Ock Pop Tok!

Different stages of the Hmong New Year skirt.

I knew very little about weaving before coming to Laos. I still don’t know how to weave, but at least after our hours-long visit to Ock Pop Tock’s workshop in Luang Prabang, I know how it’s done, and just how complicated the doing is.

In almost every village in Southeast Asia, there are women weaving traditional textiles in dozens of ways. Some use cube-shaped bamboo looms, others use backbrace looms like the one we saw in the Karen village. In many villages, husbands build their wives custom-sized looms, combs, shuttles, and beaters. Brightly patterned cotton and silk scarves are sold at every other market stall in Southeast Asia, and half claim to be handmade. Whether they actually are, or whether the weaver was paid a living wage, are both gnarly questions.

Ms Yi is one of the young artisans inventing new and wildly complicated patterns for her weaving. Every part of the pattern is reflected in the off-white threads attached to the loom; it takes hours to attach.

Ock Pop Tok, which means “East and West” in Lao, sells only hand-crafted products with natural dyes, made by women paid a living wage, which is four times as much as they might be paid from another shop. The fair-trade company also develops relationships with dozens of individual villages all over Laos, and in conjunction with NGO partners, is one of the reasons why textile production lives on in these remote places.

This means that the prices are more akin to those you’d see in the West, but I’d much rather spend more knowing that I wasn’t supporting sweatshop labor in Cambodia. Most entrancingly, the workshop is open to the public, and there are free tours every day. It was one of the best days we spent in the entire country, and I learned a lot. More learning after the cut!

Who Are All These People?

To bridge our transition from Thailand to Laos, it’s worth discussing our attempts to learn about the distinctions between nationality, ethnicity, and clan in southeast Asia—distinctions which are quite alive in 2014. We’ve written already about our weekend in a Karen village, and the inhabitants of that village, with whom we toiled and ate lunch for six weeks. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Many self-identifying ethnic groups coexist in Thailand and Laos, including the Karen, Akha, Hmong, Lisu, Khmu, Tai Dam, Tai Lü, Mien (also called Yao), and others. These communities exist across political borders and have spent the last few hundred years migrating to escape political oppression. In this blog, often we’ll say, “a friendly Thai man,” or “a teenage Lao girl”—but in reality many of these people might correct us, saying, “I am Akha”, “I am Hmong”, etc.

What we do know about this subject, in addition to what we’ve absorbed from talking to individuals, we’ve learned largely from several nonprofit educational centers.

Back when we were in Chiang Mai, we made a trip to the Tribal Museum, founded in 2002 and built north of the city, in the middle of a lake. A smiling Thai woman greeted us in English and asked us to change from our outdoor shoes into indoor flip-flops provided by the museum. In the stairwell up to the first exhibit, an animatronic mannequin of a young woman in Akha dress welcomed us with limbs that moved on their own, accompanied by flashing background lights and a recorded speech in Akha. Winding our way through a series of rooms, we examined generous displays of the distinctive clothing, musical instruments, tools, houses, baskets, and so on of eight ethnic minorities currently living in northern Thailand. We saw handmade crossbows, knives, and mousetraps (like the freshly made Karen one in Baan Hoi Hoi), some truly impressive weaving and stitching work, a giant calendar comparing typical village work and celebrations for each ethnic group during any given month, and even a replica of the sacred door-sized gateway that guards the threshold of every Akha village.

Finding Nemo in a Karen Village

If some unspeakably cruel person were to hold me hostage and forced me to choose my top five experiences in Thailand thus far, I would think this person an exceedingly dull villain. It's hard to choose. I would talk about reaching the highest shrine in Thailand, the lights over the Ping River, the dogs of Mae Mut greeting me every morning with wagging tails, I would talk about my brush with the divine when I first slurped Chiang Mai noodles in Chiang Mai, and then I would then launch into the story of the weekend that Phil, Molly, and I spent in Baan Hoi Hoi, the Karen village nearest the farm.