128 Part II: Outsiders
and Tapp each record several versions of it that were told to them. Here is the
Chengmengmai version:
There was a family who on the first day cleared a field; next day they went
to check the work. The field had returned to its original state. So they
cleared again. On the third day, the same thing happened. Next day, it all
happened again. Then a messenger named Phya Eng appeared to them. He
spoke to the youngest brother and said the world would be inundated by a
great flood, so it was useless to be clearing the field. He was instructed to
find a giant gourd and make a hole large enough for himself and one
younger sister to get inside; he must do it by the 15th day of the 9th moon
(i.e., the full moon). The rains began and they went in the gourd, closing it
off, and bobbed away. Three days and nights rains flooded the world. At the
end the water level dropped and they landed on ground. The flood had
killed all human life. Procreation was now impossible. Phya Eng reappeared
and told the brother and sister that they must take each other in marriage
and produce offspring. They said they must not do this, as they were brother
and sister, but he promised proof that it was right to do this. One of them
took a needle up one side of the mountain, and the other took a thread up
the other side and threw it down the hill. If it landed threaded, it was evi-
dence that they should marry. So they did it, and it turned out as Phya Eng
predicted; it was threaded. The couple begged for further evidence. They
resisted marrying each other. Phya Eng told them to each take one part of a
rice mill and do the same thing from the mountain top. If it lands with the
right part on top of the other part, this is evidence that their marriage is
proper. And this time again it worked as he said. So they married and after a
year the sister became pregnant. When she gave birth, it was not a baby; it
was a round mound of green flesh. So Phya Eng was again consulted. He
said, no problem; you build a number of small houses. He took the green
ball and cut it into many pieces and put them into each house. Quickly they
turned into human beings. Each piece became a couple, and these couples
were then given the many surnames of the Hmong people.
As a member of a particular clan, your advantages are a sense of relation-
ship and thus rights as kinsmen wherever you meet. “Mere possession of a
common name is enough to ensure a friendly reception among people who
would otherwise be strangers.” If you migrate to a village where members of
your clan are already settled, you can expect help from them in settling in.
They will give you a field to get you started, and probably feed you until you
can survive on your own.
The nature of the clan as a religious association is most apparent at death.
A person cannot be allowed to die in the house of someone of a different clan,
so in an emergency any clansman may be called on to accept someone to die in
his house. It is village clansmen who conduct the many expensive and pro-
tracted ceremonies associated with death and burial. When a man dies, the
head of household selects two men, one from the clan of the deceased and one
from the clan of the deceased’s wife, to organize the mortuary rites. The corpse