by
Jim Goodman
When flights became available from
Chiang Mai to Kunming in Yunnan I had already been living in Chiang Mai a few years and
had been working with the Akha ethnic minority group in the northern hills. We
produced traditional clothing items, mainly shoulder bags and jackets in
Western sizes, the colors from natural dyes, which was my own role in the
project, a skill I picked up in Nepal before I moved to Chiang Mai. There was a market for such things in the
late 80s and early 90s and by living moderately the work basically paid for my
research, having the ambition to write a book about them. Ever since I met them I had been curious about their original homeland.
Only a small portion of the Akha lives
in Thailand. They are more numerous in
Laos, Myanmar, and especially China, from where they originated, and where the
greatest number of sub-groups lives.
Thailand has only three. The
majority are Ulo Akha, characterized by tall, tubular headdresses and intricate
line-stitching embroidery. The next largest are the Lomi Akha, whose
women wear a silver-plated attachment behind a cap fully studded with silver
half-globes and employ a lot of appliqué on the bags and clothing. The third and smallest, concentrated at Pamee
and other villages near Mae Sai, are noted for their cross-stitch embroidery
and lavish use of silver on the women’s headdresses and clothing components. I worked with all three.
The Ulo and Lomi
Akha came into Thailand from Myanmar, but the Pamee sub-group came from
Xishuangbanna in Yunnan, China. On one
of my regular visits I met a relative of my host family who was staying in
Pamee a few months to make money in the litchi orchards. Yunnan was opening to tourists and he invited
me to come to his village in Xishuangbanna.
That provided my main excuse for going and I arranged a flight for the
summer of 1992.
After a few days
taking an extended look at Kunming and the nearby Stone Forest, I flew to
Jinghong, met Akhas on the street, greeted them in Chinese, then rattled off
some sentences in Akha along the lines of—You are Akha people, are you
not? I’m an American person. I live in
Thailand and work with the Akha people and can speak a little Thailand Akha
language. Can you help me? In that way I learned that my friend’s
village, called Paseu, was in Xiding district in Menghai County. In those days there were many places in the
province still off-limits to foreigners.
Beyond Jinghong, Mengla County was still closed and in Menghai County
only the towns of Menghai and Menghun were open. I needed a permit for Xiding district. Thanks to a demonstrable ability to speak the
Aini language (as the Akha are officially called in China) that was no problem.
Because of the
novelty of a foreigner at all in Xiding, and one who could speak their language,
an Aini shopkeeper invited me to stay with her family that night. It was raining anyway, so they wined and
dined me, examining my Thailand Akha photos, until after midnight. Next morning we met an old man who knew where
Paseu village was, so my Xiding hostess told her son to take me there, along
with his Chinese friends, who would all share the task of carrying my luggage.
After quite a
long hike, pausing for rain showers, we arrived at dusk and the boys turned to me. Who did I know here? Ajeu who worked in the litchi orchards in
Thailand. Someone took us to a house
belonging to an Ajeu fitting that description, but we didn’t recognize one
another. Turned out he worked in Pahee,
one of Pamee’s satellite villages. But
you’ve come a long way, he said, and must be hungry, so stay for dinner. In the course of the meal the word about us spread
through the village and before I could finish eating the other Ajeu, who’d
worked in Pamee, came to the house and afterwards took me to his home.
Ajeu was my host
and companion the next several days as I explored the forest, nearby villages, the
tea gardens where most of them worked, and the Xiding market on my way back to
Jinghong. Almost all the Akha here had
never seen a Westerner before, but my use of the language, even though a
different dialect, made the proper impression and at social gatherings I
brought out my Dictaphone and played recordings of Akha dancing ground songs in
Thailand.
Most socializing
with guests and neighbors takes place during an extended dinner. First meat and vegetable dishes fill the
tables, along with rice spirits, which must be quaffed in the beginning and
frequently afterwards throughout the meal.
Cigarettes are also liberally distributed and the men even smoke while
they eat. For a while they only take
bits of meat and vegetables as they smoke, talk, drink, joke and laugh. It’s at least 40 minutes before the women
serve the rice and soup. Even then the
pace of eating only picks up slightly as the atmosphere continues to evoke a
celebratory experience of eating and drinking in human company.
In this the Akha
in China resembled their cousins in Thailand.
They also shared customs like the internal domestic wall separating the
men’s side from the women’s side, the use of shamans and spiritual specialists,
rituals of the December New Year, and the Swing Festival. As tea cultivators they did not observe
festivals and rites associated with growing rice nor maintain their village
gates. They did not grow cotton or
indigo, so bought their clothing components from the markets. Traditional clothing was not so common in the
villages and
when posing for family portraits the females had to do some
borrowing for a traditional look. The
men dressed modern style and the only man around with a traditional Akha jacket
was me. In the Xiding market I did see some
women dressed traditionally, wearing conical headdresses or ones like in Pamee,
but often plain jackets without embroidery.
