Hanging By a String in the Wind
My mother often sits alone, isolated from the rest of the world with her paj ntaub cloth, needle, and thread in hand as her sad love songs play in the background. Doing paj ntuab helps her relax from all the stress and responsibilities that she has to do such as take my siblings to school, cooking lunch for them, and making sure that the house is tidy so nobody trips and falls.
Hmong women often pride themselves in paj ntuab. Elders say that a Hmong woman skillful in paj ntaub will be able to sew her family many clothes to wear and is considered “marriageable.” It takes a lot of patience to master this intricate needlework that is passed down from generation to generation. But paj ntaub, I would say, is one of the few ways that allow Hmong women to be heard.
My mother is a small, petite woman with her hair clipped in a half bun because she does not have a lot of hair to make it noticeable. She is very pale, and her fingers are short and stubby. She loves to do paj ntaub, but because she is getting old she always needs her glasses to help her see the small holes of where to place her needle and thread on the cloth.
She oftentimes pauses and looks at it, holding the paj ntaub at a distance to help her see better. She works slowly but carefully to make sure that each stitch is perfect and that the back side is just as pretty as the front side. I will never know how she feels or what she thinks about as she sews paj ntaub.
My mom started to teach me how to do paj ntuab when I was 7 years old. Of course, everything takes practice and with that I was given a 4 by 8 inch piece of cloth and a big, long needle with thread to practice. I was horrible, but I was willing to learn. All my stiches started out as the lines on a dotted street where cars could stay in the lane or switch to other lines.
Not long after, I started to make these dotted lines intersect and cross over each other like a huge traffic mess, or should I say a graph with multiple lines as if to measure all my family member’s heartbeats.
There is a saying that goes, “What you mean, you don’t say. What you say, you don’t mean.” Sometimes I call to ask my mom for advice, and she lectures me for at least half an hour about how she does not want to help me. I often feel neglected, but at the end of the day, she will call me back to tell me how she really feels and starts to give me advice then.
As a Hmong daughter, you are also supposed to not speak out against your parents or elders. Even if it is the same advice or story that they are telling you all over again, you still have to keep an open ear as a sign of respect. It was this one day that I really wanted to hear her stories fully and whole-heartedly.
Afterwards, I was given a smaller needle, and a longer piece of cloth and thread. I started to do stitches that looked like an X. I immediately fell in love with it because the X was something I took pride in, the initial of my last name. The dotted lines were now solid Xs piled on top of each other like a tally chart in math class to keep track of how many kids liked which kind of candy.
As I approached the end of my cloth, I started to make the stitches go right as if turning a corner in the street. I did that to all four corners of the cloth until I came back to where I started. It looked like the border of a photo frame to me. Unfortunately, you’re not supposed to make a border first; you're supposed to sew your designs inside before the border around it.
A paj ntaub piece has two sides, the outside and the inside. The outside is where people can admire the intricate details of each stitch and pictographs.
The inside, or the backside, is where all the stitches are, that make the front pictographs as pretty as they are.