THE SISTER MEAL FESTIVAL
Taijiang and Shidong, China

I

We were all dancing around to the left in an enormous circle, the Miao women shuffling along under a mountain of silver, their tall buffalo horns swaying. The Miao men were dressed in black and were dancing faster, leading the circle, swinging their ten foot pan pipes in unison.
In the center of the group there was trouble- two five gallon plastic containers full of whiskey- and around them a group of old Miao women, laughing riotously.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shadow, a wraith really, rushing towards me. I shrank, but without much difficulty the toothless crone grabbed me by the back of the neck and poured a glass of molten firewater down my gagging gullet. I choked, the raw alcohol dribbling down my chin. There was a strange buzzing in my head and I knew without a doubt that I would have to flee before it was too late.

But where was my wife? I had last seen her in the company of two black clad women, dancing and drinking.

"Well," I thought, "She's a big girl, she will have to take care of herself. Its every man for himself!" And putting my head down, I eased myself out of the circle

The origins of the Sister Meal Festival are still shrouded in mystery. Traditionally, the Miao of the Taijiang District would gather on the 15th day of the third lunar month for a marriage festival. Before the festival would begin the young girls of marriageable age would ascend into the rice terraces and harvest several wicker baskets of sticky rice. It was then steamed and dyed the colors of the rainbow. When a suitor would present himself at the dance she would offer him a packet of rice with either a negative answer-a pair of chopsticks-or a positive answer-a piece of satin-secreted inside.

Today, of course, none of this charming ritual persists. Few young men remain in the village; most have fled for the comparatively easy life of the city. The mock weddings and sticky rice presention, for example, are now held strickly for the tourists. But still, the Miao love a good party. The Sister Meal Festival is their opportunity to dress up in family heirlooms and show off their wealth. It is time to sing and dance, to express their pride in being a small minority people in southern China. And most importantly, it is a time to drink!

We had come to Taijiang directly from Kunming at perhaps the worst of times. It was China's "golden week", a May Day holiday when the entire country has the week off. Literally hundreds of millions of people were on the road, the sort of organized chaos that China seems to revel in.
Every hotel was booked out, every bus and train packed. We had stepped off the bus in Taijaing, discovered the hotels to be full, and without even removing our backpacks began dancing. It was insane.

Sitting under the giant, grim statue of general Zangb Xongt Mii in the Taijiang square I still couldn't catch sight of Yasha. There were dancing wheels everywhere, a riot of sound and color, with Miao and spectators revolving around the drummers. I shot a few photographs of the dancers, details of silver work while they whirled past, yet it was difficult not to get alcohol splashed on my camera.

Finally I returned to the dance circle I had fled some time earlier. Inside the circle of shuffling Miao women I could see a hard cluster of spectators, and around them a predatory group of photographers. I pushed my way through the dancers, and then the photographers... to find Yasha and the old women, arm in arm, dead drunk. Their cloths were soaked from spilled whiskey and they raised their heads in a fearsome laughing croak. At their feet were the two jugs of firewater; one empty and the other half full. It didn't look good.

"Yasha," I cried, "What the hell are you doing?" I pulled here out of the dance circle. It was plain we had to leave, to go somewhere, but she could hardly walk. We staggered down the main street of Taijiang,our backpacks still on our backs, the laughing stock of the locals. I would have felt humiliated except that I have been known to pull similar bone headed stunts myself. So I kept my mouth shut and looked for a hotel. Unfortunately, we could neither read, write nor speak Chinese.

Before long Yasha collapsed on the steps of a nondescript building and refused to rise. It seemed like our journey was over. I didn't know what to do. "Hotel, Hotel", I shouted at the mob of astounded men standing at the top of the steps. In my phrase book they showed me the word for 'hospital.' "No!" I said, "Sleep, she just needs to sleep!" And I made the universal gesture for sleeping, my head on my hands. They smiled. Yes, miraculously, they had a room, probably the last one in town. We graped her like a sack of rice and dragged her upstairs.

Perhaps now it is best to draw the curtain on this pathetic scene to best protect the reputation
of those involved. Suffice to say, what goes up most come down; or in this case, what goes down must come up. My father used to say that "a word to the wise is sufficient." Let's hope so. Rice whiskey is a powerful drug and shouldn't be drunk without extreme caution. But most of all watch out for those old ladies!

