Pre-reading activity
1. What is the folktale? Do Thais have folktales?
2. Have you ever seen Hmong people? Where they usually live?
3. Do you want to marry someone? Do you need your parents' approval?
4. When you love someone so much, and your parrents do not want you to marry him or her, what would you do?
5. What is the difference between "marry" and "mariage"?
A Hmong Folktale
Once upon a time in Laos there lived two people who were very much in love. Their names were Tongni and Saemi. The young sixteen-year-old couple wanted desperately to get married. The only thing standing in the way of the couple's happiness was Tongni's parents' strong disapproval of Saemi. Tongni's parents refused to let their beloved son marry her because she was from a Hmong clan different from their own.
Tongni's love for Saemi was so great that he died of a broken heart. He could not accept the fact that he would never be able to marry his true love, unless his parents changed their minds about her. Saemi sang mournful songs expressing her feelings about how she had no place to go and how she didn't know what to do now that she must live without her only true love. After Tongni was buried, Saemi went to see him. She couldn't see him while he was being buried because in the Hmong custom, it is wrong for the women to see the burial. For seven days Saemi took rice, chicken, and pies to Tongni's house. At his house, Saemi cried and called frantically for him to wake up. She did this six times and still he did not wake up. But the seventh time she called him, Tongni rose from the dead and Saemi was overwhelmed with joy.
The couple went to Tongni's house and begged his parents' approval of their marriage. They reminded his parents that Saemi had proved faithful to Tongni by waking him up. His parents were pleased that their son was finally getting married. At Tongni and Saemi's joyful wedding, they received beautiful new clothes and had a lot of fun. The wedding was very festive with many joyful people. Tongni and Saemi rejoiced their life together and lived happily ever after.
- told by Hmong students at the Visalia Adult School and written by students at Green Acres Middle School in Visalia, CA
After reading
2. Did they love each others?
3. What was the problem of their love?
4. What happened to the boy?
5. Were they get married finally?
Assignment
1. Students underline the rest of past tense verbs. For the first paragraph, it was done as an example.2. Try to translate the highlighted words and phases with dictionary.
3. In group of 3, translate the whole story.
