Jake Catlett Photography

Hmong New Year (Part 2)

I’ve complained to a few different people back at home and in other parts of the world that I’ve been very, very cold throughout much of this trip.  Everybody seems surprised to find out that it could be cold here, usually fuelled by a belief that every corner of Southeast Asia must be a sweltering sweat hole.  Well, during the hot season that is true, the heat in Laos can be unbearable, but during the winter much of the country is quite cold indeed.  Much of the country is at a higher altitude, which in and of itself will cool things down quite a bit, and large parts of the north/north central area of Laos are really more influenced by the weather patterns in southern China than they are by the southern monsoons.

So what I’m trying to say is that when I woke up on the first morning of the Hmong New Year celebrations I pretty much thought I was going to freeze to death.  There are no heating units in any of the guesthouses in Laos, so it’s just as cold inside as it is outside.  When I woke, shivering, teeth chattering, I could see the steam in my breath.  Thank God for electric water heaters.  The “hot” water was much appreciated, even if the only way to really get the water hot is to turn down the volume of water coming out until it’s barely more than a trickle.  Any more than that and the little water heating units aren’t strong enough to do more than make the water luke-warm.

After a nice hot breakfast I made my way over to the old air strip in town, which apparently doubles as a kind of fair grounds now.  Hmong New Year (known as Bun Kin Kieng here… that’s what I’ll call it from now on) actually lasts officially for a week, and some of the celebrations and rituals last a month.  There are live bands, food stalls, traditional bull fights, carnival style games, and other things to keep one entertained, but the main purpose of the extended celebrations is to have a “love market”.  Single women and men (some single, some not – polygamy is acceptable in Hmong culture) come to the celebrations looking for a husband or wife, and hopefully love, too.  They have a very strange, ritualized way of meeting and courting members of the opposite sex.  Here’s a simple run-down of how it works.

It begins with the women, almost all of them in traditional festival clothing, stand with groups of their friends in a line, and other women stand across from them, and they toss tennis balls back and forth, talking and laughing and having a good time.  They wait for men to come along and play with them.  Women that are more attractive and talkative tend to have 4 or 5 men standing across from them at any time, tossing a tennis ball back and forth with them and flirting.  The girls that aren’t so hot, or are too shy, or too young, tend to just throw the ball back and forth with their friends.  This goes on for days, weeks, sometimes a month at a time.  Hundreds of people lined up together, playing catch with a tennis ball, flirting and bargaining.  Traditionally they’re supposed to sing songs to each other.  Songs declaring their friendship, songs declaring their interest in one another, songs proclaiming their love to each other, songs stating their intention to get married, songs for actually getting married, and even songs for getting divorced.  Depending on how well they sing, or how serious the song is, groups of dozens of people may stand around and gawk at the couple while they sing to each other.

Another important consideration is which Hmong clan they come from.  Hmong people are forbidden from marrying people within their own clan.  Aside from how well they like each other and their obligation to marry outside of their clan, there’s something else at stake during these odd courtships/haggling sessions:  Cows.  A wife isn’t free in Hmong culture.  She costs cattle.  If she’s not very attractive, not very nice, or just not a great pick for one reason or another, well, then one nice healthy cow will do just fine.  If she’s super hot, or has a fantastic personality or is a mean cook, then it’s going to get more expensive.  Maybe a young, healthy bull instead of a cow.  Maybe two cows.  Maybe three!  You get the idea.  One Hmong guy told Hans that the most beautiful girls don’t even want to speak to the local guys, they’re all waiting for a Hmong guy that lives in America to come along.  First, ‘cause they want to move to the USA, second ‘cause the guy will probably have better access to prime cattle.  The whole ritual is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. Hans saw strange parallels to games we play in America like egg tossing, and theorized that in the past they may have used eggs instead of tennis balls, signifying fertility.  I didn’t quite get the rules correct, but strictly speaking if a girl doesn’t catch the ball it’s supposed to be some kind of acceptance of the man who is throwing to her.  Again, this egg theory of Hans’ would seem to make more sense if that were true.  Purposely allowing the egg to be broken…  Anyhow, it’s just weird.  More than the crazy costumes the women (and just a few of the men) were wearing, I was struck by the juxtaposing of modern and ancient cultures, of east and west.  Many of the men have punk hairstyles, dyed strange colors and sticking all over the place, wearing sunglasses and combat boots, mostly black clothing with iron-on pictures of skulls and flames.  Facial piercings.  Leather pants.  The girls, in their traditional costumes, talking on cell phones and wearing sunglasses, while sitting on the back of a motorbike.  The young people in Hmong society seem to be embracing so much that comes from modern, Western culture, however this bizarre tennis ball tossing ritual to find a mate is also alive and thriving for them.  Hans and I were both told, in fact, multiple times that they like it this way, and the young singles we met all said that this was how they planned to find their partner.

