hello? hello?

the further north we pushed this week, the fewer falang , and the more hill tribes people we saw. dressed in heavy embroidered clothes, their headdresses shaking with the weight of the silver adornments. they didn’t smile as we passed them, only peering at us with wide, flat faces and dark eyes. my first instinct was to use the word vacant to describe their stare, but it is something very different. their eyes speak of things taken from them, stripped bare in the presence of another culture and time, one with no room for their presence.

at the markets, the women and their children peddle jewelry, opium pipes, carved fetishes and clothing. the children swarm like insects around the knees of anyone approaching the stands, shouting Hello? Hello? Ten baht! Twenty Baht! Hello? Hello? Eerily parroting the English language, they thrust handfuls of cheap beaded bracelets upward, climbing on top of each other for the business. Singly, a young girl with straight black hair chopped carelessly below her ears casually strolled by me, lilting Hello? Hello? Ten baht? Five baht? One baht? Hello! Hello! And she would walk away, singing the hollow word to herself over and over again.



The elderly tribeswomen, if not stationed at their stalls, would follow us around, hanging in the background, peering through dark eyes and leather skin, grinning widely with black remains of teeth. Plied with cigarettes, she would wander away, returning later to haunt our movements.

That there are so many people who depend on falang money for their survival is depressing to me. The series of events that have forced these people from the hills and onto the streets of Maesalong, Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, and countless other bans across Southeast Asia, has left those who cannot adapt behind to beg for cigarettes and hawk tarnished jewelry and stolen clothing. One woman, dressed in an old English-language t-shirt and basketball shorts, her long hair pulled casually from her strong face, was teaching her baby, not 2 or 3 years old, to walk up to a pair of German tourists and shout Hello? Hello?, fistfuls of bracelets held high. Everyone laughed, and I wanted to leave, my guilt at being a white American flaring up while realizing there was nothing I could do to restore any pride these people may have once had in their culture.