Mai Chau Reflection

In summary, we went on a school trip to Mai Chau for a weekend. Mai Chau is a small 'town' in the mountains North of Hanoi. We left on a Friday morning, and spent several days hiking around the area, staying in three different villages: Lac, Van, and So. We all felt proud of ourselves by the end, having "trekked" a total of almost 30 kilometers over the mountains! Mai Chau is gorgeous, where rice paddies cover the valleys and jungle forests cover the mountaintops and red dirt roads wind between the mountains. Highlights included: eating grasshoppers, hiking in the rain and turning red from the mud, giving up on shoes when they slipped off in the mud, sleeping in stilt houses, "mattresses" being hard cotton-stuffed bed rolls, a squat toilet flushed by hand, "showering" with buckets and water from a cold mountain stream, yoga with Happy (our 70-something year-old resident director's wife and college counselor), circus acts with Pascal (History teacher) and his daughter, shopping in Lac village, an intense girls versus boys soccer game (we won!), and a cultural performance by the Hmong minority people in Lac village. The following reflection (another English in-class writing assignment) regards this performance.

The notes of the not-quite-a-guitar filled the air and six women and three men in traditional costumes processed out and began to sing. I quietly slid up to the front and sat on the step to get a better view. The women’s faces, carefully painted with pale makeup and red lipstick, smiled dutifully. The men, awkward in their traditional costumes, stood staunchly by them. As they moved on to a dance of spring, the women pulled out lacy pink fans. They moved delicately, swaying gently to the music and always smiling. But they seemed to maintain an air of humility and even servitude as many of the dance moves included bowing and kneeling on the ground. I couldn’t help but get the impression that these women do not feel the same sense of empowerment that American women and even Vietnamese women living in cities enjoy. I know that I can do anything I want to with my life. But while the town of Mai Chau is actually quite well off compared to other villages nearby, it is still relatively isolated. These women probably knew their paths from the moment they were born in a rural village. They went to school for a while, helped around the house and farm, grew older, probably attending high school but not university, married and started a family of their own in the same village in which they were born and performed the same traditional songs and dances as their mothers and grandmothers. Perhaps they have opened shops and maybe risen a little from total poverty, but they certainly do not have the same opportunities I will and have already had. Surely they hope for more for their own children. They never stop smiling, but are they really happy?

*A note on women in Vietnam: here in Hanoi, women are clearly out in the working world and ride motorcycles to work every day like any man and seem to be very independent. In fact, the Vice President (or its equivalent position) of Vietnam is always a woman while the President (or equivalent position) is always a man. In America, we can barely manage a female candidate for the Vice Presidency. Nonetheless, I think women here have very different roles and opportunities in the countryside from in the city.