Do You Like My Hat?

After watching the Hani minority performance at the terraced fields, Katie and I thought it would be fun to see if we could try on the colorful minority hats and take some photos. We started chatting with a woman about it and she happily said she'd bring us two of her hats for us to try on. She and some other minority women helped us figure out how to get the "hats" on (they were more like head scarves with some kind of braided black twine that they tied around our heads first). The one thing we didn't foresee was what a spectacle we would become. There were dozens of photographers at the performance with cameras and lenses that could rival the Hubble Telescope. I was slightly appalled at the gall of the photographers in the first place--I think there's a fine line between observing and appreciating a minority culture and exploiting it and treating the people like exotic animals in a zoo. I've never quite become comfortable with having cameras stuck in my face (which happens pretty frequently in China) and being photographed just because I'm foreign and look different than the people around me always makes me uncomfortable. Gives me a little more sympathy for the paparazzi-plagued celebrities. Anyways, it was fun to get to try on the hats and try to chat with the women and kids.

(Oh, the title of my post is a reference to the kid's book "Go, Dog. Go!" If you didn't read "Go, Dog. Go!" as a kid then you really missed out.)

Minority people + White Foreigners + Minority clothing + Terraced Fields = I can stick my camera in their faces and be as pushy as I want to get my photo. Who knows, maybe Katie and I will end up on some billboard or in some coffee table book about the terraced fields . . . but I hope not.