She’s
lived in these mountains for as long as she can remember, but it's all different now. Now there are roads and shops and the young
people are leaving. They are leaving for the cities, for factory jobs and
tourist spots. They are leaving without the tribal skills, the skills which they
did not care to learn. The skills they felt would not provide the things people
down there, in the city value. The skills her grandmother taught her mother,
and her mother taught her and she taught her daughter. "Is this where it ends?" she
wonders.
Yet she smiles as she sits in her hut and draws the batik as
she has for years. It is a part of her, the culture, the Hmong tribal ways. The women
sitting together embroidering, chatting, after a day of gathering or planting
in the hills. Will it end here? These beautiful skills lost forever remembered
only by these hills that witnessed the beauty of it, and the grandmothers that
created them.
