AbstractsAnthropology

The dissertation, based on my two-year research and many subsequent visits, examines experiences of a group of Hmong girls who have left their villages to come to Sa Pa town, Lao Cai province, Northwestern Vietnam, to sell handicrafts and to work as tour guides. Many tourists have traveled thousands of kilometers, crossing mountains and oceans, to get to Sa Pa, a far greater physical distance than the six kilometers traveled by the Hmong girls to get to Sa Pa town from their little village of Lao Chai. For the girls, however, these six kilometers represent a much more significant distance, a bridge both short and never-ending between local and global worlds, the worlds of tradition and modernity. The dissertation traces the journey the Hmong girls have made since they first set foot in Sa Pa town for a purpose other than to participate in Sunday markets with their mothers and grandmothers. Whereas Hmong women of previous generations all married before the age of fifteen, had one baby after another, and lived a life of confinement in the village and of hard work tending lowland and upland fields and making hemp and indigo, the girls are enjoying completely different lives.The Hmong girls' experiences are closely linked to processes of globalization manifest in the development of tourism, which has given rise to conditions that allow the girls to continue to fulfill their traditional roles of good daughter and wife, while connecting to and participating in a wider world full of excitement and surprises. Although the journey has by no means been easy or simple for the girls to make, it has enabled them to contest, negotiate and redefine their identities and subjectivities in relation to both their traditional Hmong villages and a Vietnamese society in which ethnic minorities are often seen as under-developed or romanticized as exotic others. The dissertation offers an exploration of the Hmong girls' journey intended to give readers a clear understanding of what it means to be a Hmong girl of Sa Pa today.