On the first day there really wasn’t much to see, it was mostly just kids playing the ball tossing spouse finding game.  Apparently practicing for the future.  Since all Hmong people have to have the pig party and the chicken party in their home villages, they all travel to Phonsavan on the first day of Bun Kin Kieng.  The second day, after everybody has arrived, is when the party really starts.  However, I did spend most of the day getting great photographs of young women and girls in colorful outfits, playing catch.  One extremely interesting thing I did see, though, was a huge group of people surrounding 2 men and 2 women.  The younger man and woman were married, and the older 2 were their parents.  They were standing together, singing back and forth to each other for a long, long time, it must have been a couple of hours.  The woman that was singing was crying and crying, her mother leaning on her shoulder and consoling her, rubbing her nose with a tissue.  I asked a guy standing there what was happening and he explained that it was Hmong divorce.

I couldn’t imagine that, having to stand in public with a group of about 50 people standing around staring at me, singing my divorce.  Later that evening they were eating in the same restaurant as I was.  Apparently the woman had to pay for dinner that night, too.

The morning of the second day is when the bullfights begin.  Not like Spanish bullfighting, where a bunch of guys take a long time to wear out and kill an animal, but bull-on-bull fights.  60 or 70 different bulls are matched up against one another and fight until one of them runs away. The “stadium” is actually two natural hills next to each other, with a long, flat expanse cut between them.  There’s a dirt “wall” at either edge of the pitch, however it’s scant protection against a running bull.  Thousands of people line up alone each side of the pitch, and if you pay an extra fee (like I did!) you can actually stand down in the bullfighting area itself and even walk right up alongside the bulls while they fight.  Sounds dangerous?  You bet your ass it is!  People have definitely been seriously hurt before, and my friend Simon told me that sometimes kids get trampled and killed.  Basically the fights go like this in theory:  two bulls are brought out into the ring.  They’re brought near each other so they can size each other up and get pissed off.  The bulls begin digging up dirt with their horns and flinging it in the air to show off, and eventually they’re coaxed close enough to each other that they begin fighting, ramming their heads together and cutting each other up with their horns.  Eventually one bull decides that he’s had enough and turns tail.  Shamed by losing and angry as hell about being forced into it, the bull will then run at the people standing in the arena, and eventually up into the crowds, chasing people until it’s either subdued, or calms down by itself.

The problem was that the bulls didn’t want to fight.  There were a few good matchups, for sure, but most of the morning was spent watching people try to force these giant animals to fight each other, and the bulls were having none of it.  I was given many different explanations for why this was so, starting with the hot weather (it was cold, dammit) and going into the crowds freaking the bulls out.  Either way, there wasn’t much action.  However, when there was action, I got straight up into it, running alongside these big bulls fighting, getting up as close as I could to get some nice shots.  I also got chased a few times, and had to run my little white ass off so as not to get gored.  My God, what a rush!  Adrenaline is my favorite drug.  Normally people would be considered stupid to get so close to large, angry animals and then get chased as a result of it, but under the context of a celebration, and having my camera, and therefore a purpose to it, all seemed to make it so much more sensible.  And challenging.  I’ve decided that if I were ever in a situation where I could photograph riots or mob scenes, or street violence, or even combat, I’m pretty sure I could keep my head about myself and do a good job of it.  Standing around in front of an angry animal, waiting to get chased for no good reason would scare the crap out of me.  Doing it with a camera in my hand?  No problem.  Where and when?

After the bullfights I headed back towards the airstrip for more photos of the tennis ball spouse hunt, and got some absolutely fantastic work.  It was actually extremely difficult work.  There were so many more people than the first day that people were unable to keep a good semblance of a “line”.  It was more like clumps of people everywhere throwing balls around.  The backgrounds were very difficult to work with, lots of crappy wood and wicker stalls with pieces of white, black and colored plastic draped over them as tarps, not to mention the fact that an old disused airstrip is hardly the most attractive of places to shoot.  Add to this the fact that most of the women, and many of the men, were holding umbrellas to keep the light out of their faces.

The light was perfect, all day – and people were doing everything they could to keep their faces out of it.  Some people were holding beautiful, hand-made traditional parasols.  Other people were holding cheap, flimsy, crappy Chinese umbrellas.  I wound up using my flash for fill-in most of the day, having to pay extremely close attention to my exposure as the lighting conditions changed from group to group.  Trying to get the right balance of fill flash under the parasols, and then working to make sure their clothing that was in sunlight didn’t overexpose was difficult to say the least.  Good, clean compositions with properly balanced exposures was incredibly tricky, however I was very happy with my work by the end of the day.

Two interesting things happened to me that afternoon.  First, I was walking around, and I saw a huge group of people standing around and staring at a couple that were singing to each other.  I walked over, and immediately noticed that the woman singing was the woman I had seen getting divorced the day before.  I asked somebody else what was happening, and he told me that they were agreeing to get married to each other.  So, I saw the same woman getting publicly divorced, and then publicly remarried in two consecutive days.  Weird.

