Lesson 5: Dan Lai people in the integration trend
I know you are right when considering the cultural aspect, the Dan Lai people only retain their language, a few nursery rhymes and houses (stilt houses like the Thai, Khmu, Tho, Tay, Nung, Ede...). The Dan Lai people in Con Cuong also live in stilt houses like dozens of other ethnic groups on this land and their language is in the same language group as the Muong, Tho... I secretly think that they still retain that much which can be considered a lot for a community like the Dan Lai people.
In the market economy era, ethnic communities are also getting closer together both economically and culturally, which means that many valuable cultural assets of the communities tend to dissolve into the common culture, which we still call the decline. The Dan Lai people and their culture and lifestyle are also in this trend. That makes those interested in ancient culture very worried!
The Dan Lai people's custom of sleeping sitting by the fire is only a memory.
Recently, I met a group of Dan Lai students boarding at Luc Da Secondary School. The students told me: "We are from Thin village." Actually, that is how the locals call Team 3 of Khe Moi village (Luc Da - Con Cuong). The Dan Lai students aged 12 - 14 here only speak Thai. When asked about Dan Lai, not many people know it anymore. One student said: "Even if you go back to my village and ask, not many people speak Dan Lai anymore." I decided to go to Thin village to find out why not many people speak Dan Lai anymore, because according to the students, the vast majority of the residents here are still Dan Lai.
Thin village on a winter morning is quite quiet. The road leading to the Kem Waterfall tourist site this season passes through the village without a single person. The rice fields at the end of the village have turned green and are in the weeding season. An old woman standing hesitantly by the bamboo fence said that people here only grow one rice crop, so they plant rice so early, also to avoid the first floods of the season that may come in the third lunar month.
Captain Vi Van Tien still had his head covered with a blanket. The leader of this small community of 34 households, who had been called “chief” by the locals for 20 years, saw that the family had a visitor and pushed the blanket away to get up. After every night of drinking, he had to sleep until past noon the next day. He said that last night he was drunk and if I hadn’t woken him up, he would have slept until late afternoon.
He said: Ban Thin has existed since 1988, when people from Khe Moi village crossed the mountains to make land and settled here. Previously, the Dan Lai people in Moi village still married Thai people and were also heavily influenced by Thai culture. Currently, in the village, the oldest people like Mr. Tien's mother, who is 76 years old, rarely use Dan Lai anymore.
This is in contrast to the Dan Lai community in Khe Bu and Khe Nong villages (Chau Khe commune)... In these villages, the Dan Lai and Thai people have lived together for many years, but the Dan Lai people, young and old, all communicate daily in their mother tongue. However, in the Dan Lai resettlement area in the two villages of Cua Rao and Tan Son (Mon Son commune), people only retain their language, and even the living space of the stilt house is no longer there, because before they moved from the old village in the upper reaches of the Giang River here, the resettlement project board had built them level four houses.
Mr. Tien said that, in fact, the custom of sleeping sitting is a very distant past of the Dan Lai people and has been embellished by the press. Having lived for nearly 60 years, he has never witnessed anyone sleeping sitting up. Perhaps when it is too cold, people only fall asleep while sitting by the fire to warm themselves, that's all!
The wedding customs of the Dan Lai people in the past were also different from those of other communities. On the wedding day, the bride's family usually did not have to do anything, and there was even a custom of turning off all the firewood so that the groom's family could prepare everything from rice, salt, wine, and meat. When picking up the bride, the groom's family had to wait outside the forest, and could only send one person from the family to receive the bride, and then the whole wedding procession could return together. But now, these customs no longer exist. The wedding of the Dan Lai people is similar to that of the Thai people. The child must be named 3 days after birth. If the family is too poor, the child's parents must cook a pot of tea to worship the ancestors to report on the new family member and choose a name for it. "At this age, I have never seen anyone dip a newborn baby in water like they say on TV?!" - Mr. Vi Van Tien added.
The Dan Lai people in Con Cuong have children going to university. In Thin village alone, for the past 3 years, there have been people who have graduated from schools outside the commune to attend secondary school. Moving to the resettlement area, people in the upper reaches of the Giang River previously had a medical station and received health care. In addition to the development of economic and cultural life, the Dan Lai people in Con Cuong also need to pay attention to preserving their spiritual and cultural values, specifically the Dan Lai language. In the outlying villages near the center, the Dan Lai language is gradually being forgotten?!
You Wei
