Hanging by a Thread

Squatting women embroider under makeshift shelters, a tribe of Buddy Holly impersonators, huge glasses pinch their noses, each is linked to their work by a needle and umbilical cord of thread. A gaggle forms, a jangling phalanx of China-red headdresses, wares, snippets of English. “Where you from?” “What your name?” “You buy one from me.”
Behind them, a valley is rendered in chiaroscuro, as surreal as the wafts of slow-floating mist. This countryside whose rivers feed Chinese power stations is one zigzagged with pineapple plantations, and terraced with rice paddies; a geometric land felt in the drag of a finger across the motifs the Red Dzao stitch and sell.
The ladies follow as we walk. Their hands find ours when the track oozes around our gumboots. They count family members and coo at our lives’ symmetries; they point to their village somewhere in the distance where babies run naked with burping potbellied piglets.
We admire the barren balconies winding around the valley, which yield but one precious crop a year, nacre nibs to be distilled into hooch. My new companion, Sun May’s eyes crinkle and her mossy teeth are unwavering from a generous smile. “Buffalo,” she points, as it drags itself over the lip of terrace. The ‘f’ catches in an exhalation, echoing the snort of this most valuable of beasts. A ‘bupfalo’ like this tills fields with an agility superior to modern machinery and costs as much as the scooters minority women ride sidesaddle, behind husband’s whose thin cotton shirts billow as they roll downhill.
Past eyebrows as fine as down and bald temples, at her crown a headdress of folded layers sits proudly. A tangle of magenta wool, beads as golden as the rice in autumn, coins and pompoms show her ‘wealth’. Her gentle touch moves from the crook of my arm to the wares wound over her shoulder, the crescents of her fingers are stained indigo. Today, the crop is just a stitched motif; that verdant landscape is not yet on the horizon.