Despite the recent influx of predominantly foreign-produced recordings of Hmong popular
music, the vocal art form of kwv txhiaj still plays an important role in the daily lives of many
Vietnamese-Hmong people. While previous studies of Vietnamese-Hmong music have tended to
focus solely on the musical sounds, this article attempts to illustrate how kwv txhiaj is made
meaningful in live performance by contextualizing the musical examples with ethnographic data.
Using Timothy Rice’s Time, Place, and Metaphor model (2003) as a theoretical basis, three
contrasting case studies of singers and their songs are examined: an elderly woman sings a song
she learned at the time of her marriage at the age of nine, a younger woman sings while planting
rice in her fields, and another sings about the importance of education at the local government
cultural center. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in northern Vietnam, this study examines a
representative sample of performances from the Sa Pa district of Lào Cai province in an attempt
to uncover what makes kwv txhiaj a vital aspect of Vietnamese-Hmong culture.