A common thread starts to fray in Quilt Country

BAN PA DEANG, Thailand — Narathi Palua is sewing in the tropical sunshine. His long fingers deftly pull a silver needle through the heavy fabric. He is 13.

Palua could be riding his bike or collecting crabs in the cool waters of the Yom River. Instead, he is making an American quilt likely destined for Lancaster County in Pennsylvania.

In Palua's village of Ban Pa Deang, quilts spill from the open doorways of homes, women drive by on motor scooters clutching rolled-up quilts wrapped in clear plastic, and porches have been converted to outdoor sewing rooms where scraps of fabric litter tiled floors like a calico snowstorm.

Quilting brings prosperity, so everyone sews: gap-toothed grandmothers, smooth-faced boys, young mothers.

In the 1,200-year-old village, quilting is the economic engine. Teak homes have computers with Internet service, girls go to private school and the Buddhist temple glitters in a coat of red and green jewels, the most conspicuous symbol of the village's wealth.

Palua will earn 40 baht, the equivalent of $1, for stitching the binding along the edges of an early American-style Rose of Sharon quilt that will sell for more than $600 in the United States. He has only been sewing for a month. He does it to help his mother.

Palua and his fellow villagers do not know they are participants in the transformation of a quintessentially American industry. But they do know the man who brings the work to their village each month. He is not Thai, like them, but Hmong, a member of a tribe from the hills of Laos that fought on the side of the Americans during the Vietnam War.

The Hmong man, Tshaj Sawm Huj, and his displaced countrymen in the United States are the key to a metamorphosis of the quilt trade that began more than 20 years ago. In the past five years, the Hmong have become the link between Thai villagers and Westerners with money to spend on a piece of an imagined past.

The Hmong connection

The Hmong's pivotal role in the business of handmade quilts began when a small group, about 30 families, arrived during the late 1970s in the farmlands of Pennsylvania. They had endured the misery of desolate refugee camps in Thailand after a harrowing flight from the communist soldiers who overran their native land in the bloody aftermath of the Southeast Asian war.

Many Hmong came to the United States after the war, and this group was rescued by the Mennonites of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Mennonites and Amish, the famous Plain People of Pennsylvania, are the monarchs of American quilt making.

These people of Northern European origin had much in common with the Hmong. Both cultures were agrarian, insular, deeply religious and bound by tradition. The new arrivals had one other thing in common with their hosts: the ability to ply a needle with grace, a skill the Amish and Mennonites admired and valued.

The connection between these peoples eventually would push the cottage industry of quilt making into the global marketplace.

Eight million tourists from around the world visit Pennsylvania Dutch country each year, drawn by the dream of another age.

Amid verdant hills, the clip-clop of horse-drawn buggies and laundry fluttering on clotheslines, a living piece of the nation's rustic past survives among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites. For more than 250 years, these groups have led cloistered lives in the region an hour west of Philadelphia, resisting modernity.

One item exemplifies these people and their lifestyle more than any other: the hand-sewn quilt. They are piled thick for sale everywhere, in gas-lit farmhouses and in dozens of stores along the main thoroughfares and back roads of Central Pennsylvania.

The quaintly named patterns — Log Cabin, Country Love, Rose of Sharon — conjure images of bonneted women working in the glow of candles.

Today, visitors from as far as Japan and Switzerland come to Emma Witmer's cluttered Witmer Quilt Shop in New Holland, Pa., with credit cards in hand, ready to spend hundreds of dollars for the one-of-a-kind creations piled 60 high on two beds in Witmer's shop.

Australians Jenny Bellemore and Marian McClusky arrived in search of something more authentic than the machine-made quilts available in Sydney. They found Witmer's shop on the Internet.

"We didn't want city, we wanted purity," Bellemore says. "I think we found it."

McClusky peers at the tiny stitches of a pink tulip petal splayed on a cream background. It is a superb example of appliqué, a method of sewing fancy cloth cutouts, such as flowers, birds and hearts, to a larger piece of cloth.

"The hand-quilting and the appliqué are just incredible," she says.

The Hmong do the appliqué, Witmer tells them.

The women seem confused.

"They're hill people from Laos who fled to Thailand during the Vietnam War," Witmer says.

Witmer uses about 40 Hmong to appliqué, a skill embedded in their culture and practiced to relieve the tedium of Thai refugee camps. She is proud of her alliance with the Hmong and is quick to credit them for their exquisite work.

But most quilt-shop owners do not mention their Southeast Asian workers. That would spoil the image of a Lancaster quilt as the product of strictly Amish or Mennonite hands. Quilt tags in pricey shops credit the work of Lancaster's Plain People, but rarely the Hmong, who are referred to as "local Lancaster quilters" or not mentioned at all.