Younger ones did not dress in Akha clothing, but carried traditional
shoulder bags, usually heavily embroidered.
So I had much to
relate to my Akha friends and workers back in Thailand, but on the next trips
to Yunnan I concentrated on the northwest and its people, resulting in a book
published later that decade, and didn’t visit Aini villages again until late
1997. By then counties were opening to
foreigners at an accelerated rate and I conceived a long-term research project
that would take me to all parts of the province for a book that was eventually
published in Kunming as
The Exploration of Yunnan. One of the first stops was Lancang County,
where the largest ethnic group is the Lahu, most of whom are Christian and live
in modern style. However, the county
also hosts sizable Aini communities, still traditional, as far north as
Shangyun, but mostly south of Lancang city.
I was with a
Chinese friend who was taking me to meet his Wa connections in Ximeng after
Lancang and he had a friend in Lancang who used to be a police officer
stationed in Jiujing, about 25 km south.
He arranged a car and driver to take us to a typical Aini village near
the town. It lay within the forest,
several km down a dirt road turnoff from Jiujing. The people were rice farmers, but their
fields were not visible from the village.
The houses were similar to those in Thailand, made of bamboo and wood
with roofs of thatch. Some had roofs of
wooden tiles and a few dwellings were brick houses in the contemporary style.
By coincidence
it was Aini New Year, celebrated here three 12-day calendar cycles earlier than
in Thailand or Xishuangbanna, where it occurs in late December. It was the third day, featuring the settling
of accounts at the headman’s house, and the rice liquor flowed freely. They even gave me a bottle once I was
introduced
to the scene and began conversing.
They celebrated other festivals like in Thailand and had the full range
of traditional authorities: the headman
who mainly handles outside affairs, the dzoema who is the authority and
ultimate arbiter on cultural matters, the pima who is the spiritual
specialist and memorizes the oral traditions and history, the blacksmith who is
also chief architect and oversees house construction, and the shamans, to whom
people go when medicine does not ease their afflictions.
Perhaps because
it was festival time more of the people, even males, dressed in traditional
clothing, though women tended to wear red and white checkered headscarves
instead of ornamented headdresses. Their
shoulder bags and the lower half of the vests and jackets were heavily embroidered
but with colors restricted to pink, red, white and magenta. The bags were also bigger than usual and the
skirts longer and bulkier. They wove and
dyed their own cloth and strips of indigo cloth were hanging on some of the
balconies, just like in winter in Thailand.
Three months
later, February 1998, my Yunnan exploration included sojourns to Xishuangbanna
to visit the oldest Aini settlements in Menghai County and find out where they
lived in Mengla County. In Menghai
County the biggest and oldest villages were in Gelanghe Autonomous Aini
District. With an adventurous young
Chinese friend I headed there. There was
only a dirt road then, climbing quickly into the hills southeast of Menghai,
that were speckled with forests and slash-and-burn farms, augmented by tea
gardens and fields of sugarcane. Halfway
to the town, straddling the crest of a hill was the Aini village of
Yakoulaozhai. The previous year, to mark
its 125
th anniversary, backed by a grant of 5000
yuan from
the county government, the village erected a magnificent entrance gate. Based on the original traditional entry
gates, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and not rebuilt since, it was
bigger and more richly decorated with carvings of weapons and other symbols to
repel demons from the protected sacred site of the village.
Most houses were
traditional style—stilted bamboo and wood structures with roofs of thatch or
wooden tiles. The people we saw were all
dressed modern style. We didn’t stay
long, for our destination, 6 km south of Gelanghe, was Pasha, an even older and
bigger village. With over200 houses, all
of them in traditional style, Pasha had already spawned two satellite
settlements a short distance away. It
lies on a slope that’s not very steep and the highest neighborhood is on the
crest of the ridge. Up here stands the
festival swing, next to two simple and ordinary size entry gates, with carved
male and female figures beside them to remind spirits this is a human zone and
not for them. Pasha had these gates
because three years earlier the current
dzoema personally revived the
tradition. The other two villages didn’t
have them.
