Folk Arts - The Hmong New Year: The Family and the Festival

By Blia Xiong

 

The biggest festival we celebrate is New Year, Xyoo Tshiab. In Laos, the year started at the full moon of November. November in the Laotian calendar was like December in this country. People would watch for the moon, and at the full moon they would start the New Year. The men and women would gather food and meat for the festival. It was after harvest time, so they brought rice and corn too.

 

New Year went on for one whole month. Everybody got together to talk, to eat and tell stories at night. Boys and girls would sing songs to each other. Women talked about clothes for their children for New Year. Men talked about musicians, about playing queej and raj and ncas.

 

The night of the full moon was the night before New Year's Day. Men shot their guns into the sky to send out the old year and catch the New Year- to welcome the New Year. Parents taught their daughters that on New Year's Day the first girl to get water would have good luck for the whole month year. So Hmong girls always planned to get up very early to be the first to bring water from the stream.

 

Traditionally, the head of the village would cut trees to build a doorway in the middle of the village - the door to the new year. He invited everybody in the village to walk through the door (lwm qaib), and the old men would pass a live chicken over the top of everybody's head, to wish them good luck for the future. All the men, women, and children of the village were supposed to walk through the door. Early in the morning the head of the village would call everyone to pass through the door, to send the old year away and catch the new year. The the villagers would come running - mothers with their children and little girls would their baby brothers - to walk through the doorway.

 

We had delicious food at New Year time. One important food was the sticky-rice cakes wrapped with banana leaf. The women cooked the sticky rice, and the men pounded it into a paste in a wooden bowl with a wooden pestle. They wrapped the sticky-rice cakes in the banana leaves and left them by the fire to cook and for the rice to turn yellow from the leaves. Everybody helped each other, everybody doing something for another family.

 

They took sugar cane - this was before the New Year, to get ready - they cut the sugar cane and the men would crush the canes in between two logs, squeezing them to get the juice out and letting the juice fall in a wooden pan. They even jumped up and down on the logs. Then they boiled the juice until it turned into a sticky brownish sauce, and then put it in a can made out of a joint of bamboo, where it is stored. When the New Year came, they baked the rice cakes until the leaves were very brown, then they dipped the cakes in the sugar-syrup before eating.

 

In the morning of the new year, everybody ate and talked, ate and talked. The men went from family to family, and the women cooked and cooked, and the men sat and ate and talked. Then they would go to another family, and others would come visit your family, and this went on and on the first three days of the New Year from early morning until 10 pm.

 

When the sun was getting warm the daughters got dressed in their new clothes, all fancy with jewelry and purses hung with silver coins, and they would go to an open space in the village to play toss ball with the boys in a game called pov pob, to exchange bits of jewelry or their pretty purses if they should drop the ball, and to sing songs. And the mothers got dressed so nicely, and put the babies on their backs, and walked to the place where the young people were playing ball, to watch and listen to the songs. And the men would either go to the buffalo-bull fights (where bulls were trained to fight each other) or to play toss ball with the single girls, looking for another wife.

 

This went on for days and days. You could hear orphan song (songs of unhappiness overcome by cleverness). Some people were very good at comic songs. People sat around listening and laughing. And love songs, young people seriously talking to each other through the songs. An example of a comic love song I heard since being in American went like this, "We can get married and (for the bride money) I'll get my credit card and put you on my charge."

 

When the doorwy tree got completely dry, the old men pulled it out of the ground where it was standing in the middle of the village, and threw it away. Then New Year was over. This usually lasted for almost a month. It's a wonderful holiday. Nobody cares about working on their farm, and everybody has enough to eat. Usually this is the time when people marry. Nobody wants to get married any other time of the year.

 

The New Year here in the US is very different from what we had in Laos, because in Laos people could celebrate however they wanted to, and everybody had the freedom to do it. Here you can't do New Year the same way. Especially at the Seattle Center, you can't just take food, for instance, because you need a food-handler's permit. And food is one of the most important things for New Year, so it's not as much fun from that point of view. The feasts that the villages were able to give their visitors during New Year time, that doesn't happen anymore. It's too hard because you have to buy everything. People would be going broke if they tried to do it. Some people make the yearly sacrifices for the traditional religion, and it must be very expensive to do it. Back home you had your own rice, your own vegetables, and meat, everyone could go around to everybody's house, but here besides having no money, you have no space, so we only share between members of the same families.

 

We still provide a program with queej (bamboo-reed mouth organ) kwv txhiaj (courting songs, and ncas (Jew's harp), so people can see how they used to be. For me, the reason I still help with the New Yea is the idea of having people come together with their costumes, see each other once a year, enjoy and talk, that's what I like the most.

 

Costumes have changed a lot, gotten much fancier. Now they have a lot of beautiful beads and very bright decorations. It's very simple to find beads here in this country, so people use them a lot. And the velvet and satin fabric is very nice and bright and simple to find. The style of the clothes hasn't changed much, though - they are just brighter and more decorative. But the hats have completely changed. Sometimes now they wear a Chinese-style hat, or whatever is the fanciest thing they can do. And the bird hat (ko mom noog, a take-off on the idea of a rooster-comb), that was originally for little children, but now all the teenage girls like to wear those hats. So mothers will make New Year clothes for their daughters, but actually many of the girls don't want to wear them. My daughters won't wear them unless I make them. They have two or three sets of of Hmong cloth that just stay in the suitcase.

 

Young people don't sing anymore, when they toss the ball, they just laugh and talk, but they don't sing or do any of those important things. Back home when you play toss ball, everybody is singing, and you can go from couple to couple and listen to their songs. Nobody plays ncas any more. Especially for single people it is a courtship instrument, but young people don't have that knowledge any more.

 

Kwv txhiaj, the courting songs, are not supposed to be sung my married people, particularly not by married women. If you tell young people to do it like that, they say it's boring, and they don't want to do it. All they really think about is attending New Year to play toss ball in the daytime with laughing and talking, and in the evening they come to hear a western band.

 

So New Year is very different, because all those things are missing. The longer we are separated from Laos, the more different it will be.

 

^ - next article: Catch the Good Luck: Songs for Hmong New Year by Joan Rabinowitz