About That Time I Ended Up Harvesting Rice with Dao Women in Vietnam
Afternoon in Sin Ho. The dim streetlight cast a gentle glow over the buildings. The crisp, mountain air, the narrow alleys filled with barking noises, and the earthy smell reminded me of Cocoyoc, the small town in Morelos where grandpa had a summer house. Sin Ho, however, was a remote village in the north of Vietnam. My mind connected the present experiences to those distant memories from the past. Memories are elusive by nature; they change with each evocation, and the present moment eventually melds into a faint picture, merging with those imprecise clumps of memories that define us.
I walked back to the homestay run by Mrs. Sanh and her sister, a couple of lovely old ladies belonging to the Thai ethnicity. We dined on boiled duck and Thit trat cuon la lot, buffalo ground beef and peanuts wrapped in a betel leaf, a traditional dish from the Lai Chai region. Their dining room was small, adorned with a portrait of Ho Chi Minh at the back, next to pictures of Marx and Lenin, all framed with Christmas lights. Behind me, an old analog TV played a Chinese soap opera where all the characters were poorly dubbed by the same monotonous voice.
Apart from hosting travelers, the homestay had an herbal bath and massage service. Upon returning to my shared room, I found one of Mrs. Sanh’s daughters tending to a client. Soon, four more clients joined, all lying on mattresses spread out on the floor. I lay down in my corner of the room, ready to fall asleep but not before dealing with a cockroach crawling next to my pillow.
Two days later, as the sun cast a warm glow over the village, I approached a street stall in front of the village’s elementary school to savor a delicious plate of Xoi, sticky rice commonly accompanied by chicken and crispy onion. It is a universal truth that the food stands with the most affordable prices and generous portions are always found near schools and universities, no matter where you are in the world.
At quarter to nine I suddenly found myself surrounded by a group of schoolchildren in uniforms shouting greetings: ‘Hello!’ and ‘How are you?’. I walked away and sat by a small pond in the town square without noticing that one of the children had followed me.
‘What is your name?’, he asked.
‘Pablo. What is yours?’
The little boy clutched what little hair he had in excitement. He replied with a toothless smile that reminded me of Gerardo, a friend from second grade, a hyperactive little rascal. To continue our conversation, I started counting with my fingers in Vietnamese, although I could only count until three: Mot — Hai — Ba — Yo! The little devil taught me how to count to five, although he would show a bit of frustration amidst laughter whenever I repeated a number incorrectly. Then, he would start over and count slowly until I got it right.
That afternoon, as I walked through the empty alleys of Sin Ho, I found myself in a meadow where a buffalo grazed peacefully, facing a mysterious curtain of mist that pierced the valley’s distant mountains. I wondered if the buffalo felt any sort of melancholy as it gazed into the horizon. Deep down, I empathised with its solitude, facing the unknown.
I felt exhausted and my lower back sore. Mrs. Sanh lit the iron cauldrons and boiled water with a mixture of herbs. The aromatic steam filled the air with citrus notes as her sister prepared a small, wooden barrel-shaped bathtub. Naked, I slowly submerged into it and sensed a soothing warmth enveloping my knees and feet. Twenty different herbs were used for Dao baths, collected in their mountain forests, renowned for their relaxing and healing effects on the body.
Once my shoulders were underwater, I used a plastic jug to pour water over my head. I closed my eyes and reflected on the events from the previous day, when I attempted to reach the viewpoint on top of the sacred mountain in Ta Phin village, a few kilometers away from Sin Ho. Unfortunately, my plans were thwarted when I found myself in front of a locked gate at the mountain’s entrance. Resigned, I decided to return to Sin Ho.
On my way to the road, I stopped by a convenience store to get a water bottle. Three women chatted on wooden chairs on the shop’s porch. One of them was the owner, and she invited me to take a sit after paying for the water. We were unable to communicate but with the help of our phones. They belonged to the Black Dao ethnicity, and they showed me pictures and videos of their traditional dresses, music, and dances. I didn’t want to be left behind so I played “Jarabe Tapatio”, a traditional dance from Guadalajara, on my phone.
Thirty minutes later, I was at the house of one of them with seven other women, preparing their boots and sickles for the afternoon harvest. We hopped on our motorbikes and rode to the golden rice fields on the outskirts of their village. By the end of the day, my lower back was aching, and my fingers were full of tiny cuts due to my inexperience with the sickle. Nevertheless, I felt great satisfaction from an afternoon of laughter and jesting with the Dao women, who seemed happy and amused, with enough gossip material for the next days in the village. In addition to hundreds of photos of a foreigner making a fool of himself trying to harvest rice plants.
We returned to the house and ate grape-flavoured popsicles perfect for the warm weather. In the meantime, a Dao grandmother, the mother-in-law of the house’s owner of the house, was spreading a mat of dried herbs on the ground. Her tanned and wrinkled face displayed the experience and unfazed demeanor of centenarians who are no longer easily impressed. She was a woman shaped by and dedicated to her daily rituals. I noticed that only the elderly women in Dao villages wore their traditional attire daily: black blouses with blue sleeves and colorful embroidered details, covering their silver hair with black cloth turbans.
A special dinner was prepared to celebrate the harvest. Husbands, brothers, and uncles joined us inside the cramped dining room. I wondered where all these men had been during the harvest. Perhaps it was a job traditionally reserved for women in the village. We dined on fried tofu and a chicken dish so fresh that I had seen the hen foraging around the house just a couple of hours before. We drank cold beer and Ruou gao, the traditional Vietnamese rice liquor.
The house was small, with three rooms and a kitchenette with a tiny clay oven — burning wood expanded the wood’s smoke to the rest of the hut. It had a dirt floor and wooden beamed ceiling from which dozens of dried yellow corn cobs hung. Dusty and neglected old family photographs decorated a shelf in the dining room. I noticed the same taste for badly photoshopped photos with bright, contrasting backgrounds in Myanmar and Cambodia. Their pictures looked like those Benito Juarez and Miguel Hidalgo monographs we used for homework in elementary school.
It was getting late, and I had to make my way back to Sin Ho before nightfall. Unfortunately, my motorbike’s headlight had stopped working after a fall the previous day, and I didn’t want to ride through the mountain slopes in the dark, especially after having a few beers.
They didn’t hesitate to ask me to stay the night in the village. The first person to offer me a place in his home called his wife with the exciting news that a stranger was visiting their home that night. I saw the excitement fade from his face as soon as his wife had a chance to speak.
‘Are you crazy, Dong? Do you really want to bring a stranger into our house? Have you thought about your children? You are drunk! Forget about it and come back home now!’
‘But love…’
‘I said Now, Dong!’
Such a conversation never took place outside of my head, but that’s basically what happened. Then, my dinner hosts insisted that I stay with them, and by eight o’clock, I was deep asleep in the coziness of one of the tiny rooms.
At some point during the night, the family’s grandfather gently draped a warm blanket over me. I was deeply moved by the hospitality and generosity of the family, who welcomed me, a stranger, into their home. They shared their food and let me sleep beneath their roof, alongside their children.
I was awakened early in the morning by the sounds of battle. The rain pelted against the metallic roofs of the houses like gunshots. Lightning bolts struck and knocked down trees in the mountains, while dislodging large boulders of rock and earth over the valley and the roads.
I lay in bed until the storm subsided. By the time I left the room, there was no one to be found in the house. The rain didn’t cease until seven in the morning, by the time I had returned to Sin Ho.
