Tom, Christina Firpo and I, along with all 23 of our
students, got back yesterday from the overnight hill trip excursion. It was a
high point of the trip. The students have been exhausted by the schedule: lots
of class time. They begin each day with a 9am history of Southeast Asia class
that goes until 11; then they have an hour break, followed by my literature
class from 12 to 2. Their major complaint is that then they have a two-hour
Thai language class from 2 to 4. So they
are in class for 6 hours. Two days a week, they have a cultural activity at
4:30 that doesn’t finish until 6:30. The cultural activities are Thai cooking
and Muay Thai. These activities were supposed to be 3 hours, but I asked if
they could be changed to two hours; then I asked if the Thai language could be
changed to one and half hours. The
students told me that after an hour of Thai language they were mumbling incoherent
baby syllables to pass as a semblance of Thai. One of the younger Thai female
teachers started teaching her class Thai dancing after an hour of language.
Needless to say, she is a favorite. These language teachers come impeccably
dressed for class and are good natured and professional.
Ours students all wear their skirts and long pants with
closed toed shoes to fit the dress code, yet they still look as if they crawled
out of bed. We, including us profs, stand out from the rest of the university. All of the students at Chiang Mai University
(20,000 undergrads) wear black skirts or pants and white shirts. The majority
of the students at the College of Humanities are Chinese and look as if they
are in junior high. Our students look much, much older.
After two weeks of class, we were all ready for a change of
scheduled routine, so the one-night trip was welcomed. Krith, Cal Poly’s liaison
for the Thai study abroad program, who also organizes all international
programs and therefore works constantly, took us on this trip along with Thai
drivers in three very nice vans. We
first went to the Cultural Museum in Chiang Mai, an excellent museum, similar
in theory to the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology. Then we drove to a national
park that has the highest peak in Thailand. After eating lunch, Krith passed
out rain parkas and ponchos for everyone because it was raining (it is the
rainy season). We hiked in the mud and I mean mud up a hill to an enclosed hut
that they called a museum. We were introduced to a Hmong clan leader and his
compatriot, both dressed in their traditional clothes. The Hmong are an ethnic
mountain tribe who migrated from China many, many years ago to Laos and then
Thailand. They fought for the United States during the Vietnam War. Their
involvement in the war was unknown because they were recruited by the CIA to
fight in Laos, where American soldiers were not supposed to be. The war in Laos
is known as the Quiet War, and 30,000 Hmong were killed. After the war, most of
the remaining Hmong people fled to Thailand for safety from the Communists and
ended up in refugee camps in Thailand. Those who fought were promised asylum in
the US for them and their families. About a 1,000-3,000 were airlifted to
America; many were left. As a result, many Hmong live in Thailand and other
areas of Southeast Asia. Historically,
they have never had a homeland because they were always a migratory mountain
tribe.
In the Ethnic Literature class on Southeast Asia that I am
teaching, the students and I had just gotten through reading and studying a
non-fiction book on the Hmong people. Therefore, they were well prepared for
meeting the Hmong representatives in terms of having some historical knowledge
of them. The Hmong clan leader, who was characteristically about five feet
tall, held himself with much stature and addressed us using a translator. I was
extremely pleased because the students asked such good questions and did not
fit the stereotype of ignorant or clueless Americans.
His talk was finished with the other man playing the Hmong musical
instrument (a red pipe) called the qeej and
dancing as a ceremonial welcome.
Krith had handed me a
white envelope with a donation inside for me to present to the Hmong
leader. In the dark of this shelter with
it raining outside, I thanked the two men, bowed, and handed the leader the
envelope.
In a parade of colored parkas slipping and sliding down
muddy trails, we walked back to the vans to ride further up the mountain. The
next part of the afternoon was a trek to the Karen tribe and its village. Krith
did not trek with us. Three Karen
English-speaking guides led us through the woods (students called it
“the jungle”) that followed a rushing, cold-water steam with enormous boulders
and cascading water that intermittently plunged into spectacular water falls.
Each waterfall was an opportunity for photos out on slippery boulders. One
female student climbed out on a fallen tree, protruding out over the rushing
water, and straddled it like a bronco while the whole time I was yelling “no.”
The water drowned me out.
Several of us fell in the mud as it was so slippery. I
established the precedent. Being the first to fall, I alarmed everyone and as
they waited in an arrested silence to see if I were hurt. Although I was startled and couldn’t
immediately rise, I yelled out from my bottom-dwelling that I was fine. My
pants were not.
This trek for me is one of the highlights in all our
travels. We emerged from the green forest and waters into terraces of rice
paddies. We hiked through them going down into a valley and out again into a
Karen village of about 400 people.
I was separated from Tom and was with a guide and about two
other students taking up the rear. As we walked through the guide’s village, we
passed a wood and straw house with two women sitting on the steps and a man
stooping on his legs. The guide said that they were his brother, mother, and
grandmother. We waved. I hesitated, but then asked if we could go over and meet
them. I have learned to seize moments like these because they do not come
often. He said sure that they had met other trekking Americans. We didn’t take
any pictures out of respect. The two women are indelibly sketched in my mind.
They were in the Karen traditional red skirts and wore headdresses. The
grandmother was 85ish with wrinkles and a kind, serene smile to prove it. The
mother wanted to offer us a seat for hospitality; she was clearly proud of her
son.
We were the last to arrive at an outdoor coffee shop. The
rest of the crew was under a hut drinking the village’s coffee. The coffee
trees with its beans were growing all around us. Best coffee ever. They ground
it by hand, boiled water on an open wood fire, and poured it through a homemade
cloth filter. We all sat at a long wood table ecstatically happy. The coffee makers pointed to an enormous,
exotic green spider hanging on its web above us. Many of the students are
completely freaked by spiders; this number includes the tallest and biggest
male student. He will flee before anyone. In cooking class one day, he leapt
from the bench into the adjoining room so fast I couldn’t imagine what had
happened. It was a bug.
