Audio recordings: Andrew Hsiu. (2017). Hani (Dao San) audio word list. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1123347
On February 10, 2014 in U Nhí Chải, Dao San Township, Phong Tho District, Lai Chau Province, Vietnam, I collected a word list of U Nhi or Hani (ha³³ȵi³³pʰa⁵³). U Nhi turned out to be a local exonym for the Hani people in the area. My informant was a middle-aged woman about 50 years old who was more fluent in Southwestern Mandarin (which the locals called Hanhua 汉话) than in Vietnamese. She offered to carry my backpack up and down the steep, rocky trails for a tip. Her strength and agility thoroughly impressed me.
The locals in U Nhi Chai thought I was from China, and all spoke to me in Southwestern Mandarin. However, I had trouble speaking Southwestern Mandarin and ended up speaking an improvised made-up of it. I sometimes switched to speaking Vietnamese instead. The village was highly impoverished. One elderly man walking slowly with a cane told me in Southwestern Mandarin that he was hungry and that his stomach hurt, and asked me for some money to buy food. I handed him 20,000 dong, which he gladly accepted and walked away with.
The Hani language spoken in Phong Tho is similar to Hani dialects spoken in Jinping County, which is located just across the border. Three months later, I visited Jinping County but did not collect data on any languages there.