The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (14 page)

“When Lia came back,” recalled Nao Kao, “the car came up here and when the door opened, she just jumped up and ran into her home. Her sisters and brother were too happy to even do anything. Everyone just went out and hugged her. That night she was in our bed and we were so happy to have her sleeping by our side.”

Looking over Lia’s sparse medical records from the spring and summer of 1986, around the time of her fourth birthday, Peggy Philp summed up the first few months after her return from foster care in three words: “Nothing interesting here.” The Lees would disagree. Neil and Peggy had previously spent hours recounting the details of medically complex periods in Lia’s history that Foua and Nao Kao had summarized for me in a few minutes; now the tables were turned, and a period that seemed uneventful from the doctors’ perspective was revealed, from the Lees’ perspective, to be one of the richest in her life.

The first thing Foua and Nao Kao did after Lia returned was to celebrate her homecoming and bolster her health by sacrificing a cow. In Laos, most of the chickens, pigs, cows, and buffalos kept by Hmong families were reserved for sacrifices to propitiate ancestors or cure illnesses by offering the souls of the slaughtered animals as ransom for fugitive souls. Even families too poor to keep animals of their own were guaranteed occasional meat in their diets by being invited to
neeb
ceremonies performed by wealthier villagers. According to Dwight Conquergood, sacrifice is a sacred act performed with “respect and reverence.” He has written, “The souls of sacrificed animals are precious and vitally connected to human souls. Animals are not considered to be as far removed from the human species as they are in our world view…. Since the bonding between the life-souls of the patient and sacrificed animal is so intimate, it is likened to souls being wedded together.” Eric Crystal, the coordinator of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at U.C. Berkeley, takes an equally approbatory, if not quite so high-minded, view. “So what if some Hmong feel that they have to slaughter animals to make the proper kinds of sacrifices?” he once asked me rhetorically. “Why not? It happens because people usually mark religious events that are important to them by getting together with relatives, and it is very difficult in this world to get a whole bunch of relatives together, whether you are living in some village in Laos or in Manhattan, without giving them something to eat. So you sacralize the event. The whole animal is offered, and the whole animal is eaten. I mean the
whole
animal, ninety-eight percent of it, intestines and everything, in a very ecologically sound way. Americans toss away a huge amount of meat. We also kind of slip it under the rug that people actually have to kill animals to eat them. Indeed, it may be shocking to many Americans to find out that their $1.99-a-pound chicken breast actually had to get its throat cut in a processing plant. So Americans are
real
shocked if they find out that the Hmong are doing it right in their own houses.”

During the last decade, shocked Americans have responded to the ritual killings performed by devotees of other religions by invoking legal sanctions. In Hialeah, Florida, animal rights activists and community leaders passed an anti-sacrifice ordinance in 1987 to prevent priests of the Afro-Cuban Santería faith from slaughtering animals, a practice one local resident said “blights the image of South Florida.” (The ban was overturned, but it took four years and a Supreme Court decision.) In Los Angeles, where followers of Santería and several other Hispanic sects were suspected of nailing cows’ tongues to trees and leaving entrails on sidewalks, an ordinance was passed in 1990 that made animal sacrifice punishable by a six-month prison term and a fine of up to $1,000. It is still on the books, though it is not currently being enforced. In Merced, almost every Hmong family I met sacrificed animals on a regular basis. In fact, a fourteen-year-old boy I knew, a member of the Moua clan, once complained that he hardly ever had enough free time on weekends because his parents made him attend so many of his relatives’
neeb
ceremonies. Until the mid-nineties, however, most American residents of Merced had little idea what was going on, and no one seemed concerned that it might blight the image of Central California. “Well,
I
haven’t run into any sacrificial chickens,” Pat Lunney, the chief of police, told me with some amusement several years ago. “Sacrifices?” said Steve Nord, the city attorney. “Do they really do that?”