In the 1970s, few Amish and Mennonite quilters knew how to appliqué. They didn't need to because there wasn't a demand for appliquéd quilts. In 1983, quilt design was revolutionized and expanded with the creation of a pattern called Country Bride, which employed a technique that entranced the buying public: appliqué.

Suddenly, the hunt was on for seamstresses skilled in appliqué. The Hmong were there, ready with the skill and eager for the work.

"Amish people give me work," said seamstress Bee Kha, whose family was taken in by Pearl Lapp, a quilter, and her family in 1978. "They help me. They don't mind where we come from."

That was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. It was one thing to outsource work to a Hmong seamstress; it was quite another to give her credit. The tourist paying $700 for an "Amish" quilt did not want to see an Asian name on the tag.

Life was good for the Hmong community. The Lancaster quilt industry was raging, and the shops could barely keep up with the demand.

But things were about to change.

In 1992, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was embroiled in a controversy over its decision to sell the rights to produce four antique quilt patterns to a firm that used Chinese labor to hand-stitch the designs.

The cheap knockoffs flooded stores and infuriated quilters who felt the Smithsonian had belittled U.S. history by authorizing foreign reproductions of cherished quilt patterns.

In Lancaster, handmade appliqué quilts were selling for $600, but U.S. consumers could now buy a Chinese-made king-size quilt for $149 at JC Penney or Sears.

After more than a year of criticism, the Smithsonian halted overseas quilt production. But it was too late. The patterns had been released and people had grown accustomed to buying inexpensive quilts.

Those who kept sewing worked longer and harder for less money.

Looking east

Seeking to make quilting lucrative again, the Hmong followed the lead of corporate America: They turned east to find cheap labor. In Lancaster County, a handmade quilt can easily cost $400 to make, and the best can sell for thousands of dollars. In Thailand, a quilt can be made for $65 to $80.

The Hmong in Pennsylvania who import these Thai-made creations don't make as much per piece as they would by doing the work themselves. But they can turn a tidy profit by importing dozens without turning a stitch.

Now, these ersatz offerings are sold at Lancaster County quilt auctions, over the Internet and in some shops. Many shop owners have no idea this is happening. In the past year, some have found out and are refusing to accept quilts from certain Hmong women.

Here is globalization at its best and worst. On one hand, it has elevated entire Thai villages out of squalor. But it also is threatening an industry built on authenticity and homespun values.

"It's fraud," says Peter Seibert, president of Heritage Center Museum in the city of Lancaster. "It's stuff being peddled as high-end art and it's not."

The Amish and Mennonites are as guilty as the Hmong, Seibert says. For years, shop owners have hidden the participation of their Hmong piece workers, allowing tourists to think the quilts offered for sale in the shops are made exclusively by Amish and Mennonite hands.

"Because of these two communities, we put on our white kid gloves and hold them above reproach because we think they're special in our society," Seibert says. "I think the Amish and Hmong need to clean up their act."

The Thai connection

The Thai connection started about five years ago with people like Ka Sirirathasuk, a Hmong seamstress from Upper Darby, Pa., who went to Thailand to teach Tshaj Sawm Huj's wife, Xalia — her sister-in-law — how to appliqué.

"I thought it would help her family," says Sirirathasuk, who makes Amish-style quilts and sells them over the Internet.

This gave the Hmong couple entrée into the quilting business and set Huj up as a middleman. Sirirathasuk's mother-in-law, Pang Xiong Sirirathasuk Sikoun, who also lives in Upper Darby, began placing orders and importing quilts from Thailand.

Among the largest exporters of quilts to the Hmong in Pennsylvania are Saksit and Jongkonlak Jinapanya, a Thai couple, who have an open-air stand at a market in Chiang Mai.

The couple have 300 to 400 quilters under contract from provinces throughout Thailand and ship about 200 quilts a month to Pennsylvania, Saksit Jinapanya says. He won't disclose the identity of the Hmong woman to whom the quilts are shipped. Every few orders, he says, she changes her name and address. That is most likely because his contact does not have an import license.

Such secrecy is why no one knows for sure how many Thai-made quilts are sold in Pennsylvania.

In Lancaster County, some stores no longer accept quilts on consignment from area seamstresses who show up with finished products in hand.

Instead, they dole out the work to contract seamstresses they know and trust. "We insist on documentation," says Lori Martin, manager of Village Quilts in Intercourse, Pa.

At some shops, Sikoun, the Upper Darby woman who import quilts from Thailand, has become a pariah. "Three shops don't take me anymore," she says.

Talk of foreign markets and imports and globalization perturbs shop owner Emma Witmer.

It pains her to see quilts, a symbol of family, of security, of history, provoking divisions. After all, quilts were the thread that united these two cultures. To Witmer, an Amish quilt is a Hmong quilt; a Hmong quilt is an Amish quilt.

"There's always some people who grumble about everything," she says.