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Go-karts and “fire grass”  by Xiao Kang
W e tread carefully as we descend the slope to a village nestled on the side of a mountain. Ahead of us the fields drop down
towards the Yangtze River valley. Actually, here in northern Yunnan province this great waterway goes by a different name: the Jinsha River, or the “River of the Golden Sands.” Not that any golden sands are visible here. All we can see are some white flecks glistening on the thin, grayish band of water below.

But up here in the mountains we are in the homeland of the Baiyi, a small minority group, one of the myriad sub-branches of the official Yi nationality, numbering just over 5,000 people. They live in just five villages encircled by the vast territory of the Bai people. The Chinese word Baiyi is composed of two characters, the first bái (白) means “white” and the second 依 (yī) originally came

Pix
A Baiyi boy rides his go-kart.


White Rice
A Baiyi woman in traditional dress harvests rice.

from the character for clothing (衣). And indeed, in the village that we are now entering, the Baiyi women still wear their traditional white garments just as they have done for centuries.

Sounds of excited children laughing and shouting greet us as we walk into the village. Suddenly a little boy on a makeshift, wooden go-kart shoots out in front of us across the path. He collides with a tree stump and tumbles off breathless and giggling. After sitting there for a moment gazing at us bemusedly, he jumps up and scurries back to his friends. With the topography such as it is, there is certainly no dearth of places suitable for go-karting in this village.

Later the same day, after enjoying a simple evening meal of rice, pork and turnips, washed down by the obligatory rice-wine, we take a walk with our host, the amicable Village Secretary Jiao. I point out to him a tall, earthen tower standing alone in a rice paddy. “That’s for curing the tobacco,” he says. “We don’t grow as much tobacco here as the other Baiyi do, though. We mainly grow rice and maize because we have more water than they do up there.” As he speaks he waves his arm in the direction of the Baiyi villages further up in the mountains.

“What about those hills on the other side of the Yangtze?” I ask. The slopes appear hazy and somehow mysterious in the evening shadows, as if they are hiding some portentous secret. “Have you ever been there?” “We go there to collect fire grass,” Secretary Jiao explains. And so we discover that within this forgotten bend of the Yangtze, the Baiyi continue their age-old art of making cloth from fire grass. “Fire grass” is a wild plant which grows close to the ground. On the reverse side of its dark green leaves is a white film which can be removed and spun into a strong thread. This in turn is woven into a coarse fabric used for making outer garments and headdresses.

As the sun sets over the western peaks, casting elongated silhouettes on the slopes opposite, I wonder how long people have been climbing its trails gathering “fire grass.” I wonder, too, how long this tradition will last as modern, urban culture continues its inexorable march across these increasingly less remote regions.