Five years later, Ping has aged. She is 28 now. She is shorter than I remember and her face is fuller. The unmistakable laugh lines still crowd the corners of her eyes. Her fingers are stained an inky green from the indigo dye she uses to make clothing. She now has four children, three boys and a baby girl. She pats her waistline and tells me she is pregnant with her fifth child. And then she laughs.
I had returned to Sapa with a handful of photos I had taken of the Hmong girls on my last visit. I was hoping to reconnect with a couple of the girls. Ping was one of them. Her friend recognised her in one of my photos and sent to the nearby village for her, 7km down in the valley. I felt bad that she had walked all the way up hill... just to see me.
I don’t know whether Ping remembered me. I doubt it. Her face was so familiar to me as I had studied her photo often in the intervening years. Her face lit up when she saw the photos. She looked at them wistfully and it occured to me, she might not even own a photograph of herself.
We had planned on a walking tour to the villages below Sapa, but the fog was thick and appeared to have no plans to abate. And I was worried that all we would see was the mud and not much else. Instead we accept Ping’s offer to take us to the village the following day. I could give some more of my photos to the women there. If it was still foggy, she would accompany us along the road instead of negotiating the paddy fields and muddy paths. And I liked the idea that we could give her some money for her family, instead of paying a tour company.