The Sa-ni Way
I wrote about Leena our tour guide in the Stone Forest at Kunming below. Here’s a picture of her with my sister and me.
I asked her about her hat and she told me of it’s importance to her culture, the Sa-ni people. The hat is designed and embroidered by the wearer. By the design of the hat, someone can tell if that girl is married or single. The patterns are also meant to showcase the talent and intelligence of the wearer as Leena put it. Now if a man liked the girl and wanted to marry her, he would touch the woman’s hat as a sign to her. He would then follow her home to her village where he would work for her family in their farm for 3 years. He would work all day, every day until those 3 years are done. Then he could marry her.
3 years of hard manual labor. And I’m not talking about working at your dream job, you’re working someone else farm. That’d be like working in her father’s laundromat or restraunt for 3 years everyday and all you get is room and board. No vacation or holidays and it’s not paid. That’s the dedication to marry the girl. This story reminded me of Jacob from the Bible. He worked 14 years to marry Rachael. That’s how much he loved her.
I think in today’s society, there’s very little sacrifice for a man to marry a woman. When it costs you something dearly, that forces you to measure how much it’s worth. I bet if someone had to give up 3 years of their life to hard labor to marry their woman, there would be a lot less marriages, but also a lot less divorces. People tend to cherish things that they worked hard to get. This makes me wonder, how hard am I willing to work to marry my wife. How much ‘worth’ will she be? Would I give up 3 years, 5 years, 10 years to marry her? I dunno. We’ll see how long I’m in Illinois, haha.