Secondly, there was an absolutely gorgeous girl I had taken photos of and chatted to the day before named “Ong”.  She asked me to stop and talk to her again if I saw her the next day, and so when I saw her I did just that.  Only when I stopped to chat with her, there were a few men already standing there trying to pick her up.  As I approached and started talking to her, one of the guys started trying to sing her a song.  She promptly turned her back on him and ignored him while chatting away with me.  He kept trying to edge around her, to get between her and I so he could sing his song, and she continued elbowing him, blocking him, turning around, and generally thwarting any efforts he made to sing to her.  The guy eventually gave up and stood behind her glaring at me over her shoulder, with fiery anger in his eyes.  As we talked together, more and more people started gathering around and watching.  I found out that she’s actually from “Kilometer 52” village, located 52 kilometers outside of Vientiane.  She told me that she’s actually an English language student in Vientiane, and told me that she wanted to hang out and be friends when I got back to Vientiane.  By the time we exchanged phone numbers there must have been close to 100 people standing around and staring. Under normal circumstances I would have been happy to stay there and talk to her for quite a while longer, but I just couldn’t handle being publicly scrutinized while flirting.  Sitting at a restaurant in Vietnam with a woman is bad enough, with people at their tables openly staring and listening, but this?  I’ll talk to her another time, when dozens of people aren’t listening to and discussing every word we say to each other.

After the sun went down it was, you guessed it! Beer Lao time!  Well, after a fat dinner of grilled fish and sticky rice.  Hans says he could eat grilled fish every day of his life.  I find it hard to argue that point with him.  We ate our dinner (and drank our beer) at a little food stall run by our friend Simon’s family.

One thing I haven’t mentioned much in this blog is the amount of unexploded bombs littering Laos.  It has the dubious distinction of being the most bombed country on the planet, and also having the largest amount of unexploded ordnance of any country.  In Xieng Khouang province the bombs are literally everywhere.  They use unexploded bombs as stilts for houses, as fence posts, as doorway decorations.  Cluster bomblets hang from walls as decorations all over the place, and the cluster bomb casings seem to have 1001 uses.  The two most common seem to be vegetable planters and barbecues.  Simon’s family (like most others) has there own private cluster bomb casing which they use as a fireplace/grill/barbecue all in one.  They had it set up out in front of their food stall, and after having my dinner cooked in it, I stood next to the bomb casing with a bunch of Hmong guys, drinking beer and whiskey and warming our hands.  Bombshell barbecues, a true Laos experience.  I haven’t seen it all, but I’ve seen quite a bit.

To wind the evening up, I decided to lose a lot of money.  I almost never gamble, and there’s a damn good reason why.  I suck.  I never win.  It’s not even about skill, it’s simply bad luck.  I have good luck with most other things, and I think the universe has decided that when I gamble, I’m just asking for too much.  There were these little stalls with a wheel of fortune kind of game.  Basically, there’s a little wheel with a plastic pointer sticking through pegs that are inserted along the edge.  On the wheel the words “energy drink”, “yogurt”, “pepsi”, “chocolate milk” and “Beer Lao” are written in separate sections, and in each section there are 3 slots marked 1, 2 and 3.  For 1,000 Kip you get a chit that you place on the table, also containing 5 slots, one for each drink you can win.  So, say you bet 1,000, and then place your chit on Beer Lao (like I did).  If it lands on the number 1 in the Beer Lao slot, you win one beer.  If it lands on the 3, you win 3.  So, I figured that if I bet 5 at a time (about 60 cents, USA) on beer, eventually I should win back what I’d spent.  One Beer Lao costs 8000, so even if I only landed on the number “1”, I’d win 5 beers, worth 40,000.  Surely I would hit the Beer Lao slot at least one in 8 spins!  And if I hit the number “3”, I’d win 15 beers!  That’s 120,000 Kip right there.  Plus, the woman would let you “sell” back what you’d won for cash, so I could just keep however many beers I wanted and sell back what I wouldn’t drink.

So, to make a long story short, I lost 200,000 Kip.  That’s about $25.  Once again, by the time I was finished there was a group of about 30 or 40 people standing around watching, many of them betting with me by the end of it in the belief that I HAD to hit the Beer Lao slot eventually.  Personally, I think the game was rigged.  200,000 Kip means I spun the wheel 40 times, Godammit!  With only 5 different slots, I still find it unlikely that in 40 spins I wouldn’t have hit “Beer” just one frigging time.  So, defeated (broke, no more cash in my wallet), I said to the woman “Okay, you just got 200K out of me, you should at least give me one beer for my trouble”.  “One?”, she said, “I’ll give you two!”.  So off I walked with the two most expensive beers I’ve ever had in my life.  One for me, one for Hans.  Damn, if they weren’t cold and delicious!