The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (21 page)

Every Hmong refugee has an exodus story. In the hierarchy of good fortune, my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, and her family, along with the families of other military officers airlifted from Long Tieng, ranked at the top. All they had to do was leave behind every relative who did not belong to their immediate family as well as virtually everything they owned, and, overnight, trade the high status they had enjoyed in Laos for a communal dormitory in a Thai refugee camp, where one bed was provided for their family of eight, and they stood in long lines for every meal, holding bowls for their rations of rice. “You were so lucky!” I heard Nao Kao tell May Ying one night, when they were comparing their postwar experiences. A notch further down—an option for only a few privileged families—was escaping from Vientiane or another urban area by “taxi,” which meant forking over one’s life savings to a Lao driver who, along with his passengers, might or might not be arrested before reaching the Thai border.

Most Hmong walked. Some traveled in small extended-family bands, others in convoys of up to 8,000 people. I never heard of a Hmong who fled alone. In the first months after the fall of Long Tieng, when Pathet Lao efforts to block the Hmong hegira were still disorganized, it was sometimes possible to drive one’s livestock along major trails. “Those people could just kill their animals along the way, so they didn’t starve,” Nao Kao told me. “They took it really easy.” Later groups followed tiger and elephant trails, or steered clear of established routes altogether, walking the ridgelines whenever they could in order to avoid mines and detection. Most families, like the Lees, took about a month to reach Thailand, though some lived in the forests for two years or more, moving constantly to evade capture, sleeping under bamboo leaves, subsisting on game (though that soon became scarce), fruit, roots, bamboo shoots, the pith of trees, and insects. Desperate to fill their stomachs, some people chopped up their sweat-soaked clothes, mixed them with water and salt, and ate them. They lit fires only at night, so the smoke would not be visible. Sometimes they used fox fire—luminescent rotting wood—to light their way in the dark.

Many people carried children on their backs. The babies presented a potentially fatal problem: they made noise. Silence was so essential that one Hmong woman, now living in Wisconsin, recalled that her son, who was a month old when the family left their home village, didn’t know a single word when they arrived in Thailand two years later, because no one had talked during that entire period except in occasional whispers. Nearly every Hmong family I met in Merced had a story to tell about a baby—a relative’s child, a neighbor’s child, a member of the group they escaped with—who had been drugged with opium. “When the babies would cry,” a young mother named Yia Thao Xiong told me, “we would mix the opium in water in a cup and give it to them so they would be quiet and the soldiers would not hear, because if they heard the babies, they would kill all of us. Usually the baby just went to sleep. But if you give too much by mistake, the baby dies. That happened many many times.” When I heard these stories, I recalled something I had once read about an Israeli child, hiding from Palestinian terrorists, who, when she began to cry, was accidentally smothered to death by her mother. That death, in 1979, was said to have driven the entire Israeli nation into mourning. The horror of the opium overdoses was not only that such things happened to the Hmong, but that they happened so frequently that, far from driving a nation into mourning, they never made headlines, never caught the world’s ear, never reached beyond a community of families that numbly accepted them as a fact of life.

Sometimes worse things happened. When I asked Nao Kao about the boy with the scar on his forehead whom May Lee had mentioned in her eighth-grade essay, he said, “You had to be very quiet. The father of that little baby tried to kill him so he wouldn’t cry and everyone would get killed. He had a slash on his head. Somebody saved him and now he is living in Merced.”

Able-bodied adults usually took turns carrying the elderly, the sick, and the wounded until they were no longer able to do so. At that point, by a process of agonizing triage, the burdensome relatives were left by the side of the trail, usually with a little food and a little opium. People who died en route were left to rot. It was too dangerous to take time to bury them. To understand what these choices were like, it is important to remember that the Hmong revere their elders, and also that the soul of anyone who is not accorded the proper funerary rites—being washed, dressed in special clothes, honored with animal sacrifices, verbally guided back to the place where one’s placenta is buried, lamented with death drum and
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, and laid to rest in a hand-hewn coffin on the shoulder of a sloping mountain—is doomed to an eternity of restless wandering. Jonas Vangay said, “Not to bury the dead is terrible. Not to carry your relatives is terrible. It is the worst thing in the world to have the responsibility to choose between you and them.”

On their way to Thailand, Hmong families walked through abandoned villages and untended fields. They passed piles of jewelry, silver bars, and embroidered garments—Foua discarded her entire dowry of
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which previous refugees had jettisoned. They also passed many decomposing corpses. Dang Moua, a Merced businessman whose family lived during their three-week journey on birds he shot with a homemade crossbow and poison-tipped bamboo arrows, saw dozens of ragged orphaned children in the forest, eating leaves and dirt. He gave them food but walked on past. His wife found a baby, less than a year old, trying to nurse from the breast of its dead mother. They walked past it, too.

Because Houaysouy was west of the Mekong River, the Lees were able to cross the Thai border on foot. Farther south, the Mekong, which is up to a mile wide, forms the Lao-Thai boundary for more than five hundred miles. Most Hmong refugees had to cross it. “The Mekong River is ten times bigger than the Merced River,” said Jonas Vangay. “So how do you cross? Most Hmong people do not swim. If you have money maybe you can pay Lao for a boat. You can hold a tree branch. Bamboo floats better than wood, so you can lash it together, but later on all the bamboo is gone because people have already cut it down, and you have to carry it all the way down from the mountains. Crossing this river, everyone here in the United States continue to dream of that nightmare.”

