Cat Cat Village

Those hands spin hemp into thread, slowly and steadily, one strand joined to the next, one twist after another. They belong to a Hmong woman in the village of Cát Cát, at the foot of the Hoàng Liên Sơn range. From the center of Sa Pa, her home lies only about 2 kilometers away, along the road toward Fansipan mountain.

Her day in the village begins with threads of hemp, and it will close when the evening shadows settle over the wooden roofs.

Her house leans its back against the mountainside, like most homes in Cát Cát. It has three rooms. Each roof frame stands on three posts set across the house, and the posts rest on round or square stone slabs. The roof is laid with cypress boards, and the walls are made of sawn timber. Bamboo thickets and terraced rice fields surround the house. One house stands a few dozen meters from the next, and most of them line the stone stairway that leads down into the heart of the village.

Inside, each part of the house has its own work to do. There is a space for worship. There is a loft where stores of food are kept. There are places to sleep, a kitchen and a corner for receiving guests. The house has three doors, but the main door always stays shut. It opens only when the family has a great occasion, such as a wedding, a funeral, or the offerings made at New Year. It is a door that knows how to wait patiently for the most important days in a family's life.

The hemp in her hands has a long road ahead. The Hmong here spin hemp into thread, then sit at the loom and weave the thread into cloth. But the plain cloth just off the loom is not finished yet. First it goes through a tub of indigo dye. Then it goes through herbal ash water and through leaves and plants gathered from the forest, which give it its color.

Then comes the step that makes every onlooker curious. The cloth is spread on a flat stone smeared with beeswax. The worker sets a round log on top and rolls it back and forth over the cloth. Back and forth, again and again, until the cloth takes on a shine. The special gloss of Hmong hemp cloth comes from this work, which looks so simple.

On the many-colored brocades, the patterns imitate trees, leaves, flowers and animals. Up close, each piece of cloth looks like a patch of mountain forest folded small. In the village, people still keep the crafts of embroidery and of drawing beeswax designs on cloth. They also weave baskets and other things for the home.

Later in the morning, she follows the stone stairway down. The path passes the house of a silversmith. Silver engraving in Cát Cát goes back a very long way. The silver is melted and poured into a mold. Then it is hammered and filed. After that, the smith engraves the patterns, whitens the metal and polishes it. Through those patient steps, necklaces, bracelets, silver waist chains and rings come into being, one by one. The finest pieces are the women's jewelry. Not far away, someone is forging tools for the fields.

Visitors to Cát Cát today can watch all this work with their own eyes. The village has become a Hmong community tourism site. Here, people from far away can step into the everyday life of the homes at the foot of the mountain.

Yet Cát Cát is far from new. The village took shape in the middle of the 19th century. Early in the 20th century, the French came here and chose the village as a place of rest for their officials. People in Lào Cai still say that the waterfall in the village once had a French name, and that the name Cát Cát comes from it.

In 1925, the French began building the first hydroelectric plant here, beside the Hoa stream. Its power went mainly to run the telegraph system in Sa Pa. Only in 1993, when the national power grid reached Sa Pa, did the plant stop generating. Today the dam on the stream is still preserved. So are the channel that carried the water, the surge tank, the steel pipes and the operating house. The plant has gone to rest, and it lies quietly, listening to the stream.

Down in the middle of the village, three streams meet. One is the Tiên Sa stream. The other two are the Vàng stream and the Bạc stream. Right at that spot, Cát Cát waterfall, also called Tiên Sa waterfall, pours white water down over the rocks. Two suspension bridges cross the water. They are the Si bridge and the A Lứ bridge. Standing on a bridge, a visitor hears the sound of the water rising from right underfoot.

The village also has a very unusual rice mortar. It needs no human strength, and it runs on the power of water. Stream water flows in, and the pestle lifts and then drops. It keeps that steady beat, and the rice is pounded clean of its husks.

In the afternoon, the music of reed pipes and the jaw harp rises from the performance area. Visitors are invited into the bamboo pole dance with Hmong young men and women. Their feet step lightly between the poles as the poles knock out the rhythm. The laughter of the villagers and of the people from afar blends into one beat.

Early each year, Cát Cát holds the Gầu Tào festival. It is the biggest festival of the year in the village, held to pray for blessings and for long life. In those days, the village is far livelier than on any ordinary day.

Village meals bring corn cakes, smoked meat and fermented soybeans. Smoke from the small kitchens drifts up, mingles with the cypress roof boards, and slowly fades into the mountainside.

Dusk falls over Cát Cát. She returns to the three-room house that leans against the mountain. The main door is still shut, waiting for some important day. By the light of the kitchen fire, her hands take up the hemp again and spin one more turn, and then one more.