Minority Report

Visiting the Long Neck Karen village was a complete afterthought. I had left Pai at the crack of dawn and arrived in Chiang Rai that afternoon. I had only two objectives in Chiang Rai, the Black House and the White Temple, both eclectic modern takes on ageless spiritual concepts. However the two attractions were not merely opposite thematically but also geographically opposite from Chiang Rai center. With our late ETA, I had resigned myself to requiring two nights in an otherwise ho hum city to see both sights. But our bus had made an unexpected stop at the White Temple en route, enough to gaze at its spiky glory in a half dozen angles, and shortly after arrival at my Airbnb I caught a cab to the Black House. 

Through the chance sharing of both a bus ride and Airbnb booking, I had acquired a travel buddy, a Chinese girl named Qiao Li from Chengdu. We strolled around the Black House leisurely for an hour and I was feeling very content having knocked out the two birds with one stone, but Qiao Li wanted to keep hunting for a third bird. She pointed out that the "长颈村" was not far, and I had no idea what she meant. Long neck village? This wasn't highlighted in Wikitravel. She pointed at her tourist brochure and there was a picture of a woman in pink embroidery with shiny brass rings covering her neck. It took me a minute to mentally remove the rings, upon which I realized her neck must've been extraordinary long. Part of me was interested in going - there were many ethnic minorities I had only read about in the Demographics sections of Wikipedia articles of places. Part of me was fascinated to learn more. But part of me was reluctant because of the feeling that I wasn't going to learn more, and this part was right.

I visited a Miao village in Hunan within the past year, as part of a group of a few dozen Chinese tourists. The visit was one of the fakest experiences of my life, complete with a large sign at the town's main gate that said Miao People City … in Chinese characters. The whole place was a charade for tourists - an interesting experience, but not one that shed any light on Miao culture. Most real Miao people were adapting to modern China, doing regular life activities and trying to move up in Chinese society. Maybe there was some existential dread on how to preserve their traditions, but preservation wasn’t accomplished in this village by weaving baskets in front of tourists. For their part, I couldn't discern any sense of disillusionment or outrage from the other Chinese tourists.

At the beginning of this southeast Asian voyage I was breakfasting in a cafe in Sapa, at the northern tip of Vietnam. The cafe staff expressed their curiosity in me, and we exchanged pleasantries. Their English was good, and one of the girls had been learning Mandarin for all of a week. I smiled at her efforts, and she told me that it was her 4th language, after English, Vietnamese and her native language of Hmong. My first reaction was surprise - I hadn't been able to tell that they weren't Vietnamese. My second reaction was a light bulb going off - Hmong is the real name used by the people whom the Chinese call Miao. I tell them about the other Hmong people way up to the northeast, in China where the Chinese call them the Miao. They tell me that the Vietnamese call them Meo, which sounds the same as the Vietnamese name for cat, and so they don't like the Vietnamese. I hesitate for a moment, then inform that Miao sounds the same as the Chinese name for cat. The girl scowls. "Now I don't like the Chinese."

If I rack my brain hard enough, there is a bit more in there about the Hmong. They have been a stateless people for a long time, scattered from southern China by Han Chinese invasions and living in pockets throughout Southeast Asia - China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia. Many Hmong joined the US-led anti-communist efforts in the Vietnam war and its spillover into Laos and Cambodia, and when the war ended, they faced reprisals from 3 governments. The Hmong refugee crisis resulted in many Hmong being resettled in the US, seemingly chiefly in Minnesota of all places. One of my Georgetown classmates was born to Hmong refugees, and the movie Gran Turismo highlights this community. I'd figured their homeland was gone, inaccessible to someone like me, but here I was in a cafe speaking English to a Hmong college student.

All of this was in the back of my mind as I entered the Karen Long Neck village. I didn't know nearly so much about the Karen (despite having friends with that name). I had read something about them in Myanmar but had forgotten it all. We paid a 300 Baht entrance fee, which after free admission to the White Temple and Black House felt exorbitant. A long dirt path down the hill was calm and devoid of any extravagance and I held out hope that this could be a genuine village. Those hopes were dashed so fast.

