Yao Paintings Redux

Sometimes it's all about the comments not the entry. This was definitely the case with my March 22nd piece entitled The Mystery of the Painted Scrolls. The entry was an experiment to see if I could harness the collective knowledge of my virtual readership to help identify and interpret two painted scrolls I purchased on the eve of my departure from Hanoi. I was not disappointed. A special thanks to Anonymous and Wulingren for helping me understand the origin and meaning of these paintings. Because the discussion happened entirely in the comments section, and I know many readers skip comments (especially when there are 22!), I thought I would give an update - though I recognize this stuff is probably too esoteric for most of my blog readers out there.

As it turns out I should not have been so dismissive of the vendor who told me the scrolls were from the Dao (aka. Yao) people in the Northern highlands of Vietnam. The Yao migrated into Southeast Asia (where they are scattered across the highlands of Yunnan, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand) after being squeezed off their land near Shanghai in the 12th Century. (I've included a photo I took of a Red Dao woman in the countryside near Than Uyen, Lai Chau Province - see my entry Heaven's Gate.) They took with them a form of Taoism which became more distinct over the years. One of the central features of Yao Taoism are sets of sacred painted scrolls displaying the deities in the Yao pantheon. These scrolls are not merely depictions of these gods - in fact, the paintings are considered to be the abode of the gods who are present within them. The paintings are used for ceremonial purposes (such as ordination). When the paintings are old and worn out, the deities are invited to leave the scrolls in a "closing of the eyes" ceremony, after which they can be sold. It seems I bought some cast-offs.

Painting #1 (click to see it) depicts the Four Messengers (or Liaison Officers) of the Governors of the four supernatural realms. The messenger for the Governor of the Sky rides the white crane at the top. The messenger for the Governor of This World comes next on the white horse. Below him is the messenger for the Governor of the Underworld on a tiger (which were thought to dig up corpses and graves). Finally we have the messenger of the Governor of the Waters at the bottom riding a dragon.

It seems these messengers have a role not unlike Hermes, shuttling back and forth between the high priests, one of whom you can see at the bottom left, and the gods. At the top left corner is the hand of a supreme deity who is receiving the messages. I still don't know who this is. The Jade Emporer?

There is a painting reproduced in J. Pourret's book "The Yao" (p. 241) with exactly the same figures in exactly the same configuration.

Wulingren was able to interpret some of the text at the margins (from the comments):

The painting seems to be a representation of what takes place on a heavenly level during an ordination ritual, and is probably hung during the ritual. In the bottom you see the teacher, in this case, surnamed Li, and the student, with tablet.... On the right side, it says, "receive the disciples of the sanyuan (translated as 3 primals, 3 origins, 3 principles--the upper primal/heaven, the middle primal/earth, and the lower primal/water).

It is still unclear what the relationship is between the 3 primals and the messengers of the four supernatural realms depicted.

Painting #2 (click to see it): I know much less about this one except that Anonymous tells me the Chinese characters at the top read "Dai Lua" which is the Taoist heaven. But who is this guy in the picture? I could find no clues in the books I've consulted on Yao paintings. Possibly he is one of the guardians of the temple? Looks like he's keeping someone at bay.

As it happens I picked up these two small folksy portraits at the same store in Hanoi. I thought very little about them and in fact mostly forgot them until i came across a section in Pourret's book on Mun Yao paper masks. I had a flash of recognition. These masks are worn by Mun Yao priests "on his forehead whenever he needs to impersonate a particular deity for the ritual at hand". Just a hunch.

By the way, the store where I bought this stuff had piles of these Yao paintings which were going for reasonable prices (though I had a Vietnamese friend with me to help me drive a hard bargain). I picked my scrolls because of their excellent condition and bright colours, but I remember seeing many very old looking ones in more muted mulberry colours (probably more historic). There has got to be some important stuff there, though many are falling apart. So, if you happen to be in Hanoi, the store is just south of the little corner of Ngo To Tich and Hang Quat in the Old Quarter (maybe 1 or 2 doors down on the east side of the street). The paintings are upstairs. While you're at it, get a trai cay dam further down the street!

Returning: One Month Later

Something lay there that eluded not just me, but many who have experienced another way of life. We write about some facets of it, some surfaces, that we make our business. But the gold we find is transformed by the reverse alchemy of our journey, for there to here, into lead....What is this reality that gets left behind?

-Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden

Last week I saw a woman in a conical hat riding down Parliament St. Then I looked again and saw only a man on his bike wearing a large beige hood that sat like a triangle on his shoulders.

The woman seemed as natural as the man, except that she inhabits another world. I only saw her though because I was still between worlds. It's as though my body returned to Toronto, but my mind lagged behind, shifting between alternate realities, not sure where it was or wanted to be.

It's been a very long month since I returned. I expected reverse culture shock, but that was the easy part. Grief has been the greater challenge.

