Headwrap -nothing is more important
    Uncle Bai has a bad vision. He has just received an eye surgery for the retina trouble. But when coming to sing, his eyes are full of light.  “The girl I eulogize is like this: the flowers on the mountains are in full bloom; the bamboo  shoots by the house have shown up. The girl in my heart, you are as warm as the morning sun; your shadow is as bright as the full moon; your eyes are like the green tea balls made by the Hans; your lips are like the areca piece; your teeth are blackish yellow; your fair is like moss in the black river; your arms are as smooth and tender as new banana stalks;your fingers are like the bees on the ground; your nails are like glistening beetles; your legs are like sugar cane; your feet are like bananas ........”
    Isn’t it a beauty? We jeered. But Uncle Bai seemed not care much. “These are our criteria,” he contended. “Our ancients sang like this. Look at the cameraman in your team. He ties a hair plait at the back of his head. IsnÕt it his liking? If a man wears a plait like that in our Jino Mountain, he would become a laughing stock. It looks nice to us to see teeth painted blackish yellow. It prevents the teeth from being decayed. My grandfather died at 89, with only two teeth fallen.”
    The Jino people chew areca and paint their teeth. So their lips are red and teeth are blackish. In the past, young people used to gather in “Ni Gao Zuo”, which is like a club in the village, every evening. Girls make fire by the pond and burned a kind of wood that would emit black liquid and people used the liquid to dye their teeth. The blacker the teeth, the more beautiful a man or a girl looks. The liquid also functions to clean the teeth and drive away bad smell. Tooth-dyeing is a routine, especially after eating something that smells not good or eating meat or drinking wine. “Lac can also used to dye teeth,” his wife chimed in. “Chew a kind of pigment grass and then lac and that will make the teeth blackish red. Very beautiful.”
    “Very beautiful!” Uncle Bai ended virtually every sentence with the phrase in a particular emphatic way. It is more than 40 years since he began to dye his teeth and they still look blackish. But he feels it regret that the young people have changed the habit and they no long dye their teeth. TV commercials adjoin the people that white teeth are the most beautiful. So we could only see the shadows of the kind of beauty eulogized in ancient songs among people of over 60 years.