A road one car wide. Scattered wooden houses. Small figures in indigo cloth set freely against an unbroken expanse of green.
The vehicle moved quickly, yet the landscape beyond the window seemed still. Perhaps it was an illusion of motion; perhaps it was something particular to a village enclosed by mountains. As soon as we entered, time appeared to slow.
The walls were low and the mountains behind them high. On our first visits, they seemed high enough to hold the village within a small world and close off everything beyond it.
Repeated returns changed that impression. Hewan was not suspended outside time. The road connected market and county town; people left for work and came home; Bluetooth speakers, livestreams, basketball, and old songs occupied the same days. The mountains sustained local life, but people constantly chose how to live among them and how to move beyond them.
We returned in July 2024. Earlier visits had followed dragon boats and the Sisters’ Festival. This time, we wanted to slow down and enter the days between festivals.
Hewan
Natural life and cultural memory met us as soon as we entered Hewan.
The museum stood near the gate. A stone path ran between grass and bamboo.
The bamboo grove was like a record that never stopped turning. During the day, birds took the melody; at night, loud insects replaced them.
A tall old tree in the courtyard held three swings. In the breeze, the seats moved lightly and our thoughts slowed with them.
To the east stood the long tables where we ate. Grandparents carried out plates while conversation travelled from one end to the other. Beneath the table, several small black cats waited to be fed. Someone always crouched down to greet them before taking a seat.
On one wall, a collage of local faces showed many kinds of laughter—gentle, broad, mischievous. Birdsong, insects, steam from dinner, cats beneath the table, and those faces became our first memory of Hewan that year.
Following a stream towards fish
We walked towards a stream below Mount Jinzhong. Pebbles pressed against our feet and water moved across our skin as we followed it upstream.
Several people, unafraid of the “fragrance of mud,” had already entered the paddy and begun surrounding the darting rice-field fish. Some worked in groups to drive them into a corner; others saw the water shift and threw themselves into the mud.
Before long, a bucket held our “spoils.” Mud covered clothes and faces; cheers travelled along the valley. The next step, naturally, was to carry the fish back and eat together.
This was not a perfectly arranged lesson about nature. What remained was the pressure of stones, cool water, mud, and the sudden movement of a fish escaping between two hands. The pleasure of close contact with the land also helped us understand why catching fish and ducks appears in some local festivals and communal occasions. It concerns food, but also the way people gather in water, mud, and laughter.
From hesitant greetings to entering with gifts
Hmong culture can feel like an immense store of stories, but fieldwork is not an act of mining a place and carrying its contents away.
At first, we were shy about approaching anyone on the street. Later, with greater familiarity, we entered homes carrying small gifts. More than anything, we were learning how to come closer—and how not to come too close.
Some of us followed an aunt carrying indigo and helped gather plants used in dyeing, tracing glossy cloth through its cycles of colour and beating. Others sought out an early silversmith’s shop in Tanglong and asked how the craft and business had changed. At the market, another group bargained over paper-cut designs while their makers explained butterflies, dragons, and other forms.
Fortune telling, dental work, medicinal herbs, embroidery pieces, silver—the market placed craft, income, and ordinary need side by side. We once rushed to find a single explanation for every motif. Later, we learned that the same form could carry different meanings according to speaker, use, and village. A paper cut might hold a story; it was also, first of all, someone’s labour and livelihood.
We once contacted a silversmith hoping to ask about his work. He preferred to postpone the sale and go support his village basketball team. It seemed as though the whole street was flowing towards the court. Craft never existed apart from life, and craftspeople did not live only inside the “tradition” outsiders wanted them to describe.
The unfinished sleeve panel by the door
We entered a lane nervously, unsure how to approach the people around us.
An elderly woman, her hair coiled and her silver simple, caught our attention. She looked to be in her seventies or eighties and had lost most of her teeth. Seeing our uncertainty, she invited us to sit.
“...beans...cook...”
We understood almost nothing. Perhaps she was asking us to stay for a meal; perhaps we had misunderstood the question entirely. She continued smiling. The exchange yielded no “usable information,” but it remained a warm encounter precisely because it had not gone smoothly.
Another grandmother sat in the noon light embroidering by the door. When we moved closer, she asked her granddaughter to bring us small stools.
