A pretty mind-boggling instance of the times which William Gibson might
have appreciated in Sapa, Vietnam yesterday. Sapa is a stronghold of Vietnam"s
Montagnards, the minority hill tribes found throughout southwest China
and northern Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam who still retain something
of their traditional ways. In particular, Sapa is absolutely thronged with
proud minority people whose dress is both absolutely traditional down to
the use of homespun cloth and dyes, and wildly baroque and colorful - in
spite of the fact that hordes of tourists are drawn to Sapa and that the
Montagnards interact intensively with them in hawking their embroideries,
etc.
Last evening
a small concert of traditional Hmong dance and music was held; but the
amazing sight came after its conclusion when the bar converted back into
a disco. As trance music blared and a powerful strobe flickered over the
boogying Vietnamese, they were joined by many Dzao and Hmong in full costume.
Several Dzao, who love kids, were dancing with Western tourist ten-year-olds
they'd befriended; and to see gyrating under the strobes this combination
of people in daily dress which could have been from hundreds of years ago,
people with the strength of tradition to maintain what is of value while
actively engaged with contemporary culture; and Western youths not insulated
but dancing with both the past and the future, and the Other, was a powerful
and hopefully auspicious sight.
It reminds
me a bit of one night in Kyoto, Japan during a traditional holiday in which
bonfires are lighted on the surrounding hilltops, and many women come out
attired in beautiful traditional kimonos. Later in the evening, passing
through the vast futuristic tunneled labyrinths of shops which seem to
stretch for miles underground beneath the modern city, one saw these kimono-clad
women, dressed like and honoring the traditions of hundreds of years ago,
playing futuristic video games in the subterranean baroque neon...
shmoetry
Surrealism
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