The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (13 page)

The Lees politely submitted to my questions about Lia, often answering at length, but they also had their own agenda, which, as Nao Kao once put it, was “to tell you about Hmong culture so you can understand our way and explain it to the doctors.” Their favorite time for these cultural lessons was about 10:30 p.m., after they’d gathered conversational steam for at least four hours. One night, just as May Ying and I were getting ready to leave, Foua decided to explain soul loss to me. “Your soul is like your shadow,” she said. “Sometimes it just wanders off like a butterfly and that is when you are sad and that’s when you get sick, and if it comes back to you, that is when you are happy and you are well again.” Nao Kao added, “Sometimes the soul goes away but the doctors don’t believe it. I would like you to tell the doctors to believe in our
neeb
.” (The word
neeb
, or healing spirit, is often used as shorthand for
ua neeb kbo
, the shamanic ritual, performed by a
txiv neeb
, in which an animal is sacrificed and its soul bartered for the vagrant soul of a sick person.) “The doctors can fix some sicknesses that involve the body and blood, but for us Hmong, some people get sick because of their soul, so they need spiritual things. With Lia it was good to do a little medicine and a little
neeb
, but not too much medicine because the medicine cuts the
neeb’
s effect. If we did a little of each she didn’t get sick as much, but the doctors wouldn’t let us give just a little medicine because they didn’t understand about the soul.”

On another late-night occasion Nao Kao explained that the Hmong often got sick because of their encounters with malevolent
dabs
, but that the doctors didn’t understand this either and therefore failed to treat these patients effectively. “I will give you an example,” he said. “There is a man named Mr. Xiong, and he has a son who went to swim at Bear Creek.” Bear Creek is a small, muddy river that flows through Applegate Park, north of downtown Merced. “And while Mr. Xiong’s son was sleeping, the
dab
that lives in Bear Creek came up to him and talked to him and made him sick and restless and crazy. The doctors and nurses in Merced gave this young man shots and medicines, and the young man hated the doctors and nurses, because the only way to cure that kind of sickness is to sacrifice a dog, and this country won’t allow you to kill dogs.” Foua told me that a
dab
had caught her just the previous week at the county reservoir. She knew this had happened because after she returned home, she felt afraid, and when she closed her eyes, she could sense that a
dab
was near. She left all the lights on that night to frighten the
dab
away, and she did not become sick. (Several months later, I was to learn that Merced’s
dabs
were not confined to natural surroundings. Chong Moua, a Hmong woman who cleaned Bill Selvidge’s house once a week, told me that every Hmong in town knew about the
dab
who lived at the intersection of Highway 99 and G Street. This
dab
liked to cause accidents by making Hmong drivers fall asleep or making the cars of approaching Americans invisible.)

The longer I spent with the Lees, the more firmly Foua took me in hand. She improved my manners by teaching me, via May Ying, how to say please and thank you in Hmong. When she learned that I occasionally got headaches, she gave me detailed instructions on how to treat them by rubbing an egg-covered coin up and down my body. I think she was disappointed that I never actually contracted a headache on her premises so that she could heal it then and there. “But you remember,” she said. “Next time, you do it the way I said.”

When Foua had known me for almost a year, she decided to get me married. The Hmong have a phrase, “a flower full of honey and ready for the bee,” which is used to describe a marriageable girl of fifteen or sixteen. I was thirty-five, and had thus been ready for the bee for two decades. When my boyfriend visited me in Merced, Foua realized that she finally had an opportunity to do something about this appalling situation. Her plan, of which she did not inform me in advance, was to dress me as a Hmong bride, a transformation she was certain would render me irresistible.

My makeover took place on a sweltering summer day. The temperature in the Lees’ bedroom must have been well over 100°. Out of a battered suitcase that she kept in the back of her closet, Foua extracted piece after piece of exquisite
paj ntaub. (Paj ntaub
, which means “flower cloth,” is a traditional Hmong textile art in which geometric or organic designs—spiderwebs, ram’s heads, tiger’s eyebrows, elephant’s feet—are worked in embroidery, batik, appliqué, and reverse appliqué. In Laos, a Hmong man was said to value two qualities most highly in a wife: her ability to sing poetry and her skill at
paj ntaub
.) Foua had made these clothes for her daughters. They constituted the lion’s share of the family’s wealth.

