Sunday market in Bac Ha, Vietnam

Our overnight sojourn in the hilltop village of Bac Ha was motivated by its renowned Sunday morning market and a desire to avoid the hundreds of day buses arriving from Sapa and Hanoi heaped with tourists. We boarded a two hour bus from Sapa down to Lao Cai, and then for several hours back up the hills to Bac Ha. The market was organized in a winding loop that made its way through the quaint town, labyrinths of small offshoots and different sections dedicated to the tourist trade, a ‘food court’ and an animal market up on a hill (more on that later). Entering the market stalls, my eyes were bombarded by a never-ending variety of fabrics and clothes, all in absurdly bright colors, composing numerous bags, scarves, shirts, pillow cases, small teddy bears, you name it. The vendors, Flower H’Mong and Dzao hill-tribe women, are famed for their dazzling clothing with tightly woven strips of multicolored fabrics, frilly cuffs and ornate edges, and their handicrafts bore the same designs, woven and intricate. The H'Mong originally migrated from China around two hundred years ago and now populate the far northern region of Vietnam.; being animists, they do not follow an established religion and mostly worship spirits, and also have a spoken dialect and script separate from mainstream Vietnamese. 

However, this discombobulation of shapes and colors very quickly began giving way to an unexpected repetitiveness. Previously ‘original’ patterns increasingly began to suspiciously resemble each other, each a slight variation on the thousands of others, coalescing into a mass of only a few discernible structures until I was a hundred percent certain that I had indeed seen that blouse with the woven coins in the previous stall, and all the ones before it as well… What was going on? It was not possible that each individual saleswoman had handcrafted such identical objects with bare hands only, and I began eyeing the wares with a much more apprehensive eye. The personal, the homemade, had become the mass-made factory-produced, and I found that my inclination towards the objects had diminished, having lost the unique touch that had formed a major part of my motivation of buying them in the first place. Needless to say, when we later wandered around the Old Quarter in Hanoi, the same objects were on sale as well.  

Meat vendor in the food market

Slightly frustrated, I entered the culinarily oriented part of the market. This area was completely different, inhabited by all the locals who had been visibly absent beforehand. They were sitting on thin wooden benches barely elevated five inches off the ground, cramped around different ramshackle wooden structures, huddled over bowls of the national favorite pho bo noodle soup, and around them masses of redolent shining carcasses and bones being diced up with no real care for differentiation between meat and organ, subsequently toppled into massive cauldrons of steaming water and topped off with a plethora of herbs. The air was thick with sooty smoke emitting from open wooden fires, and often when I passed in front of a particular food stand the smell of raw rancid meat made me gag and hold my breath for several seconds. Of course we did stop to get lunch here, indicating with two upheld fingers our order of what that particular stand was serving up and were not at all disappointed by the tangy elaborate flavor of the soup we received. Some of the locals sitting on the next bench over generously offered us large mugs of their beer, which we gladly accepted with a smile and contentedly enjoyed for dessert.

Fancy some pig head?

The most interesting and perhaps most disconcerting moment of the day came when making our way up the slippery hill towards the animal market. Up until now I had not seen the living state of animals in China or Vietnam before they made their way decoratively unto my plate, and this was my wakeup call. One man knelt down with two disheveled, diseased-looking chickens, with half of their feathers missing and eyeballs popping manically out of sockets, and further up cages and cages of wicker baskets were filled to the brim with scrambling chickens piled on top of one another. At the very top of the hill, bulky grey cows were chained by rings in their noses to the sodden ground, irresolute eyes cast downwards, whilst congregations of men and women stood around bartering their lives. Seeing their expressions, I could not help but wonder whether the cows were somehow aware of their predicament.

Chicken run

But as always the best was saved till last. All of a sudden, the air was pierced with the shrill sound of hysterical cries, and some animal instinct inside of me was aroused as my skin began to crawl- where could this sound be coming from…?!

I peered over the edge of the hill and there below lay the pig market. Never could I have imagined the inhuman scene before my eyes- dozens of small brown and black pigs were lying on the ground, the majority with their front and back hooves roped together, thrashing and flaying about in vain attempts to free themselves but instead toppling over with legs in the air and all the while frantically emitting the manic screams that had called my attention. Many pigs also lay cramped in cages, lying in pools of their own excrement and vomit, unable to avert their faces. Just as I began leaving, having seen about all I could take in, a yellow plastic bag right next to me began trembling and moving slightly. “There’s a living animal in there…” I said to my friend, and began to discern the snout of a pig in the upper left corner. The creature had been tied up, half-alive, wrapped blindly and shivering in a plastic bag, its absence of sound almost more disturbing than the surrounding squeals.

Bag containing the live pigs
(with cages behind)

This entry may have me sounding like a daisy-chain-making Greenpeace or WWF activist but what I witnessed in the market gave me a reality check about the living conditions of many animals before they are killed to serve as meals. Of course, I understand that in countries where people can scarcely afford to maintain their own standard of living, such treatment of consumable animals is unavoidable... And perhaps even understandable. I love eating meat probably more than many people out there and could never even contemplate vegetarianism, but I also think that there is definitely some truth in the theory that the way in which an animal is treated is reflected in its flesh; I think I will find it difficult to eat pork in Vietnam without remembering the squealing pigs of that day.