Chapter 4 Tribal People 131New Year, to receive offerings and messages from the family and to bring them
good fortune when called upon. In other words, the dead person through these
ceremonies is taught how to be a good ancestor.
These are the tasks of family and clan in assisting one’s departure from life
and celebrating the life just finished. One’s clan gives a person an identity and
community larger than the household and different from the village, both
cross-cutting and transcending village society. As we have seen, a village is a
transitory thing, whereas a clan is eternal. But clan membership is not enough
to satisfy all your needs. You must get your wife from another clan.
“Silver Celebrates the Worth of Women”
A Hmong woman spends her life working hard, but this labor brings her
advantages that women in many other societies do not have.
The myth told earlier describes a primordial couple who are brother and sis-
ter but become husband and wife. This myth should not be taken as sanctioning
incest, for the brother and sister in the story know it is wrong for them to marry
and resist the urgings of Phya Eng to do so, but they are forced to it by the neces-
sity to resume life on earth. As if proving them right, the outcome is a monstrous
mound of green flesh. The theme of going up opposite mountains, a male and
female side, found in that myth appears in other myths recorded by Tapp. In one
of these, a brother and sister compete for superiority. The brother says, “You’re
only a woman. Your body is for carrying water and bearing children. You can-
not govern heaven and earth.” Boiling with fury, the sister challenges him to sev-
eral tests, and in one after the other they come out even. One she devises is a test
of strength: “Each of us will have to carry ten loads of copper on the left side and
ten loads of iron on the right side.” The brother said, “All right, you’re the old-
est, you go first.” The sister was able to carry ten loads of copper and ten of iron,
but so could her brother. Then they compete about wisdom: who can learn
about the “veins of the slopes” (i.e., the knowledge of geomancy). For this they
have to go up the left (male) and the right (female) hillsides, but in this case the
brother got there first. There he caught the “veins of the dragon” and began rid-
ing it, causing the slopes to collapse around him and churning up the land like
water, while the sister lamented that she had lost everything (Tapp 1989:155).
This myth seems to be accounting for gender differences, among other
things, and several features stand out. The first is how well the sister fares in
competition with her brother. She suggests the competition in the first place.
She dreams up the tests they must pass. On many of them they come out equal,
most strikingly on the test of strength in carrying loads of copper and iron. She
is the right hand, he the left. Many people in the world reverse that formula on
the grounds that the right hand, the hand that throws the spear or holds the
pen, is surely male. But the Hmong logic is that the “right hand toils and the
left hand rests,” therefore the right hand is female.
So women are valued for their strength and their ability to work hard, to carry
heavy loads, and to make important contributions to the household. The wife is a