair comb crafted by Trang.

Tea disappeared into the side-room kitchen as Sho stoked the living area fire with one stick of hardwood and a couple splinters of wide bamboo.  We all appreciated the extra warmth on this mid-winter day, and the smoke smelled good.  To a westerner, the home, like much of rural Vietnam, offered an eclectic mix of Spartan simplicity and modern practicality.  The simple fire on the dirt floor was juxtaposed with the rice cooker’s glowing red light.  Tea and Trang’s youngest son, a smiley 3-year-old, played on a wheel-less bicycle set in the front room.  A large sow slept a few feet outside of the front door, and grunted greedily when a pumpkin was split open.  The daughter helped wash greens using the hand-pump in the kitchen.  Drying corn hung from the rafters.

Trang and Tea’s youngest on his bike.

Sho had thoughtfully requested that we purchase food at the morning market to contribute to the meal as the family’s means were modest, and the addition of our appetites would stretch their resources.  Within an hour of our arrival, a large meal was set for our family of five plus five more – the adults guests got to use the four chairs.  Steaming plates of greens with pork and ginger, fresh bamboo shoots with buffalo, fresh tofu from the morning market with tomatoes, and garden pumpkin soup were served with gracious smiles all around.  It was delicious!

Trang had learned his metal-working skills from a local elder.  Trang knew that farming alone would not support his family in this sparse environment, and living a couple hours walk away from the tourist town of Sapa granted him access to a wider customer base.  Several members of the extended family (which including Sho before she moved on exclusively to guiding services) offer his jewelry to both western and Vietnamese tourists in the local market.

Tea cutting up pumpkin for lunch.

Trang can work with silver as well as nickel-bronze.  But the high up-front cost of silver and its limited market appeal pulls Trang to work more with nickel-bronze.  Most H’mong women as well as tourists prefer more affordable nickel-bronze or aluminum “bling” as well; locals relegate silver jewelry to wedding-wear and dowry value, and not to the desired everyday use of bright dangly and hoop earrings and extravagant necklaces.

Trang crafting earrings for us to buy that day.

His workbench is a slab of wood, his tools simple, and his workmanship traditional & exquisite.

After three hours of eating and chatting, and our promise to sell Trang’s jewelry in the USA and come back seeking more, we gathered up our treasured bag of finished jewelry and prepared to slide back down the mountainside.  Luckily, an hour of afternoon sun had set the mud a bit firmer, and our careful steps, with Sho’s firm support and freshly-chopped bamboo walking sticks, got us back down the hill without catastrophe.

The Hmong shaman mid-trance, chanting to invoke healing spirits.

Near the bottom, we heard a constant drumbeat and a monotone female chant coming from another hillside home.  A rather distraught and inebriated gentleman stumbled out of his dark, smoky home and, bleary-eyed, indicated for us to enter his home.  Sho confirmed that indeed a H’mong shaman had been hired to clear his home of recent illness.  We were unsure as to whether it would be appropriate for us to interrupt the healing ceremony, although we were intrigued with the rare opportunity to see a shaman in trance doing her work.  The man looked desperate and again, through Sho, urged us forward.  We tiptoed into the dark home, and watched the candlelit shaman rock back and forth intently as she wailed a fast, tuneless prayer.  We stayed only a minute or two, feeling both honored and out-of-place.  The old man nodded quickly as we bowed with gratitude for the honor of bearing witness to the ceremony.  Afterward, Sho confided to us that the elder thought our family’s presence in his home might intimidate the malevolent spirits so they would exit more quickly.

The gracious kindness of Trang and Tea and the heartfelt plea of a mourning elder were the bookends of an amazing afternoon’s adventure.  And we can’t let the story go by without thanking Sho Lythi and her extended family for welcoming us into their lives in rural Lao Cai Province in northern Vietnam; she has opened so many unusual and wonderful doors for both our pleasure and our business.

Sho: Our Spirited Black Hmong Guide, Friend, and Confidante

Sho in her trademark cowboy hat.

Our family was most fortunate on our first trip to Vietnam in 2005 to be teamed up through a guesthouse with Sho Lythi as our guide for our first trek.  It had been pouring rain for days, and the trails through the rugged steep hills around Sapa in Lao Cai Province were like pudding – thick and slippery. We considered canceling the day-long walk due to the weather, but Sho quickly arranged a batch of 50-cent disposable plastic rain jackets and bamboo walking sticks, and, with a smile larger than her umbrella, cheered us on our way out into the foggy wet.