Assisted by her fourteen-year-old daughter May, the oldest Lee girl still living at home, and by May Ying Xiong, Foua dressed me like a doll. I was completely at their mercy, since I had no idea which garment was coming next and, when it came, what part of my body it was supposed to adorn. First Foua picked up a
phuam
, a pink-and-black sash at least twenty feet long, and wound it around me like a ribbon around a maypole. Its function was the precise opposite of a girdle’s: it was supposed to fatten me up, to transform me into a healthy Hmong farm wife who looked capable of carrying heavy loads of rice. Then came the
tiab
, a pink, green, and yellow skirt with about five hundred accordion pleats, which, if it had been spread out, would have been wider than I was tall. Its cross-stitching was so fine it looked like beading. May Ying told me later that it had probably taken Foua the better part of two years to make, and that it would take her several hours to restitch threads through each of its pleats to prepare it again for storage. Over that went a pink brocade
sev
, a kind of apron, whose
paj ntaub
work was protected by an American refinement, a layer of plastic wrap. On my upper half I wore a blue-and-black jacket called a
tsho
(the same word as the Hmong term for “placenta,” one’s first garment) and four
hnab tshos
, pocketlike bags decorated with dangling silver coins, which were hung bandolier-style across my chest and weighed a ton. Around my neck went a five-tier necklace of hollow silver. Around my calves May Ying wrapped a pair of black puttees called
nrhoob
. And on my head Foua balanced the
pièce de résistance
, a
kausmom
, a pink, green, and yellow hat, bedizened with its own set of silver coins, that was shaped like a pagoda and jingled whenever I moved. Although I nearly died of heat prostration during the forty-five minutes it took Foua, May, and May Ying to wrestle all this stuff onto me, I felt for the first time in my not very fashionable adulthood that I understood the ritual pleasure of women gussying each other up and giggling like crazy in rooms to which men were forbidden entrance.

While all this was taking place, my friend George was sitting in the air-conditioned living room, watching a boxing match on television with Nao Kao and wondering what I was doing. Neither he nor Nao Kao spoke a word of each other’s language, but they communicated in the universal language of male bonding by throwing punches in the air and making appreciative grunts. When I emerged from the bedroom, George was, in a word, stunned. He didn’t think I looked
good
, exactly. He told me later that I resembled Tom Kitten in “The Roly-Poly Pudding,” after Mrs. Whiskers ties him up and covers him with pie dough. However, Foua’s work must in some way have had the intended effect, because a week later George asked me to marry him. When we told Foua that we were engaged, she didn’t act in the least surprised.

Later, when I complimented Foua on her beautiful needlework, she said matter-of-factly, “Yes, my friends are proud of me because of my
paj ntaub
. The Hmong are proud of me.” That is the only time I ever heard her say anything kind about herself. She was otherwise the most self-deprecating woman I had ever met. One night, when Nao Kao was out for the evening, she remarked, out of the blue, “I am very stupid.” When I asked her why, she said, “Because I don’t know anything here. I don’t know your language. American is so hard, you can watch TV all day and you still don’t know it. I can’t dial the telephone because I can’t read the numbers. If I want to call a friend, my children will tell me and I will forget and the children will tell me again and I will forget again. My children go to the store to buy food because I don’t know what is in the packages. One time when I went to the hospital I went to the bathroom, and the hall went that way and that way and that way and that way, and I didn’t know which way to go, and I couldn’t get back to where I was because too many sad things have happened to me and my brain is not good anymore.”