II

The ramshackle bus slowly climbed along a pock marked dirt road, crested a ridge, and descended again. We were on our way to Shidong, a small village several hours north of Taijiang, for the third day of the Sister Meal Festival. I rubbed at the condensation on the bus window but it didn't really improve the view. Like an old Chinese painting I could see pine trees rising into a misty nothingness. Along the road red azaleas and wild honeysuckle bordered rice terraces; it was beautiful. Jet Li was starring in 'Fong Sai Luk II' on the video, and when it turned out there wasn't a second CD we got to watch the first half over and over again. Yet it made me feel as if we had gone back in time to a simpler China, a place where the tiny hamlets of wooden post and beam Miao houses were devoid of the ubiquitous satellite dish.

Two thousand years ago the predecessors of today's Miao had begun a migration from the upper Mekong region in Tibet. Driven by population pressures and warfare they descended the Mekong River, displacing some groups, avoiding others. The Miao always traveled the ridge tops; perhaps it was easier walking, perhaps it was easier to find game, or perhaps it was simply to avoid already established groups in the valleys.

Today the Miao extend across all of Southeast Asia. During the first Indochine war the Vietnamese called them Montegards. In Laos and northern Thailand they are called the Hmong.

After the fall of Laos and Vietnam in 1975 tens of thousands of Hmong fled their homeland... they had sided with the losers. In China however they are still a viable minority group with a culture that is still relatively intact.

Our bus again crawled up to a ridge top; the mist cleared, and mountains and rivers seemed to stretch forever around us. Then again we descended towards a village only to be stopped by a line of cars blocking the road. The drivers were gone, towards the village ahead. It was Shidong, and the day's festival had begun.

Unfortunately it really wasn't what we had been expecting. We navigated our way through all the abandoned cars to find a mock rice presentation in progress. Chinese photographers were everywhere; I had never seen so many photographers in one place. All of them had either a brand new Nikon or Canon SLR, all of them had photographer's vests and hats that said NIKON or CANON, and all of them had a brand new tripod to rest their expensive equipment on. It was as if in the privacy of their own home in Beijing they had consulted some sort of guide on 'how to be a photographer', bought all this expensive stuff, and then gone on vacation.

Milling around the rice presentation were a dozen Miao, dressed in more silver chains and necklaces than the Mayor of London on the Queen's birthday. Their elaborate headdresses- tall silver buffalo horns, silver birds and flowers, towered above the crowd. It was merely a photo-op, but of the most obnoxious sort. The Chinese photographers would rudely demand them to stand here, or stand there, and when the girls were slow in compiling they would grab them by the arm to move them to a new spot. I was shocked and a bit uneasy. Yet the Miao women seemed to take it all in stride. No money was exchanged, this was all gratis, a way for the Miao to show their visitors a good time. It was simultaneously impressive and saddening.

We descended to the river where the dancing was to be held. It was like any small town Chinese fair, with booths selling sour bean curd and rice noodles, watermelon slices and ears of cooked corn. Boys shot at balloons on a backboard with an imitation AK-47 pellet gun. Young lovers held hands. Closer to the river several men paraded around their champion waterbuffalos- the winners of a bull fight held previously. The buffalos posed for photographs also, gazing mournfully up at the sky as waterbuffalos do, with a big pink ribbon pasted on their forehead and a pair of live ducks hanging from their horns.

The symbolism, needless to say, was obscure.

Finally, at three, the dancing began.. First one drummer started drumming and a circle formed.

Then another drummer appeared, and another and another. In the end there were more circles than I could count. But they couldn't really dance. There were so many spectators surrounding around them, so many photographers, that there wasn't even enough room to move. Even then photographers would stop a dancer and pull her out of line so that they could get a shot. It was astounding and inexplicable. Surely it seemed like the Miao's patience was being tried. Yet without speaking Chinese we couldn't ascertain the real state of affairs. And perhaps we never will.

Eventually we tired of the spectacle. We climbed back up to the road and found our bus, trapped in a sea of cars. So that is were we sat for the next several hours as the police tried to unsnarl the mess and to send the photographers home.