In the summer of 2022, we made our first sustained visit to Shidong in Taijiang County, Qiandongnan, and lived in Hewan for more than two weeks.
Together, we left the study behind and entered real villages, festivals, rivers, and crowds. The winding stone lanes, the village well, and the tall maple beside it stepped out of books and into view. Things that had existed only in our imagination became specific and real.
Before we reached the village
Before we went, what did we imagine when we thought of the Hmong?
On the train into Qiandongnan, we began with that question.
Mountains and ravines came to mind; solemn rites we did not yet understand; beautiful clothing, fine embroidery, bright silver, and smiling faces in ceremonial dress.
But once those images were set aside, what did life in a Hmong village actually look like?
We carried that curiosity towards Taijiang. Only after arriving did we realise that the field was never a landscape waiting at a distance. It was the morning market, cloth beaten again and again beside the river, a festival already busy before it had formally begun, and a sentence that suddenly contradicted everything we had imagined.
For more than two weeks, we talked with people of different ages across the villages. Practices that had seemed “mysterious” from afar took on ordinary and concrete places in daily life: festivals brought relatives together; rites gave sequence to important moments; songs and stories connected ancestors and the natural world to the present.
We also learned, repeatedly, that we were seeing only part of the picture. The same story could have different tellings in different villages, from different speakers, and on different occasions. Our first lesson in the field was simple: listen to the end before beginning to speak.
Butterfly Mother in the old songs
Hmong lives have long been accompanied by myth and old song. The body of song often called the Hmong Ancient Songs carries narratives of creation, human origins, migration, work, and ordinary life. In Hewan, we encountered fuller tellings of these songs and of Butterfly Mother for the first time.
In the version shared with us then, Butterfly Mother emerged from an ancient maple and later laid twelve life-eggs; humankind was only one among the lives that followed. Humans, animals, and the natural world were placed within a single genealogy of life.
Butterflies, dragons, and other beings that we had first admired as beautiful motifs suddenly echoed the hills, river, and spoken stories around us. They might be sung in an old song or embroidered on a cuff, continuing to live at the table, during a festival, and in an elder’s account.
At the time, we were quick to interpret this narrative as a vision of equality and coexistence between humans and nature. Looking back, we understand that no such summary can replace a particular narrator. The meaning of a motif, song, or myth must return to the village and occasion in which it appears—and to the person who makes, wears, or tells it.
Dragon boats on the Bala River
On our second day in Hewan, An Hong of the Guizhou Hewan Institute of Hmong Studies introduced the stories, rites, and local rules surrounding the Hmong dugout dragon-boat festival.
Until then, our picture remained superficial: boats, crowds, ceremonial dress, racing, and celebration. Standing on the bank of the Bala River, however, we watched people arrange clothing, prepare offerings, wait for relatives, and organise crews. A festival, we realised, begins long before its most spectacular image appears.
Calls from the bank, drums on the boat, arriving relatives, and many busy hands together carried the dragon boat into the festival. A camera naturally follows the most striking vessel on the water, but may miss who prepared, who waited, and who passed up a bowl of water when the boat returned.
Watching from close by for the first time, we began to move our attention away from the climax and towards the many people through whom a festival comes into being.
Welcoming the married women home
One of the clearest scenes from that summer was the welcome for women married into other villages.
The returning women changed into carefully prepared Hmong dress, covered themselves in silver, and formed a procession. Silver rang against silver as music carried the old rite forward with brightness and life.
At the entrance to the natal village, other women waited in ceremonial dress with bowls of liquor. Cheers, music, and firecrackers rose together. The returning women were offered drink at the gate; inside the village, they sang and danced around a great drum. That day they were not expected to work. They simply received the care their natal families had prepared.
At first, we saw colour and excitement. Further questions revealed women returning to their place in the natal family and ties across villages being renewed through welcome, drink, song, dance, and care.
The rite did not float above ordinary life as a performance. At least on that day, in the village we entered, it was one of the ways people lived their relationships.
“I want to leave”
It was not a grand rite that broke our romantic picture, but two very ordinary remarks.
“I want to leave.”
A young Hmong friend said this in conversation.
“What is so good about this place?”
An elderly woman in the village asked us the same thing in different words.
We were surprised. To newcomers, the mountains, villages, traditions, festivals, and close ties could resemble a real-life Peach Blossom Spring: quiet, beautiful, and new.
People who had lived there for years could also tire of the mountains, wonder about cities, seek work, and want a wider life. Others left and later returned, telling us that life outside was not necessarily better, or simply, “This is where I belong.”
No one is forever content with the life an outsider imagines for them. Wherever people live, they hope. What is already ours often loses its magic; what remains unknown gives us reason to explore.
Leaving and returning were not simple votes for or against tradition. They were choices made among livelihood, family, belonging, and the future. Respecting a place did not mean turning it into an eternally peaceful homeland on behalf of those who lived there. Fieldwork had to see beauty and contradiction together—to understand both how people kept traditions and why they wanted life to change.
Belief within ordinary life
That year we also encountered local cultural practitioners commonly addressed as shi, or “masters.” They presided over rites and carried chants called upon at marriages, illness, funerals, festivals, and other consequential moments, following local traditions for handling relationships among the living, ancestors, spirits, and everyday affairs.
These practices were unfamiliar to us and impossible to explain quickly. A brief observation could not account for the full history and meaning of a rite. To reduce it to an exotic story would erase the respect, sequence, and lived experience that mattered most.
What we could see was that these roles did not belong only to a remote past. Families still invited such practitioners; they still acted at particular moments in people’s lives; and they carried songs and local knowledge that required years of learning.
For those who called upon them, belief was not a cloud drifting above life. It appeared at concrete moments. To understand Hmong culture, we had to look beyond visible clothing, buildings, and festivals, while recognising that the prohibitions, judgements, and spiritual worlds beyond the camera could not be reduced to easy definitions.
Translation by the river
Near the morning market, we saw several older workers dyeing cloth beside the river. The dye, fabric, and repeated movements were all in front of us, but the women spoke mainly Hmong and we understood none of it. Our prepared questions stopped at our lips, unable to reach the people before us.
A local young man, Zhang Fulong, stepped in.
We asked a question; he translated it into Hmong. The workers replied; he brought their answers back into Mandarin. How the dye was prepared, why the cloth was beaten repeatedly, and how each step changed its final sheen—what we could previously only guess from gestures now had the makers’ own explanations.
Without him, the exchange might have ended in smiles and awkward hand movements. Zhang was not an assistant standing outside the field. He was a local narrator and a fellow participant, connecting Hmong and Mandarin, village experience and questions from elsewhere.
That moment made something plain: no one completes fieldwork alone. A story can be heard only because someone is willing to translate and someone else is willing to speak.
An ending
More than two weeks in the villages passed quickly.
We experienced the noise of festivals and talked with people on ordinary days. We tried to know, feel, and understand—and repeatedly watched our assumptions break against real lives.
Hmong culture is living culture. It is not confined to a museum, a book, or a fixed image. It unfolds beside particular people: in an old song, in a rite that gathers relatives, in cloth beaten beside a river, and in the decision of one young person to leave while another chooses to return.
The memory of that summer may soften with time. But to listen with reverence, seek to understand others, and meet people with feeling became our first lesson from 2022—and the beginning of every return to Hewan that followed.
图 / 文：
宋沅芮 Sophia
赵琂瑷 Elizabeth
李林翰 Jack
编辑：
赵梓晴 Miya
张亿笛 Linda
指导老师：
李昊
肖汉隆
曾月