Although the film crews tried their best to recreate the Mong culture in a profound and detailed way, both the films A Phu's Wife and Pao's Story share some basic mistakes. In addition to the language translation error that leads to misunderstanding of some specific concepts in Mong culture as presented in article 1 of the topic, there is also the error of creating the wrong Mong cultural context that the author analyzes below.
In the film A Phu’s Wife (1961), the first wrong construction of the cultural context is the reproduction of the image of a man and a woman who are too flirtatious and sexy, intimate right in the middle of the Tet festival – a public event with many participants. In the film, the male and female characters appear in pairs, holding hands or sitting affectionately next to each other in the middle of the festival ground – a very public space, which, according to the cultural principles of the Mong people in the context of the work, is rare.
It should be made clear that the birth of the game of pao throwing(request)It is purely for boys and girls to connect with each other through a game. There, the girls will hold their pao, stand in a line or a group, wait for the boys to pass by, when satisfied, the girl will actively throw the pao towards the boy and say something like“Pov tuaj lawm aus, paab txais ov”(The pao is flying by, my friend. Help me catch it.) The boy, with utmost respect, whether he likes it or not, must catch the pao (or if he misses, pick up the pao), throw it back to the girl and reply,“please wait”(return this pao ball). Thus, the pao ball is the beginning of a conversation between men and women. The pao throwing game (instead of something passed around for example) is a demonstration of the distance between men and women. That is the distance far enough to throw a round object sewn from scraps of cloth like the pao ball. Therefore, in the Mong cultural principle, the boys and girls who play at the Tet festival mostly play the pao throwing game, with a certain distance between men and women, as shown in the film Ib Leej Tub by Xab Thoj - a Thai Mong director. Instead of standing together and showing overly intimate gestures like in A Phu's Husband and Wife (1961).
The film Pao's Story (2006) incorrectly recreated a Mong funeral. In the scene of Pao's old mother's funeral at the beginning of the film, the film crew invited a Mong character and sang a song in the Mong language. However, the song used here is one of the songs in the ceremony.Hu plig– the ceremony of calling the soul back to the body to continue the earthly life of the Mong people. The lyrics of this song are in Mong, there are no subtitles in the film, I listened and translated it as follows:
"Ob ploj tsi of rab teb as, yaj tsi of rab ntuj es. Tshuas coj qaib mus o, ruas hu tau tus niam plog nev as yaj tshi 88 rab raj. Coj qaib mus txa tau nus tus ntsuj duab rov qhos qov los. Ob ploj tsi of rab teb, yaj tsi of rab ntuj. Tshuas mus mus txa tau nws ve fo los. Hu tau tus niam pos li 88 rab raj.
The general meaning is:
“Oh, [the soul has] disappeared from the earth and cannot reach the sky. So [I] brought this chicken to call back here 88 parts of this woman's soul. Bring the chicken to raise the part of her soul to return here [to possess]”.
With this meaning, the song is completely out of context for the funeral, when the funeral for the Mong people is to send the soul that has left the physical body of the deceased back to the ancestors, to the sky to prepare to reincarnate into another physical body; but with the songHu pligThis has the opposite meaning, that is, calling the lost soul of a living person to return to that person's physical body (the train is closedmeaning to have received the soul back to the body) to continue his life. That is a reversal of cultural meaning.
We can think that, the way of using lyricsHu pligfor the funeral is an artistic implication of the film crew that the character of Pao's old mother is not dead and will return to life, to the film. But perhaps that is not true when the film crew did not show that they paid enough attention to the content of the lyrics. That is shown by not translating the meaning of the song.Hu plig,Meanwhile, in another scene, when the young mother or Pao's biological mother gives birth to a girl, the Hmong-speaking character criticizes the birth of a girl as nothing special and the film crew translates the dialogue very literally in both Vietnamese and English subtitles. Thus, we can eliminate the possibility of the film crew's artistic hidden meaning in this scene; at the same time, we can definitely confirm that this is a cultural misunderstanding on the part of the film crew.
We also need to add that the film Pao's Story was filmed in the house of a Mong family in Lung Cam village, Sung La commune, Dong Van district, Ha Giang province. Before and after the film crew came to work, this family still lived normally in that house. Meanwhile, the Mong people believe that a funeral is a ritual with profound spiritual meaning, absolutely not to be faked in the house. Perhaps this is also a reason why it was difficult for the film crew to deeply recreate the Mong funeral in the film. However, in cinema, there are many metaphors about funerals without having to directly film the real funeral scene but still evoke the unique features of the Mong funeral.
The film Pao's Story (2006) incorrectly depicted the Mong people's costumes when the character Pao in the film sometimes wore the clothes of the Dong Van Mong people, and sometimes wore the clothes of the Meo Vac Mong people. This was another misunderstanding of the film crew about the Mong people, when they failed to clarify that Pao was a Dong Van Mong person.
If set in 2022, it is true that there may be times when a Mong person wears the clothes of another Mong group, but the film was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Information in 2006 and tells a true story based on a work written in 1997, and the society depicted is the Mong people in Dong Van in the 1980s; the story of the character being dressed in Mong Meo Vac costumes and not having any details showing the reason for wearing this costume, shows that the fashion designer in the film did not understand that the costumes of different Mong groups are different.
