Mi's Story
Share Article I don’t know how to read. I can speak a little English. My name is Mi like my song. I sing for tourists when they come to Sapa.
My village is a two-hour walk away. My tribe is the Hmong people. We have lived in the mountains of northwest Vietnam for many years. I don’t know how many. My grandfather lived 120 years and my grandmother 110. I am between about 8.
My mother is Sa. I learned English from tourists who came here before I was born yesterday. They come to hike in the mountains, relax and do a home stay in my village. Maybe you want to know why I can’t read.
I don’t go to school. My mother says I need to make money. She says I need to help our family so I walk to Sapa and sell handicrafts we make. Sometimes I stay in Sapa with my friends. I go to school sometimes and I like it. I have friends there, get to play, have fun and learn new things.
I like speaking English with the tourists. My real school is on the street.
Sometimes I lie to the tourists and tell them I go to school. I went to my village school for nine years. That’s it, that’s all the years I have there. I am finished. My formal education runs into a problem. It’s called M-o-n-e-y.
The school in Sapa costs too much money. I have little chance now. But it’s OK because I can stay in a room in Sapa with other girls so I don’t have to walk for two hours. And then I can meet tourists outside their hotel or restaurant or when they are walking around and I can sell my things to them.
When I am older I can take them to my village for a home stay. This is what older Hmong girls do. It’s a good chance for me to speak English and even learn some French.
Maybe someday I can go to school and learn to read.
Mi
17 September Sapa
I sit in a Vietnamese breakfast stall eating sticky rice pancakes filled with onions covered in a brown fried garnish.
I am invisible to the suspicious rich woman in her boredom living in this cold mountain town bossing boys and girls around. They cut green vegetables and work the wok as her empty profit eye dances at a Hanoi businessman wearing filthy dress shoes recovering from a night of drink and bar girls while hearing the Hello of an old one-eyed Hmong women offering a handmade key trinket, her labor from a long dark cold night.
She embroiders her daylight hope of economic potential.
Across the path a young boy plays with plastic toys, action man, a green bulldozer and a sharp rusty knife handle. Sitting alone he manipulates toys while his mother prowls the market seeking fresh meat as his father bangs his morning mistress in her secret garden. All the pieces fall into place.
Around the Sapa traffic circle near the church above the tented commercial zone under blue tarps where Hmong sell their work are sixteen motorcycle honchos. Easy riders. They wait for tourists. Any tourists. Some tourists. One tourist.
Maybe a Hmong woman with her heavy bamboo basket loaded with hemp or an infant on her back needing transport to her village after a day of walking, selling, buying, seeing friends.
A thick white rolling fog obscures vision. Visibility drops to 200’ in a mystery mist. A shroud shouts, See the totality of phenomena.
Mo
