The first thing one notices upon arriving in the mountains of Guizhou is the beautiful landscape, a balanced collaboration between nature and man. As stewards of the land, their ability to sculpt the rugged landscape into layers of terraced rice patties is a reflection of their finesse and mastery of the land. Nestled at the base of these green hills are their dark wooden houses, clustered together like a tight ecosystem. The Miao homes have a strip of white tiles on tops of their roofs while the Dong are centered around a tall drum tower. They are surrounded by lush green fields where, upon closer look, farmers can be spotted hacking grass with a curved machete blade they pull from a bamboo basket slung onto their back. Out in the fields, the farmers and the land become one.
While in Guizhou, I came to the sudden realization that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. This may seem obvious to a biologist, but for a New Yorker like me who had spent 15 years living amongst concrete buildings and only experienced trees on the weekends, this was a huge revelation. My first experience with this was walking past village homes where I saw a pulley system made of tree vines, holding up beams for hanging things, were later discarded in a pile on the ground after use. If it had been made of plastic, it would have looked like trash. But being a tree vine, it could be thrown back into the forest and go back to nature where it came from. It seemed like such a novel yet obvious solution for getting rid of waste. This was my first lesson in true sustainability — not an over-thought and forced corporate marketing concept. Here, it just made sense.
I later saw young women washing their long hair in the water canals, children playing in the river, and grandmothers washing vegetables in pools of collected rainwater. Before then, it never dawned on me where water came from. For me, it always came from a sink faucet — giving me the false sense that freshwater supplies are endless. So it was surprising when I learned that water plumbing did not exist for some villages as recently as three years ago. Every morning, one had to fetch water from the mountain spring and carry the heavy buckets back to their home. Or take their laundry and vegetables outdoors to the nearest river or spring.
Fortunately for Guizhou, the sub-tropical climate (fact check) means that it rains all the time. For generations, there has been a constant flow of fresh water coming down from the mountains and villages have sprung up around them. They come from holes from the side of the mountains, either alongside a trail or directed into rice patties. The fresh water is filtered naturally from the rocks and minerals in the soil, and tea connoisseurs note that mountain water is the best water for making tea (site Marriage Frères Art of Tea). It tastes pure, alive, and is better than any over-priced bottled water at a grocery store. It can even have healing benefits, especially if it passes through the roots of the red yam tree (get exact name) as it does in Dongcen village where villages drink a cup of it each day to help alleviate stomach pain.
The abundant water source is not taken for granted by the villagers, and these springs are worshiped as a powerful spirit in the village (site source). In fact, the Miao and Dong are shamanistic (animist?) in religion and believe that everything in the natural world has a spirit, including the rivers, rocks, mountain springs, big trees, and plants — even just one blade of grass (site Yang Wen Bin interview). Offerings are regularly given to appease these spirits in exchange for their protection and cooperation, a humble acknowledgement that humans must work in harmony with nature in order to survive. I can’t help but notice the similarities with other indigenous cultures around the world and wonder when, why, and how the modern world decided to abandon their respect for nature.
Region
Guizhou may be the poorest province in China, but it is rich in natural resources. It is blunted with a lush green mountainous landscape and abundant rain that makes everything grow quickly. Experiencing this natural wealth and the villagers’ own rich culture made me question how poverty is defined, and by whom. Certainly they are cash-poor. After all, it was once not uncommon for them to go an entire year without seeing any cash. As self-sufficient farmers, they grew and made everything they needed to survive. This, of course, can only be done in nature, where one must acquire the skills to live off the land. Instead of buying the things you need, you’re making them instead.
Growing food and making their own hand-crafted items was a way for these villagers to be self-sufficient in an isolated region that was, until recent years, inaccessible by roads. Their daily practice of eating organic, freshly-picked, free-range, grass-fed, farm-to-table meals would be considered an expensive lifestyle for an American living in a city. Nature acts as their refrigerator, and their diet is much healthier for it. Their access to fresh air and clean water is also a privilege that even the wealthiest in China’s cities do not have access to. From an outsider coming in, it feels a bit like a utopian paradise.