The Hmong have a phrase,
yuav paim quav
, which means that the truth will eventually come to light. Literally, it means “feces will be excreted.” I knew it was only a matter of time before feces would be excreted on the subject of Hmong animal sacrifices, and indeed, in 1996, tipped off by local newspaper coverage of a dog sacrifice in Fresno, the residents of Merced began to realize that similar things might be taking place in
their
town. That the animals were killed quickly and cleanly—and, unlike the products of a meat-packing plant, were actually thanked for their services—failed to extenuate what seemed like aberrant behavior. The result was an ordinance banning the slaughter of livestock and poultry within city limits. For most Hmong, the need to heal sick family members far outweighed the claim of a mere law, so they paid no attention, and few neighbors were nosy enough to report them. However, rumors about the sparsity of dogs and cats on Merced’s south side, which had circulated
sotto voce
for several years, upped their volume.

The rumors were false, but that did nothing to stop them. Dan Murphy told me where they had originated. “There was a small stove fire in a Hmong house here a few years back,” he said, “and one of the firemen opened the refrigerator. There was a roast pig in there. The fireman thought it was a dog, and he told his friends, and they told theirs, and instantly people were saying that the reason there aren’t so many strays around here anymore is that the Hmong are eating them all, and you’d better lock up your dog at night. Well, Dang Moua heard this.” Dang Moua is a local Hmong leader. “And he went and got the fire chief and brought him over to the house and opened the refrigerator and said, ‘This is a pig. Can’t your men tell the difference between a pig and a dog?’ And that should have settled it. But you know, it’s not as much fun to tell about the resolution of a story as it is to tell about the genesis, so that part didn’t get spread around very far.”

The Hmong of Merced do not sacrifice dogs, which they know are protected by American law and custom—though some of them, like the victim of the
dab
of Bear Creek that Nao Kao told me about, may have wished that they could. They do, however, frequently sacrifice pigs and chickens, which they buy live from Hmong or American farmers. To sacrifice a cow, as the Lees did, is a rare and important event. It was the first time they had done so during their six years in the United States. Lia’s cow cost $300, a monumental sum for a family of nine who were living on $9,480 a year, plus food stamps. When I asked Nao Kao where the money had come from, he said, “Lia had her own money from the government.” It took me a moment to understand: he had bought the sacrificial cow with three and a half months’ worth of Lia’s Supplemental Security Income, a use to which federal disability assistance had probably never before been put.

Because Nao Kao had no way of transporting a live cow to East 12th Street, he bought one from an American rancher who lived near Merced, had it slaughtered, and, with the help of some of his clansmen, cut it in pieces small enough to stuff into plastic garbage bags that fit on the floor and in the trunk of his cousin’s subcompact car. After they returned home, a
txiv neeb
performed the ritual chant that accompanied his journey to the realm of the unseen. During the chant, the cow’s severed head was sitting on the Lees’ front stoop, welcoming Lia’s soul. When I asked the Lees whether any American passersby might have been surprised by this sight, Foua said, “No, I don’t think they would be surprised, because it wasn’t the whole cow on the doorstep, only the head.” Nao Kao added, “Also, Americans would think it was okay because we had the receipt for the cow.”

After the ceremonial portion of the
neeb
was complete, the Lees and their many invited relatives sat down and ate a large, festive meal of fried beef, boiled beef, a spicy ground-beef dish called
laab
, and a stew called
kua quav
. When I asked May Ying what
kua quav
was, she said, “It’s made out of cow’s intestines and the heart and the liver and the lungs, and you chop it up really fine, and there is a part that is what is inside the intestines, and you chop that up too. Then you boil it all up together and you put lemon grass and herbs in it. It has a really bad name when you translate it. I guess you could call it, oh, doo-doo soup.” (The literal translation of
kua quav
is liquid excrement.) “It’s a classic.”