When I suggested that I would have had at least as much trouble finding my way around her village in Laos as she had finding her way around MCMC, Foua said, “Maybe, but in Laos it was easy. I didn’t know how to do anything but farm.” Venturing that it couldn’t have been quite so easy as she claimed, I asked her to describe a typical day in Houaysouy, the village in the northwestern province of Sayaboury where the Lee family had lived. She tilted her head to one side for a moment, thinking. Then she said, “In the season when you have to tend to the rice fields, you get up at first cock crow. In the other seasons, you can wake up at second or third cock crow. Even at third cock crow it is before dawn, and it is dark, so the first thing you do is light a lamp. The lamp was like this.” Foua walked into the kitchen and came back holding the bottom three-quarters of a Mountain Dew can, which was filled with oil and had a homemade cloth wick. “In Merced, when the electricity goes out, we still use one like this,” she said.

“First you cook the rice for your children,” she continued. “Then you clean the house with the broom you tied together yourself. After you are finished sweeping you go and cut wild grasses to give to the pigs, and you cut more for the cows, and you feed the pigs and the cows and the chickens. Then you walk to the fields. You carry the baby on your back, and if you have two children your husband carries one on his back too, and if you have a lot of children you can leave some of the smaller ones home with the big ones. Our parents grew opium, but we just grew rice, and also peppers, corn, and cucumbers. When it is planting time, first you make a hole in the ground like this.” She walked back to the kitchen and, after rummaging around for something with which to demonstrate to me the use of a dibble stick, returned with a cardboard tube that had once held a roll of paper towels, which she proceeded to stab at one-foot intervals into her living room’s brown wall-to-wall carpeting. “Like this. Then you put the seeds in the holes. You and your husband do it together. In other seasons you clear the fields and harvest the rice and thresh and winnow the rice and grind the corn.”

At this point in her narrative, her daughter May walked in, wearing shorts, a T-shirt that said
TIME FOR THE BEACH
, and pink plastic earrings. May was three and a half when her family left Laos. She sat on the carpet at her mother’s feet and listened. “The farm place was far from where we lived,” said Foua, “farther than from here to Bear Creek. If you leave the farm when it is still light, it is dark by the time you get home. When you get home you go to the stream and carry the water for cooking and bathing in a barrel on your back.” Foua showed me how she had made the pack-barrel, gesturing with her fingers to illustrate how the bamboo was wrapped around the wooden staves. “You bathe the babies by boiling the water and then you pour it with a smaller bowl. The older children can bathe themselves. You bring corn for the chickens and you feed the pigs, and then you cook for your family. We usually just ate leftover rice from our first meal, with a little vegetables, because we ate meat only about once a month. You cook on the hot coals of the fire and you use the fat from the last pig you killed to fry with. The smoke just goes through spaces in the roof. After dinner you sew by the light of that lamp. In the fields you wear clothes that are old and dirty and ripped up, but the children have to have good clothes for New Year’s, so you sew for them at night.”

I asked Foua to describe their house. “It is made of wood from the forest,” she said, “some wood as big as telephone poles. The thatching is bamboo. I helped build it. Our relatives helped us too, and then we help our relatives when they need a house. Our house is all one room but it is very nice. The floor is earth. If you want to sleep, you take some bamboo, you cut it open and split it into small pieces that are springy and make it into a bed. We sleep next to the fireplace where it is warm because we don’t have any blankets. My husband sleeps on one side holding a baby, I sleep on the other side holding another baby, and the older children keep each other warm.”

While Foua was telling me about the dozens of tasks that constituted her “easy” work in Laos, I was thinking that when she said she was stupid, what she really meant was that none of her former skills were transferable to the United States—none, that is, except for being an excellent mother to her nine surviving children. It then occurred to me that this last skill had been officially contradicted by the American government, which had legally declared her a child abuser.

I asked Foua if she missed Laos. She was silent for a few seconds, rocking back and forth on her low bamboo stool while her daughter looked at her, waiting curiously for her answer. Then she said, “When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don’t want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But you don’t speak the language. You depend on other people for welfare. If they don’t give you money you can’t eat, and you would die of hunger. What I miss in Laos is that free spirit, doing what you want to do. You own your own fields, your own rice, your own plants, your own fruit trees. I miss that feeling of freeness. I miss having something that really belongs to me.”