The irony is that poor villagers eat organic and farm-to-table because they cannot afford to buy their own food. They must work in the fields everyday to grow and cultivate all the food they need to survive for the year. Americans, meanwhile, generally buy everything they need at the supermarket — which creates a disconnect between the consumer and their source of their food. It also makes the city dweller more dependent on an office job or making money, as they never acquire the skills to become self-sufficient and grow their own food.
Even five years ago, when I first arrived in Guizhou, I had to drive 2 hours to the nearest town if I wanted to buy a lemon. As for avocados, I had to buy them in Shanghai and fly them down with me in my luggage. Half of my suitcase was stocked with store-bought items until I learned how to eat locally and in-season. Doing so changed my relationship with food, and valuing those things that were not locally available — like chocolate, olive oil, almonds, and fruit. These all turned into small luxuries when they were suddenly out of reach, and made me appreciate them even more.
While it may seem unusual to mention growing food in a book about clothing, one has to realize that clothes are grown in the same way. Just as we have natural vs. chemically-processed ingredients for making food, there is also natural vs. synthetic fibers for making clothing. While the natural fibers are grown outside in the sun and have been used to make clothes for thousands of years, synthetic fibers are developed in a lab and have only been around since the 1930s (fact-check Nylon). My aim is to design a collection where the entire production follows the traditional process — which, by default, will be all-natural, organic, and made without the need for electricity.
The ethnic minorities in Guizhou province may look similar to the outsider, but they are different races, each with their own set of beliefs, and speak languages that cannot be understood by the other. The ones I am in contact with the most are the Miao, Dong, Sui, and Ge. Each ethnicity specializes in a set of techniques that has been perfected over several generations using resources native to their land. Like a fine wine, the terroir and climates determines the plants that can be cultivated and sourced, and therefore the fabric that can be created. Each village has a costume style that is unique to their tribe, and these costumes, like a uniform, identifies the wearer with the village where they come from. These villages may be small in number, ranging from 100 to 6,000 people, but together they create a vast network across the province’s 34.7 million population, 37% of of which consist of ethnic minorities.
The Miao people were among the first people to settle in present-day China and among the first rice farmers in China. Over 3.6 million people, half of China’s Miao population, live in Guizhou. (footnote: Huadricourt, Andre; Strecker (1991). “Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) Loans in Chinese”. T’uong Pao. 77 (4-5): 335-341) According to Chinese legend, they descended from the Jiuli tribe led by Chi You, one of the three founding ancestors of China, who were defeated at the Battle of Zhuolu around 2500 BC (near present day Hebei and Liaoning), while some scholars connect the Miao to the Daxi Culture nearly 6000 years ago. (footnote: Wen, Bo et al (2005) “Genetic Structure of (H)mong-Mien Speaking Populations in East Asia as Revealed by mtDNA Lineages”. Oxford Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution. 22 (3): 725-734) Over centuries of warring with the Han, the Miao were pushed from the central area of China to the southwest and settled in present-day Guizhou province.
The Dong originated from Luoyue branch of the Baiyue, a group of people in south China in ancient times. Modern-day Dong people are considered a sub-group among the Yue folk who, it is believed, were the original ancestor of the Han Chinese people.(site source). There are 1.628 million of them left, with The Miao are known for their elaborately embroidered costumes while the Dong wear more reserved costumes with hand-embroidered trims. If the Miao use textiles to pass down their oral history, the Dong do it through their traditional polyphonic singing which is unique to each village.
The Sui people are also descendants from the ancient Baiyue people, who inhabited southern China before the Han dynasty (before 206 AD). There are only 430,000 of them left, living predominantly in Guizhou, and they excel in weaving an infinite variety of plaids, diamonds, and geometric patterns.
The Ge people are masters in wax-resist painting on textiles. With a small population of 125,000, they are included within the Miao ethnicity in the Chinese census. They share the same language as the Miao, with slight variation, but they consider themselves a separate ethnicity with different customs and ways of dress.
