Last month Peter and I were invited back to Mae Chaem to gain perspective on the topics we chose for our globalization papers. Peter’s paper dealt with the farming industry in the face of globalization, while I, big surprise, decided to focus on globalization’s effect on the textile industry. In true Thai style, we were told that perhaps we would have the opportunity to arrange a trip, and the next day we were informed that, as it so happened, two members of the Raks Thai Foundation were returning from Chiang Mai to interview a Hmong weaving group in Mae Chaem that weekend, and we were welcome to hitch a ride and accompany them. Raks Thai is an NGO that works to develop sustainable communities (see raksthai.org for more information). Last time we went to Mae Chaem, we were given a lecture on Mae Chaem by Khun Jaeb, the Senior Field Officer of Raks Thai. She talked a lot about the problems farmers have been facing and also mentioned the foundation’s development and supporting of weaving groups established throughout the district. Khun Jaeb set up the entire trip, for which I am extremely grateful!
Peter, my weekend companion, in the tomato fields
Peter and I had just chosen our paper topics, having vague, romantic notions of what we wanted to discuss in our papers, and were a bit worried about making the most of this opportunity. What knowledge would we be able to gain without yet having any sense of direction? Fortunately, we weren’t too concerned – we were content with simply returning to this rural paradise, regardless of the excursion’s academic success. Luckily, I realized we would not have a very productive weekend whatsoever if we did not have a translator, so Ajan
Ho found an English major to come along.
A day later we met Tot, our new Thai friend and translator, at a hotel near the train station in town, tracked down our ride (a pick-up truck – this would certainly be better than the open-air cattle truck we were packed into last time for the bumpy, three hour drive) and headed out. The drive was much better – I slept most of the way. Halfway into the ride, however, we turned onto a tiny “road” – two rows of cement on which tires were supposed to balance (mind the cracks and gaps and holes!) – up to a village for a pit stop. As I groggily get out of the car I am handed a mug of instant coffee and sit on a chair in someone’s yard. There is a lot of commotion, and we are told we have come during preparations for a wedding.
Beautiful, right? Romantic, no?
No.
As I sit, sleepy and bewildered, I try to sip m coffee as I listen – for twenty minutes – to the wails of three pigs being beaten to death with a large stick (small log?), tied to a tree, and then thrown – in its entirety – onto a fire. Let me tell you, beating something to death is not a humane way to kill. At least the pigs certainly didn’t think so – those porkers squealed and sreamed and hung onto their life for as long as possibly – or rather, much longer than I would have liked. As Peter and I allowed our horrified, amused gazes to meet, we knew that this would set the tone for the entire weekend. And we couldn’t wait.
As it turned out, the pig wasn’t as foreboding as we thought. I felt a strange pride when I found that I was more comfortable with the slow life of Mae Chaem than our city-raised companion was. The weekend was amazingly relaxing, those who work at Raks Thai were kind enough to take full days out of their schedule to show Peter and I around the weaving and agricultural world of Mae Chaem. As we went from textile store to organic farm to dyer’s house to tomato fields, we learned that our two topics had a close relationship. Everyone we talked to were farmers, once subsistence growers who were enticed by the projeced profits a cash crops and now found themselves scrambling to get out of debt. They could not pay back the substantial loans taken out to afford new crops and machinery and chemicals, and industries which contract the farmers do everything they can to make extra money – even so far as genetically altering seeds to produce only a single harvest, forcing the farmers to depend on them season after season for new crops. It is because of this that women still weave.
Weaving was once synonymous with femininity, around which a girl’s pivotal steps into womanhood were measured. A girl began learning the skills from her mother and grandmother once she reached an age eligible for marriage. Men courted young women in the evenings, sitting at their looms underneath their stilted houses, and when she married a woman was expected to present textiles to her mother-in-law to prove her skill and worth. But women no longer wear the textiles they weave. Sitting at their looms in modern Western clothing, today women weave during the dry season and at night – any time they are not farming – to made a small extra profit. “Small” is not to be taken lightly. Somsri Rooying, a woman born and raised in Mae Chaem, was kind enough to let me interview her (cough, Ajan Jessica!) as she sat at her loom, effortlessly weaving a signature pha sin tin jok, the famous, intricately designed tube skirt woven only in Mae Chaem (don’t worry, I got one!), using a porcupine quill.
Somsri Rooying at her loom with her porcupine quill, two diamonds is a single day
Producing an average of two squares a day, one skirt can take up to a month to complete. Once they are finished the skirts are sold for 850 baht. While this is about $28, the raw materials cost the weavers 800 baht. A month’s worth of labor translates to less than $2. Somsri tells me that most of the patterns made today use a lot less color than the traditional patterns, many of which have been lost over the years because few are interested in learning a more difficult pattern that takes more time and materials. I am tol that weavers produce more now than past generations, but they cannot produce enough to export them. So women sell their textiles to local weaving shops or to men from the city who will cell the skirts for a higher profit to tourists at night bazaars or Sunday markets.
When I ask Somsri why she chooses to continue weaving when it makes so little, she replies that she has no choice but to do anything she can do in her fee time to make money. She feels that weaving is harder than work on the farm “because you must sit all day and use more eyesight.” She recalls the first finished piece she ever wove, it sold for 50 baht. She was twelve and very proud.
I could have spent the rest of my days in Thailand doing what I did during my second trip to Mae Chaem. Roaming the mountainside on the back of a motorbike, through the rolling hills and tiny webs of villages, watching weavers and dyers create works of art from materials found in the earth, sitting with tomato pickers as they sorted their crops, sharing a juicy, fresh tomato hot from the sun, talking to Burmese migrant workers in the fields and tasting fresh cucumbers, parsley and dill from the largest herb garden I’ve ever seen. It may be a difficult life, but its certainly a beautiful one.
Rolling hills of rice and corn, fluffy clouds and sunny sky, all viewed on the back of a motorcy!