“Look, this is a dragon. This is a bird. And this—this is the butterfly, our mother...”
She pointed along the stitches as she explained the forms. A small panel like this required at least several weeks, and it was only one portion of a single sleeve.
The girl beside her said that the grandmother was now the only person in the household who still practised the craft, though everyone owned embroidered clothing. The grandmother’s daughter worked in the city; the girl herself was busy with school. She liked embroidery but could not find long, regular periods to learn it, so she helped with smaller tasks when she could.
The unfinished sleeve was more specific than any phrase about a “crisis of transmission.” At one end was the needle still moving in the grandmother’s hand; at the other were work, school, and a young person’s limited time. Tradition had not broken on a single day. It was being rearranged between the long labour required by a garment and the actual rhythms of people’s lives.
Shidong BA after dark
Village BA had become an internet phenomenon. We travelled to Taipan, its widely recognised birthplace, and spoke with organisers and residents. Yet it was Shidong’s own village-organised tournament—“Shidong BA”—that kept us beside the court late into the night.
During the festive season, Jieshang village invited teams from surrounding communities. Dozens responded. Professor Zhuang Chenyan of Minzu University of China also arrived with researchers. She suggested that this loose, thoroughly non-professional event was close to the early form from which Village BA grew.
Village households contributed to the expenses; local sponsors were announced before play. Well-known talkers from the surrounding area provided commentary in a deliberately comic style. Some referees were basketball enthusiasts filling in for the night. After one whistle, we heard a referee mutter, “Ah—I called that wrong.”
There was also a free-form “aunties’ game” unlike anything we had seen. Its flexible rules made it the evening’s greatest spectacle. Villagers ringed the court three and four rows deep. At two in the morning, people were still watching, unwilling to leave.
During the hot afternoon, an elderly woman saw us standing in full sun and brought an umbrella. At night, the air was cooler but a seat impossible to find. Whistles, jokes from the commentator, and the crowd’s calls travelled into the darkness.
After one match, we interviewed a referee who taught Chinese at a local school and had officiated at the Village BA tournament that later became famous online. In the end, he returned home and helped his own village sustain a competition of its own.
“Come on! You have to win!”
One evening, several grandfathers mistook our matching bright-orange shirts for the uniform of a visiting team and cheered us along the road.
We waved and asked whether they were also heading to the court.
“Of course,” they grinned. “Heh-heh.”
Even visitors accustomed to professional basketball left exhilarated. At Shidong BA, no one could predict what would happen next. That uncertainty was much of its unpolished, moving pleasure.
Songs, ritual practitioners, and the discipline of watching
That year, An Hong invited local singers and ritual practitioners to Hewan. We listened to a rain-prayer song for the sixth lunar month and, with permission, observed a rice-divination rite.
Such scenes are easily described as “mysterious.” Within the rite itself, however, the point was not to satisfy an outsider’s curiosity. What mattered was why local people called upon it, who presided, what sequence was followed, and what should not be casually filmed or interpreted.
We did not turn a brief observation into a complete conclusion. Songs, rites, and local knowledge have their own lines of transmission and differ across villages. To remain seated, listen to the end, and know when to lower the camera was itself an important field experience.
The village is quiet
At times, the village is quiet.
Quiet enough to hear a silver hair ornament tremble, indigo garments brush together, and stones shift beneath a passing foot.
Those were the sounds of a particular moment on a particular lane.
People around us were busy with their own lives: drying grain, embroidering, smoking fish, pressing oil, going to market, watching basketball. Some stayed in the mountains; some worked in cities. Some could still sing old songs; others gave most of their time to school and new occupations.
The women we met were strong. They farmed, made clothing, ran businesses, and transformed ordinary cloth through dye, repeated beating, and stitch after stitch into ceremonial dress. That strength did not need to become an essential quality assigned to all Hmong women. It was present in how particular people worked, chose, and organised their lives.
The Hewan of 2024 was not a village frozen in the past. It gave us bamboo turning like a record, an unfinished sleeve by a doorway, a silversmith who went to the game before making a sale, and a crowd still unwilling to leave at two in the morning. Everyday life was not the empty time between festivals. Culture continued within its details, noise, hesitations, and choices.