In Yer Xiong’s living room, Ko Vang Xiong is bent over the layers of cloth in her lap, taking tiny, even stitches with a needle a half inch long. She is making a leaf-pattern reverse applique: the outlines and veins of leaves are cut in the top layer of fabric and then the edges turned under to reveal the fabric below. The craft requires stitches that are practically invisible, and each leaf is about five inches long. With the help of her teacher, Yer, Ko Vang hopes to finish two in the next four hours.
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The 200 or so Hmong in Chicago, who live mainly in Uptown, came here from Thai refugee camps, where they had fled from their homeland of Laos during the Vietnam war. The Hmong culture–and the making of pandau–is centuries old.
All Hmong women make pandau; they learn it from their mothers starting as young as three years old. Chao Yang, a member of the Hmong Folk Arts Project, an Uptown group whose goal is to promote and preserve the art of pandau, says that making pandau is a matter of pride and a way of preserving the culture’s traditions, and every Hmong woman knows how to do one or two patterns well. But only master artists, like Yer, know all of pandau’s many patterns and techniques.
Ko Vang will spend six months studying with Yer. Although Ko Vang will know almost every pattern by the end of her apprenticeship, “the time is not enough for learning to become a master,” Chao says. It will take her years to become as adept at handling the fabric as Yer.