My first shock was the silence. I live in an urban area by North American standards, and yet the silence in the house was deafening. I felt like my ears were stuffed with cotton: no honking motobikes, no clanking dishes, no water pump motor, no barking dogs or calls from the laneway vendors. Only silence. Even outside I felt a kind of sensory deprivation. Where were are the people? A city of millions behind closed doors, an entire metropolis inside, hidden away in houses, cars and office buildings. No theatre of the street, no sea of motobikes, no adrenalin.

Of course I knew I had arrived in the midst of our winter slumber. We are only now tentatively emerging into spring but the city still waits.

The cold was one reason I hid at home for the first few days. The other reason was that I was not ready to be part of things again. Reengagement was an admission that it was all over, and I was not ready for that. That would come later when I felt like I was returning, and mentally I felt I was still in the process of leaving. I still feel that grief. My mind wanders back to the vivid world I left behind and then suddenly I reawaken to my surroundings and feel a yawning loss.

Grief is in many ways a renegotiation of identity, and my challenge has been to incorporate HanoiMark with a different self that inhabits this world. I left something behind in order to explore a new identity abroad and it is as if these two selves now meet as strangers. At first I felt distant and disconnected in my old contexts. For at least two weeks I felt tone deaf in conversations with friends. I felt I was observing our conversations but strangely never fully a part of them.

Sometimes after a vacation you experience that strange sensation when you walk into your house and somehow everything feels different. The space of your home feels altered, as if someone changed the height of the ceiling or the shade of the walls. This return had a different quality. Places seemed completely unchanged - it was the other stuff: the sounds, the conversations, the social relations, the pace of life, that all seemed strange and foreign. And maybe the fact that the places seemed all too familiar, highlighted the odd temporal character of the experience of returning. I felt I was returning, not just to a place, but to a time half a year earlier. Time itself seemed compressed and foreshortened. Because everywhere I returned felt like I had only left moments before, the six months, in their intensity and richness, seemed to inhabit some other dimension, some unrelated time.

This disconnect between worlds played out on so many levels. Most people had a very difficult time relating to my experience or knowing what to ask or say. I think it helped that many friends had been following this blog. Still I tired of answering the question "So how was it?" because the question only seemed to invite a quick summary. And then there was this one: "What was the one highlight of your time in Vietnam?" I cannot distill the experience like that. All I can say is something true but generic like "my friends" - which sounds flat to the listener who was probably hoping for something more exotic or lyrical.

I'm not sure I'd be any better at engaging someone who had returned from a place I knew nothing about. And the problem is not all theirs either. I became aware that people would tire very quickly of me beginning every sentence with "In Hanoi..." so I would censor myself. Too often the result has been a huge gulf in communication. People don't know what to ask, but then I also don't know how to get started. What remains is a sense that I experienced a very vivid dream, a world hermetically sealed off from this one both in time and quality, a private world resistant to all attempts at description.

I try to find ways to bridge these worlds. Writing helps. Also I've been able to keep in touch with so many of my Hanoi friends by chat and internet phone. I am still up on all the gossip. How long this will last I don't know. And I've tried to continue to feed my addiction to Vietnamese food. Toronto has no shortage of Viet restaurants, but then the offerings here have lost their magic. What impressed me so much before pales now in taste and variety. I haven't given up yet, but I stare at the menus here and recognize little. This is partly because most of the restaurants here are Saigonese style. Even when I have found the odd place that serves Northern delicacies I find that the dishes have inherited only the names: bun rieu, cha ca, bun cha - but rarely their essence. I've been assured by others who have returned from abroad that eventually your tastebuds forget. Is this a blessing or a curse?

In January my friends Deep and Daniel visited me in Hanoi for a weekend. They are Toronto friends but are now living in Bangkok for several years. Viet and I took them all around town on the backs of our motos. One evening we took them across the Red River to a fish restaurant in Gia Lam where we joined 6 or 7 of my Group friends and sat on grass mats eating grilled fish and hotpot. Later I told them how pleased I was that some friends had come to witness this world. It meant that I would have someone to talk to about this experience, to validate the existence of all of this, and to make it seem less like a private dream. I told Deep how I was already anticipating the challenges of returning. I worried that I'd have to box up this part of myself and put it on a shelf. "Welcome to the immigrant experience", Deep said.

Obviously my return after six months cannot approximate the profound dislocation that immigrants must feel, but at least it gives me some small insight into the challenges that can result from such cultural shifts. It also reminds me of the richness of place that sometimes seems to resists language. I can see how this surfeit of experience could defeat and silence - or inspire acts of imaginative expression.

Deep agreed that probably part of this experience would sit sealed in a box. But he also assured me that it is never really forgotten. "There will be times you'll need it, and you will take it again off the shelf."