One big
difference between the Akha in Thailand and the Aini in China was ideological
interference. In Thailand outsider
attempts to change the traditional Akha Way came from Christian missionaries
and Buddhist proselytizers. In China it
was periodic government campaigns against ‘superstition’ that undermined
tradition. Another casualty of this was
the absence of ancestral altars inside Aini houses, still very much part of
Akha life in Thailand. At least there
was never a campaign against embroidery designs and the survival of this
tradition was very evident in Pasha, especially among the older women, who still
wore traditional garments and were currently busy stitching in their free
time. The younger ones rarely wore them,
except for the shoulder bag, but all the babies had traditional caps, festooned
with beads, cowry shells and coins.
In Mengla no one
could tell us where the Akha lived, but I assumed they must be near the Lao
border province of Phong Saly, which was heavily Akha-inhabited. I chose to look in the vicinity of Nankexing,
a spot on the map next to the border.
There was a border check post at Manzhuang, but when my friend explained
I was researching Akha/Aini in China for a book the police permitted us to
proceed. However, they couldn’t tell us
where the Aini might live. We got a ride
part of the way, then hiked past thick forest on both sides of the road and
after another hour came, not to Nankexing, but to a stone pillar marking the
China-Laos border.
Fortunately a
woman turned up heading back to her village and informed us an Akha village lay
3 km ahead and the nearest Lao border check post was several km further
on. We hiked to this village, called
Pakeu whose residents were the original inhabitants of Nankexing. They fled to Laos to avoid the political
campaigns of 1958. They had moved down
from the mountains a year ago, closer to their sugarcane fields, so their
houses were a bit ramshackle, yet the interiors were in the same traditional
style as in Thailand. The men’s side and
women’s side had separate hearths and a wall divided them. The ancestral basket was stored in the far
corner of the women’s side beside the dividing wall. Water was carried and stored in bamboo tubes.
This was the
first Akha sub-group I met whose women wore, instead of skirts, black shin-length
trousers. On top they donned a black
long-sleeved, side-fastened jacket that reached to below the knees. Aside from the cuffs and a tab next to the
left side of the neckline, it was all plain black. On their heads they wore a close-fitting cap
with a flat board rising up from the back, all swathed in black cloth. A line of silver studs decorated the front
brim and round silver pendants hung on chains on both sides of the face. Unmarried younger women cropped their hair
short and many wore no headgear. For
those who did, it was a skullcap decorated with coins, silver studs and the
same round pendants hanging down each side, as well as long strings of beads
and white seeds dangling from the back of the cap. More of their sub-group lived north on both
sides of the border and I met them again years later in Mengban district.
Still, their
attire was quite a contrast to the bright and colorful outfits of all the other
Akha I’d encountered. But with our final
excursion it was back to the kind of Akha ensembles I was used to seeing. We went to Mengman in the southwest corner of
the county and at once met Akha girls in full traditional clothing similar to
Thailand and Menghai County. From them
we learned of Akha villages west of the town past the rubber tree
plantations. These villages were well
off thanks to the rubber business and all the houses were newly made brick in
the local Dai style. Only the big swing
distinguished it as an Akha village. When
I commented on that, a villager suggested going to his sister’s village on the
Lao side of the nearby border to see something more typically traditional.
It was a
90-minute hike over a plain, a Lao army post visible to the south, to the edge
of the forest and the site of the village.
Here, as promised, all the houses save the headman’s were in the classic
Akha style. (His was brick.) All females dressed in traditional garments,
though none wore the calf-wrappers common elsewhere. And instead of a heavy beaded pouch holding
down the skirt in front they wore loops of beads across the right hip, fastened
to the waistline front and rear. As it
was already late afternoon the headman invited us to stay the night and attend
the house-warming party of a neighbor.
The males spent
an hour slaughtering and cutting up a big pig and when the feast began ate
separately from the women. Young women
kept replenishing the tables with freshly cooked pieces of pork, while the host
made sure the rice liquor made regular rounds, and I passed around my photos of
Akha in Thailand. The meal was long,
marked by much conversation about their culture, comparing aspects in each
country. They also had the same origin
myth as that narrated to me in Pasha, Jiujing, Xiding and Thailand, memorized
in full by the village
pima.
We returned to the headman’s house fairly late
and a little drunk, but there was one more old-fashioned traditional experience
coming up to enjoy—opium. Behind the
partition wall on the female side an older woman was lying on her side smoking
her pipes. She soon finished and turned
over her place to a young man who proceeded to prepare a couple pipes for
himself to smoke and then several each for both of us. My friend had never smoked before but this
was something still common at that time in northern Thailand, where until
recently many Akha villages cultivated the plant. At the end of the session our host only asked
payment for what the Chinese smoked.
Mine was complimentary because I spoke their language. Now I had a final anecdote to relate when I returned
to Thailand’s Akha villages.
* * *
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