The celebratory mood of Lia’s first few days home began to dissipate as the Lees came to feel, more strongly with each passing week, that the child who had been taken from them had been returned in a damaged condition. According to May Lee, Lia had once been able to count in English and Hmong and knew all the tunes and lyrics of the traditional Hmong New Year’s songs. “Before the Americans took her away, Lia was really smart,” said Nao Kao. “If you came in the door, she would say hello and bring a chair for you. But after those months that she was government property, I don’t know what they did to her. Maybe they gave her too much medicine, or maybe she got sick because she missed us too much, because after that, when people come, it seems she does not know them, and she could only speak a little.” The Lees were under the impression that the court had returned Lia to them because foster care had made her sicker, clear evidence that her family’s care was superior. When I told Neil and Peggy this, they were surprised. They had also noted Lia’s worsening developmental deficits, but in their view her downward intellectual slide had begun before she was removed from parental custody, had been temporarily arrested by her regular drug regimen during foster care, and had then been seriously aggravated by the seizures she had had after her catastrophic week-long visit home in September 1985, during which her parents had failed to administer any medications. Neil and Peggy were even more surprised—and grieved—to learn that the Lees believed Lia had been taken from them in the first place not to safeguard her health but “because the doctors were angry at us” for being noncompliant, and wished to inflict punishment. And when I told them that Foua and Nao Kao, in their willingness to travel the middle road of “a little medicine and a little
neeb
,” viewed themselves as eminently reasonable and their doctors as incapable of compromise, Neil and Peggy shook their heads in puzzlement and consternation."

In order to keep Lia’s condition from deteriorating further, the Lees stepped up their program of traditional medicine. I had often heard doctors at MCMC complain that the Hmong seemed to care less than Americans did whether their sick children got better, since they spurned the hospital’s free medical care. Unbeknownst to their doctors, the Hmong actually took their children’s health so seriously that they frequently budgeted large fractions of their public assistance stipends or indebted themselves to relatives in order to pay for expensive services not covered by Medi-Cal. For example, the Lees spent $1,000 on amulets filled with sacred healing herbs from Thailand, which Lia wore constantly around her neck. They also tried a host of less costly but time-consuming therapies. Foua inserted a silver coin that said “1936 Indochine Française” into the yolk of a boiled egg, wrapped the egg in a cloth, and rubbed Lia’s body with it; when the egg turned black, that meant the sickness had been absorbed. She massaged Lia with the bowl of a spoon. She sucked the “pressure” out of Lia’s body by pressing a small cup heated with ashes against her skin, creating a temporary vacuum as the oxygen-depleted air inside the cup cooled. She pinched Lia to draw out noxious winds. She dosed Lia with tisanes infused from the gleanings of her parking-lot herb garden. Finally, she and Nao Kao tried changing Lia’s name to Kou, a last-ditch Hmong remedy based on the premise that if a patient is called by a new name, the
dab
who stole her soul will be tricked into thinking that she is someone else, and the soul can return. According to Foua, this plan was foiled because Lia’s doctors persisted in calling her Lia, thus ruining the subterfuge.

The Lees’ most ambitious act of healing was taking Lia to visit a famous
txiv neeb
in Minnesota. “We had heard this
txiv neeb
was very special because he can fix people and he gives good medicines,” explained Nao Kao, in the deferential tones of someone describing a distinguished specialist he has gone to great trouble and expense to consult at the Mayo Clinic. “When this
txiv neeb
was younger he had gotten sick himself with the same thing as Lia, where the spirit catches you and you fall down. For the Hmong people, they usually get that kind of sickness before they become a
txiv neeb
, and maybe when Lia was grown up, that would have happened to her too, and she would be a
txiv neeb
. This
txiv neeb
was also a member of the Lee clan, so that is why we took Lia to Minnesota.”

Nao Kao, one of his brothers, one of his grown daughters, his son-in-law, and Lia spent three days driving to Minnesota. “We rested one night in Salt Lake City and one night in Wyoming,” said Nao Kao, “and then we took another day to get to Nebraska and then we took the whole night from Nebraska to get to Minnesota. We just stopped to get gas. I only drove for three hours in Wyoming because Lia kept trying to hug me, so I couldn’t drive, so someone else drove and I just held her.” He did not remember where the
txiv neeb
had lived, but recalled that it was several hours beyond St. Paul. “The
txiv neeb
tied spirit-strings around Lia’s wrist and gave her some green medicine from roots and things like that. Some of it was boiled and you drink the juice and some of it you boil until it crystallizes and it gets really sticky, and after it dries you eat it.” The three family members who had accompanied them stayed in Minnesota with relatives, and Nao Kao, again using SSI money, flew home with Lia, filled with optimism about her future well-being.