Written and photographed by Mick Elmore

published in Sawasdee magazine
 

Lan has returned to her parents' house for lunch. She joins the family on stools around the low wooden table and whispers softly in her three-year-old daughter's ear.

In front of her are plates of dried fish, assorted vegetables, rice noodles and meat. There is one of pork and a second piled with white fatty pieces of beef. Sauce that sears the lips before it burns the tongue sits in small bowls on the table and pitcher-sized baskets of sticky rice are passed around. The meal is topped off with a rice wine that can knock the drinker out if too much is drunk too fast. This makes it good preparation for the siesta that customarily follows lunch.

As the diners reach with chopsticks for different items, the scraps are fed through the cracks in the floor and fall to the ani-mal quarters below. The numerous chickens, running free through the village, quickly rescue them.

A Thai speaker following the conversa-tion would be forgiven for thinking they were in Thailand, even with the numerous unfamiliar words and portrait of Ho Chi Minh on the wall. But this isn't Thailand. Instead, Lan and family are of the Black Thai minority scattered through the mountains of northwest Vietnam. They have familiar smiles and speak a dialect proficient Thai speakers can understand. They are called Black Thai because of their proximity to the Black River.

"We have much in common with the Black Thai community" admits Professor Prakong Nimmanaeminda at Chulalongkorn Institute of Thai Studies in Bangkok, "there are also many cultural links, besides the apparent similarity of language".

Prakong is one of several Thai and Vietnamese academics who Study the Black Thai and their background. But the geographical and social isolation, coupled with the cool relations between Thailand and Vietnam over the past decades, has left many questions unanswered about when and from where the Black Thai originate.

Of the 54 documented ethnic groups in Vietnam they are one of the largest, second only to the Kinh people who make up 90 per cent of the entire population. Thai minority groups form the principal population in northwest Vietnam, num-bering one million, and are believed to have arrived in the area early in the second millennium.

Professor Prakong places their dialect as closest to northeastern Thai, but says the alphabet probably comes from the Lao language. Some have argued that it advanced from Sukhothai to Laos and then to Vietnam, while others say they invented it themselves, at least in part. What is known is that during this century they started using a Romanised alphabet, in common with the Vietnamese. Now with warmer relations between Thailand and Vietnam, and the economic and po-litical progress of the latter, more may be learned. The Black Thai, and other mi-nority groups like them, are becoming a cultural link between the two countries in the l990s.

It is known that the Black Thai be-lieve in the 'Three Spirits'; of the community, the household and the fam-ily. They also believe in their ancestral spirits, as do the people of northeastern Thailand. Other beliefs remain vague, a result of the isolation that has enabled them to retain much of their original iden-tity. Villages are spread through numerous fertile valleys in mountainous northwest Vietnam and parts of Laos, and vary in size from a few houses to more than 500 people.

Lan and her husband often eat with her parents, but as is the custom with the Black Tai, daughters leave their homes after marriage to live with their husbands family.  That tradition isn't changing but family sizes seem to be decreasing.  The Black Thai, in common with all Vietnamese, are encouraged to have no more than two children to limit the country's population growth. Lan's mother, Lo Hi Dong, points to the neighbour's house and says they have six children. Her husband, La Van So, laughs and says another village family has 11 children. This is changing slowly, as people become more aware of the implications. Lan says she and her husband plan to have one more child hut will stop at two.

They live in a normal Black Thai house with one large room on stilts and a kitchen attached at the side. The living quarters gravitate around the centre of the room where the family eats.  Each adult has a cubicle at the back, an area between the stilts which is cordoned off with a curtain. Not the most private of accommodation, hut it has been tested over centuries and is still preserved today.

Weaving looms sit by a window in corners of many homes, where the women make cloth for clothing and bags. The kitchen is a bamboo porch with a small room on one side where the food is cooked on an open fire.

Life revolves around the home. Some houses have neatly cut wood for stilts, and carved lattice along the front balconies. Others use rough logs and a few use bamboo. All the homes take advantage of limber taken from the local forests. A few, near the bigger towns like Dien Bien Phu and Son La, have electricity.

Whatever characteristics each home acquires, the basic design is constant in all villages and easily recognisable.

In the villages, animals are plentiful. Water buffalo are well tended, mostly by young boys who ride either reading and or resting on these wide-backed beasts.  Pigs are kept in pens. They scurry from place to place trying innocently and unnecessarily to avoid detection.

A Black Thai village is overrun with dogs.  "We don't eat them," said one resident, a little surprised by the growls of one dog he was approaching. They do eat the bananas and other fruit growing nearby, and fish in the rivers. The villages are surrounded by rice paddies, corn fields, kitchen gardens and ducks in the small man-made ponds. They also harvest fish from the ponds, and plants from around the edges. Many rely on the forests to provide any extra food.

The day starts early by most standards with breakfast at 6am. Activities are carried out as a family, although neighbours are nearby and some things, like building, are done communally. Goods for market are taken to the local towns by bicycle, and will include mostly wood and vegetables. The Black Thai look more like Thais than Vietnamese in both their bone struc-ture and facial features: their eyes are more round and their noses appear to be bigger than the indigenous Vietnamese. And their mouths seem to be permanently creased, as if they did truly once belong in the Land of Smiles.

But as in Thailand, their per-petual smiles don't mean they're always happy. Vietnam remains one of the world's poorest countries. In and around Dien Bien Phu they are a proud and well-kept people, but further into the mountains some of the villages are much poorer. Levels of poverty vary from village to village; some may be healthy while others are destitute. The condition of the children is the best indicator.

Traditional dress also varies. The men now wear the same clothes as Vietnamese with few exceptions. The women, however, continue to wear the practical and colourful traditional dress of close-fitting black skirts and embroidered blouses with silver clasps. Most also wear a beautifully embroidered black head-dress but often it is hidden under the conical hats that have become recognised as the international symbol of Vietnam.

Much of the Black Thai's identity has been kept intact, mainly because the Ha-noi government has given the Black Thai space. They fought alongside the Viet Minh forces against the French at Then Bien Phu in 1954, and in reward, cadres in Hanoi have since sent Black Thai officials to manage their own government offices.

Former chief of the Vietnamese Army and the architect of the 1954 victory, Vo Nguyen Giap, gives the Black Thai much credit in his book Dien Bien Phu: "Thanks to the great efforts displayed by the inhabitants, including the North-westerners... our task of reinforcing and supplying this his-toric campaign was fulfilled on a large scale." Being instrumental on the winning side went a long way towards improving attitudes and ensuring their acceptance.

The biggest disputes now facing the Black Thai seem to be between the pigs and poultry over kitchen scraps. Speed is the key and the darting chickens usually claim the prize. Development, however, in the form of hydro-electric dams, may soon change the society forever.

Geographical isolation has left them alone for centuries but the outside world is slowly beginning to arrive, Tours, for example, that come for the military history at Dien Bien Phu, include a Visit to a Black Thai village and are well-subscribed with visitors. With tourists going further and further into Vietnam, the villagers are being exposed to an ever-increasing variety of cultures, albeit in small groups. The effect of this is yet to be seen, but change is inevitably around the corner.