It was towards the end of the day and several huts were empty. A single woman with the neck bracelets was there and smiled as she saw us, her hands mindlessly weaving on her wooden loom. As we walked past, other women materialized out from the huts and immediately went to work on their looms. Their bamboo huts were lined with scarves and trinkets for sale, because you know, who doesn't keep goods for sale on their front porch? Karen villages apparently are in a state of perpetual yard sale. 

The tour saw women and kids come out of the woodwork, all dressed in traditional dress and bangles. Everyone was very friendly, giving a Sawadee Ka and smiling for pictures. The women wore a full 8 inches of neck rings, with larger rings at the base. Some had on modern fleece jackets, but with more traditional-looking scarves, shawls and sarongs underneath. A little girl smiled and held some sort of game board, with a few inches of neck ring on her. I wanted to give everyone a hug and $100. Where are the men? Are they unfit for display because they don’t wear neck rings? Where are the "real" Karen people? Are they blended into Thai society, secretly waiting tables in Chiang Mai? Are they all still on the farms, tilling the land that the Thai people deigned to give them? How much more are they making in selling their culture to tourism?

This tourist site encompasses other villages, "inhabited" by other minorities, who aren't advertised as heavily because their necks are of normal length. I am introduced to the Akha, whom I had never heard of before. Their village is entirely inhabited by elders, and they're offering a set of wares that might have come from a factory. To my untrained eye I can't tell any difference in their appearance - they could all be Karen playing pretend for all I know. The women wear white headdresses and lots of bangles around their necks. Two of the elders who welcome us speak some basic English and even more Mandarin and throw many wares in our faces. As I ask them about their goods and history, I inadvertently get the elder man to call for a dance performance. Dozens of Akha elders with unenthusiastic expressions come out of their abodes and grab thick sticks, and drum the sticks straight down into the ground unleashing a deep earthen beat. I watch with 1 part awe and 9 parts embarrassment. After the minute long performance, Qiao Li walks away and I guiltily drop 100 baht into a jar in front of the dancers. I muster a thank you in their language, long gone from my memory, and feel pity that this community has to resort to performing like trained monkeys.

Walking back up the hill to the site entrance, I wonder what are the best options for impoverished village minorities here. In this region of Thailand, groups including the Karen, Akha, Lisu, Meo and Hmong are called “Hill Tribes,” mostly all relatively recent migrants from Yunnan province. They probably settled in the hills not because that’s the terrain best suited for their traditions - growing food in mountainous regions is rough work - but because the Thai wouldn’t let them settle in the better lowlands. They had to retreat to the more remote areas to not be bothered. And now they could try to continue their traditional lifestyles, subsisting on their crops and with limited access to modern infrastructure. I mean, how many scarves and brass rings does one need to trade for a car? Or do they try to assimilate into larger Thai society, starting from the dead bottom? Or do they engage in some sort of tourism contract like this, getting some revenue from curious people like me, and figuring things out from there?

How blessed am I to be from the world’s largest ethnicity, holding the passport of the world’s most powerful country? How would it feel to be a minority in every single country, speaking a language no one else deigns to learn, official absolute nowhere? 

I used to be idealistic regarding linguistic conservation and diversity, but I now believe that there is no way for people like the Akha to advance economically and simultaneously preserve their culture. When you read figures about how many languages are dying each year, they're languages like Akha and those of even smaller communities. Any stateless minority will eventually face the same challenges. There are some stateless people that we hear about in the western media, but most are not covered. Maybe my thoughts are too western-centric and bleeding hearty, and maybe most Akha people live happier lives than me. Nonetheless, my visit to this Long Neck Village reinforced a belief that the nationality and ethnicity you are born to matters far too much in this world.

The next day I boarded a boat to Laos, and drank beers with a bunch of western backpackers. We boozed lazily as the boat eased its way down the Mekong.