Some people attempted to float across the Mekong with bamboo stalks placed under their armpits, on banana-wood rafts, or in inner tubes purchased from Lao traders. The inner tubes were hard to find and very expensive, because the Pathet Lao border patrol killed people who sold them. Many babies and small children who had survived the journey this far drowned while crossing the river strapped to their parents’ backs. Their bodies were left in the Mekong. “A few [Hmong refugees] manage to bring empty plastic gallon containers, still others inflate ordinary grocery plastic bags,” wrote Dominica Garcia, a doctor working in a Thai refugee camp, in a 1978 letter to the director of the International Rescue Committee. “It is not unusual to find these survivors clinging to their makeshift ‘life-savers’ even long after they have been in the detention centers. They carry them up to the hospital wards where they finally get proper treatment.”

One resident of Merced was sixteen years old when he and his extended family reached the Mekong. They were able to obtain a boat large enough to hold half their party. He and another adult crossed the river first, bringing all the children. The other man paddled the boat back to the Lao side and picked up the rest of the adults. On the return trip, when the boat was halfway across the river, the border patrol sank the boat and fired on the passengers. From the Thai shore, the teenager and the children watched their parents, uncles, and aunts all die from bullets and drowning.

Dang Moua’s cousin Moua Kee once unsuccessfully tried to procure federal disability benefits for a mentally disturbed Hmong woman in Merced who, a decade earlier, had attempted to cross the Mekong with a party of 170 people. “They wait for the sun to go down and do a night crossing,” he explained, “and then, one group of Pathet Lao open three machine gun. This lady, she saw more than twenty people fall down and die in one place, and one of them was her husband. I think she is sick now because maybe she saw too many trouble.”

One afternoon, when Blia Yao Moua and I were chatting, as we had on many previous occasions, I happened to make a casual remark about the cohesiveness of Hmong society. He said, “Yes, if a person outside the community see a Hmong person, they look that way. But inside they have guilt. Many feelings of guilt. You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before you get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together it is like putting glue on a broken glass.”

An unknowable fraction of the Hmong who attempted to flee Laos—some survivors estimate it was half, some much less—died en route, from Pathet Lao and Vietnamese bullets and mines, as well as from disease, starvation, exposure, snakebite, tiger maulings, poisoning by toxic plants, and drowning. Most of those who reached Thailand ended up, often after being robbed and occasionally after being raped by Thai bandits, in district police stations. From there, they were sent to refugee camps. When they arrived, eighty percent were found to be suffering from malnutrition, malaria, anemia, and infections, especially of the feet.

At first, the Hmong were placed in a string of makeshift camps near the Lao border. Officially speaking, because Thailand had not signed the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, they were illegal immigrants, but the Thai government was willing to grant them temporary residency as long as other nations paid the bills and promised them permanent asylum. Eventually most of the Hmong—who kept streaming across the Lao border until the early 1990s—were consolidated into one large camp in northeast Thailand, fifteen miles south of the Mekong River. At its peak, in 1986, the Ban Vinai camp had 42,858 inhabitants, of which about ninety percent were Hmong. It was the largest Hmong settlement in history, larger even than Long Tieng, General Vang Pao’s former military base. Ban Vinai was, in effect, a large-scale charitable institution that continued the job, effectively begun by wartime rice drops, of eroding Hmong self-sufficiency. Depending on how you looked at it, life there was either a catastrophic deracination or a useful dress rehearsal for life in the American inner cities to which many of its inhabitants would ultimately relocate. Though it lacked electricity, running water, and sewage disposal, the camp was so densely populated that it was, in effect, urban. A 1986 survey by a Catholic relief agency concluded, “Like other poor urban communities, Ban Vinai has problems of inadequate health, overcrowding, welfare dependency, unemployment, substance abuse, prostitution, and anomie (suicide, abandonment, loneliness).” Jonas Vangay told me, “In Ban Vinai, you don’t have the right to do anything except get a ration of rice and beans, and go to your tent, and you do that for five or ten years. People were born and grew up there. The young ones play soccer and volleyball. The elderly person just sleep day and night, they just wait and see and wait and eat and wait and die and wait and die.”

According to Dwight Conquergood, the enthusiastic ethnographer from the International Rescue Committee who organized the Ban Vinai Rabies Parade, the camp officials tended to hold the Hmong responsible for their own dependence, poor health, and lack of cleanliness. “Instead of seeing the Hmong as struggling within a constraining context of historical, political, and economic forces that have reduced them from proud, independent, mountain people to landless refugees, the Hmong are blamed for their miserable condition,” he observed. Conquergood was astonished at how violently most of the other Westerners at the camp disliked the Hmong, whom he liked very much. He wrote:

Conquergood believed that this focus on “dirtiness” and “difficulty” was actually “an expression of Western expatriates’ uneasiness when confronted with Difference, the Other. A Western aid official’s encounter with the Hmong is a confrontation with radical difference—in cosmology, worldview, ethos, texture of life…. Unfortunately, as [the French critic] Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, ‘The first, spontaneous reaction with regard to the stranger is to imagine him as inferior, since he is different from us.’”

Most of the people who made those disparaging comments about the Hmong came from the United States, to which the majority of the inhabitants of Ban Vinai eventually emigrated. About 10,000 Hmong resettled in France, Canada, Australia, Argentina, French Guiana, and elsewhere; but because of their American military ties and because Vang Pao had already established residence in Montana, they preferred the United States by a huge margin. In 1975, the U.S. was willing to admit fewer than 300 Hmong—mostly army officers and their families—but both the quotas and the eligibility requirements were liberalized over the years, with about 25,000 Hmong admitted in 1980 alone. As with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, the best-educated Hmong and Lao came to America in the first wave of immigration and the least-educated in later waves. Because for several years the U.S. refused to accept extended family groups of more than eight people, but did not limit the size of nuclear families, the Hmong, none of whom had birth certificates, grew accustomed to lying when they were interviewed by immigration officials. Second wives became daughters or sisters; nieces and nephews became daughters and sons.