Starting on Sapa’s ridge-top location, the route for the first half hour was almost straight down – hilltribe people don’t seem to believe in switch-backs!  The kids traveled as though they had skis on their feet, slipping and sliding, using the bamboo pole as a balance, and hooted and hollered as they disappeared over the the lip of the hill.  Maren and I, being both heavier and more fragile, carefully chose our steps.  Sho, walking patiently with us, chatted cheerily and seemed to almost dance her 80 pound frame down the slope.  We arrived at the bottom of the hill at her home, where we dried off, scraped the largest clumps of muck off our shoes, and were introduced to Sho’s parents and many sisters.

Maren and Sho slipping and sliding.

From the outside, Sho’s family’s house looks a bit ramshackle, with boards and shingles nailed at odd angles.  Pigs, water buffalo, ducks and dogs amble on the front “yard” at the edge of the harvested rice fields.  Inside, the floors are dirt; large baskets (triple-walled for rodent protection), both on the floor and up in the wood-planked loft, hold clothing and other textiles, as well as bags of processed rice and corn.  Corn also hangs from the ceiling, drying in the smoky, wood-warmed cottage.  On the one piece of wooden furniture, a large dresser, sits the color TV; the satellite dish is out back.  Sho’s and her mom’s cell phones seem to ring every couple of minutes.  An electric iron sits on the ironing board.  The house has a single fluorescent light-bulb to illuminate everyone’s sewing and dyeing efforts.

Sho’s mom, sisters, Sho, and Josh in front of Sho’s mom’s house. Note the satellite dish!

It was dyeing season, and a huge vat of liquid indigo stewed on its own off of the main room.  Sho proceeded to educate us all about how her ethnic group, the Black Hmong, dye, weave and sew their own outfits.  Every woman makes a new outfit for each family member every year to be first worn on New Year’s, and the old clothing, now faded from wear, is dismantled and made into blankets and other necessities.  Dad made tea to share on a second small hearth to help us stave off the damp chill.

Beyond her family’s home, Sho has led us on multiple home-stay treks in Lao Cai Province, and she has helped us acquire some of our treasures at the colorful weekend markets in Bac Ha, Long Phinn and Sapa.  Once, quite by accident, we ran into her in Hanoi where she was investing in some English writing classes for a few months.  She has a wonderful radiating energy that makes her fun to be with.

The family and Sho, on the first trip when we met in December, 2005.

Sho, age 18 when we met, is fluent in English, Vietnamese, and Hmong, and boasts a spattering of French and German.   She learned English on her own from the western visitors who often hire her as a guide.  She is chatty, eager to learn about the world, and obviously very intelligent.  When she is in her home province, she dresses in traditional Black Hmong clothing – indigo-dyed knee-length jacket with dyed leggings.  Her outfit has bright green embroidered bands around her upper arms and on her collar.  Like most Hmong women, she adorns herself with several large necklaces and earrings.  When we have met her elsewhere, in Hanoi or in Bac Ha, she wears a western t-shirt, blue jeans, tennis shoes, and her trademark cowboy hat (and we did bring her a true Stetson this last summer).  Did I mention she is knock-out beautiful and cute as can be?  Ari can barely keep his eyeballs in his head when she’s around!  The unique lilt in her accent only adds to her charm.

Sho’s family has also become friends. Sho’s mother, at out first meeting, pulled Maren out of a mucky rice patty with a strong arm and a huge smile.  She also taught Maren how to turn twists of hemp into strong continuous rope.   Sho’s sister’s husband makes  traditional metal Hmong jewelry, and Sho’s sisters all sew handbags and other textiles from their year-old clothing (which we in turn have available at Above the Fray).

Sho’s mom twisting hemp strands into one long string.

In addition to her knowledge about dyeing and weaving, her delicious cooking when we have trekked, and her chatty knowledge about the cultures of the area, Sho is also, we discovered, a shrewd shopper.  She has helped us bargain for better deals (where her Vietnamese and Hmong language skills come in handy), and she has a great eye for color, quality, and authenticity.  She is eager to learn about western culture and tastes, and her efforts to understand what Above the Fray is looking for spurs both her curiosity and her acumen at assisting us.

What we also love about Sho is her willingness to tell us her opinion.  So often the guides and translators we hire want to tell us only what they believe we want to hear.  Sho, on the other hand, will openly comment on what she thinks, likes, and dislikes.  She maintains a calm and overt confidence that both reveals who she is as a person and facilitates our goal of finding the best hilltribe art in Lao Cai Province.  Once, in a small shop that had a collection of used Hmong knives, Sho unhesitatingly picked up each knife and whacked them repeatedly against a hard bamboo stick.  After castigating the owner for having some knives with softer, and now slightly blemished, metals, she demanded he only show us the better-quality metal knives – the “real Hmong knives” – and then proceeded to negotiate a better price for the better quality items.  Sho has no pretense; she lets people know exactly what she thinks.

Sho has become a trusted friend, someone we can count on to follow through and give us honest opinion and perspective.  She knows her culture well, and unhesitatingly wants us to represent the very best of her people.