Fanpai diary

Fanpai village does not have the embroidery tradition as I found out one day after I arrived.

Only then I started to understand what I saw on the first day. Most of the Miao costumes that villagers showed me were black, only very few of these costumes had a black decorative pattern in the back or in the front. The workers were still doing the final construction of the two-floor building that will be used for the Miaoxiu course. They were varnishing the wood, and Miao grannies were embroidering in the dim light through the window in the dark room.

Mrs Long is the teacher in this course. She is the only one who can speak standard Chinese in this course. She is not from this village but Taijiang town. She works in a Miaoxiu company in Kaili city. This company built a cooperation with the local township government to improve the villagers’ income. Mrs. Long is responsible for the second phase of this course, and she will stay here for one month to teach embroidery.

We had the opportunity to see the “Miaoxiu training” graduation ceremony. Embroidery frames were carried down from the small training house on the hillside. Miao villagers who attended the course were dressed in Miao clothes, and waiting for the town leaders to get their allowance and to take a group picture. The training program required each adult woman in this village to participate in this course. The course was divided into several phases, and each participator needed to complete a 30-day training course. The participators can get 900 Yuan as allowance. After the training course, any woman who can finish the embroidery well enough will be selected to work for the Kaili Miaoxiu company. They will get paid according to the quality and quantity of their work. Because the training course is relatively short, and the participators are not too young anymore, what the teacher taught in this training course was simple and basic. It was about basic double-sided embroidery.

First they should practice to embroider a point, then try to embroider leaves and flowers that are slightly complicated. The last step is to embroider birds. The needle goes into one side and then comes out on the opposite side. The thread should be hidden under the pattern which would be embroidered later. So, both sides look very complete and perfect without the thread pattern. This is why it is called double-sided embroidery.

It is not very complicated, but one needs to pay attention to the cooperation between eyes and hands, and use the needle expertly. Most of the young persons in this village go out to work, the rest of them stay there to take care of the farming. Because of the geographic environment, most of their farm land is far away from their homes. They start to work in the fields in the early morning and continue until sunset. After a long time, the fingers of those women become very thick. Some of them even cannot hold the small needle. Another problem is that they suffer from presbyopia; even the point pattern they embroidered is not good enough. Those women who are younger cannot focus on embroidery as well due to their farm work.

Mrs Long is around thirty five years old. She looks not differently than these villagers except for her modern clothes. Her hands are a little bit frozen, but it does not affect her embroidery. Her two hands work perfectly together and the work she does is mint and tidy. I always feel that Mrs Long is a little bit blatant when she embroiders in front of us. She started to learn embroidery when she was still a teenager. She has already worked in this field for twenty years. For her, embroidery is as usual as eating and sleeping. She does not have to look at her embroidery even in a dark room. Sometimes I can feel that she switches her eyes from embroidery to somewhere else, but soon her eyes focus again on her work. She cuts the thread and touches the embroidery she finished.

I visited the Fanpai village again in May the following year. I specifically visited Mrs Long’s company in Kaili. After crossing a lot of alleys, we arrived at a small building with four floors. The left side of this building contains the female public bathrooms, and the right side is her company. Maybe because it was a weekend, there was no person there. There were a dozen of embroidery frames in this room; I could even notice that someone left very hurriedly. The room is full of orders of drawings, colorful threads and some already finished embroideries. Mrs Long opened the door to another small room. The air in this room was quite damp, and there were many embroidery works from the Miaoxiu training course. There was an unfinished Qingming Shanghe Tu embroidery which was lying on the coach. Mrs Long tucked her hair back, and said: “I heard someone’s big embroidery was sold with a very good price, what do you think of my embroidery?”

Fanpan village is located in Qingnan autonomous region of Guizhou