This is Ping's baby girl. PIng must have been overjoyed to have a daughter, after having three sons. She tells me that her boys are naughty... especially the youngest one. I asked her if they can speak English too. Her command of English is very good. "No." She replied. "They do not want to learn." I told her she should try and teach them, tourism is very important the region and if her children can speak English they will have an advantage and a greater opportunity to obtain work within the hospitality industry. I guess they will learn the same way she did. "From the tourists."
Ping is now pregnant with her fifth child. I hope for her sake it is a girl. Because the girls work hard and support their mothers, and can earn good money from making handicrafts. She tells me the boys just run off into the fields and play.
Her children attend primary school in the village, where they are taught in "Vietnamese." At home they speak the "Hmong" language. The different minority groups all speak a different dialect to each other and converse with each other in Vietnamese or English.
The nearest high school is in Sapa. where the Hmong children are integrated with Vietnamese children. I asked her if they commute all the way up to Sapa, and she told me that they live in the town. Ping told me how this works, but I didn't really understand her explanation. I can't imagine that the government subsidises accommodation for the minority group children to attend high school. And I would have thought the Hmong families too poor to support their children living away from home. Many of the children do not attend high school as they are more valuable to their families as workers. Some of the older Hmong girls run their own guided tours of the village in competition with the tour companies. The girls are overall smart, hardworking and entrepreneurial.
I asked Ping if she speaks other languages apart from Hmong, Vietnamese and English. She told me that she can speak a little French and Italian, but mostly they converse with the tourists in English. She said that the English speaking tourists, predominantly the Australians, are friendlier than some of the other nationalities and therefore the Hmong girls learn the their language more easily. The Hmong boys do not interact with the tourists very much as they are not involved in selling, consequently there are fewer of them that speak English.
Ping's baby's name is "De" (a surprisingly very short sound, the sound we teach babies when they learn the letter d.)