In the last 30 years, village life has changed dramatically. The rural youth have left to become migrant workers in coastal factories, and returned bringing outside influence back into the villages. Traditional costumes are replaced with t-shirts and jeans. Wooden buildings are replaced with concrete ones. Dirt roads give way to smooth asphalt roads. Within the span of 5 years, a highway, a fast-train, and even a regional airport were built to advance tourist development for a growing middle-class with more leisure time. Whereas my first trip from the capital of Guiyang to the village of Zhaoxing would have taken 2 days, today the journey only takes 1.5 hours by fast train and only a one hour drive from the nearest airport.
In Tang’an village, where my workshop is now based, electricity did not arrive until the mid-1990s and running water did not enter the homes until 2014 (get exact year). This explains why, whenever there is a rainstorm and the electricity is knocked out for 3 days, they can still live without electricity, just as human civilization has done for thousands of years. For me, living without power was a new experience, and I quickly realized how much of my modern life is dependent on electric devices.
So I started to look for manual alternatives: a manual juicer instead of an electric one, drying fruit in the sun instead of in a dehydrator, line-drying my clothes instead of using a dryer. I learned how to live without a refrigerator, which meant always buying fruit with its peel intact or eating vegetables soon after they were pulled from the ground. And I understood why there were so many farm animals running around — chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, frogs, and even dogs. Keeping them alive didn’t require refrigeration, and they were fed well and lived the good life before being sacrificed for the dinner table.
My work schedule followed that of the villagers, which revolved around the natural light given off by the sun. The weavers would start at sunrise, the normal time the villagers would start working in their fields, take 2 hours at lunchtime to return home and make their meal, then return to work until sunset. The sun was the only light we needed, and so our workday revolved around that natural source of light.
Farming is taken very seriously, as the effort put into the land will determine if the family has enough food to eat for the rest of the year. While we city people may spend our work days in an office building, these countryside villagers “go to work” all day in the fields. They walk the trails with such confidence, with their machetes, pipes, and stylish farm gear. These ethnic minorities are survivalists, understand nature, and can innovate when it comes to getting things made. This makes them very different from city dwellers, but they are not the “backward” and “uneducated” people the city people has stereotyped them to be. In fact, the villagers often surprise me with their creative problem-solving, despite their lack of formal higher education.
Seeing the ethnic minorities in their natural setting, where they are masters of their land, is very different from dealing with them in the big cities, where they seem a timid and hesitant as migrant workers in the restaurants and hotels. This can be explained by Han chauvinism, an internal form of Chinese racism that views the Han, or 92% of the Chinese population, as more educated, sophisticated and successful than their ethnic minority counterparts.
In this kind of environment, the villagers tell me, the younger generation of ethnic minorities feel pressured to assimilate into the majority Han culture and will imitate their lifestyle and modern way of dress. This is disappointing, of course, not least because the ethnic minority style of dressing is more sophisticated and advanced than what the Han Chinese are currently wearing in the cities, but because their modern dressing is not even traditionally Han. Modern clothing in China is actually an imitation of Western dress that they have adopted in recent decades and are still learning how to coordinate outfits and mix-and-match properly.
When we’re sitting around a table hand-sewing, I love asking the villagers what life was like growing up without electricity, nor running water. “Why do you want to know?,” was their initial response, “So you can tell your friends in American how poor we are?”
“No, not at all.” I tell them, “It’s because your life is fascinating and we have no idea what it’s like to live without these modern comforts.”
It’s too complicated for me, in my limited Chinese, to explain that the world is running out of fossil fuels and freshwater, that we have become wasteful and too dependent on electricity, and that living more sustainably is a survival skill that all humans will need to learn to survive in the future. These villagers may feel poor compared to the aspirational lifestyles they see on their TVs, but the abundance of fresh mountain water, the best water I’ve ever tasted, gives me the feeling that they are much richer than they actually know.
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