The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (26 page)

The second said:

These men were both suffering from a global despair to which their economic dependence was only one of many contributing factors. In the survey for which they were interviewed, part of a longitudinal study of Hmong, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, the Hmong respondents scored lowest in “happiness” and “life satisfaction.” In a study of Indochinese refugees in Illinois, the Hmong exhibited the highest degree of “alienation from their environment.” According to a Minnesota study, Hmong refugees who had lived in the United States for a year and a half had “very high levels of depression, anxiety, hostility, phobia, paranoid ideation, obsessive compulsiveness and feelings of inadequacy.” (Over the next decade, some of these symptoms moderated, but the refugees’ levels of anxiety, hostility, and paranoia showed little or no improvement.) The study that I found most disheartening was the 1987 California Southeast Asian Mental Health Needs Assessment, a statewide epidemiological survey funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the National Institute of Mental Health. It was shocking to look at the bar graphs comparing the Hmong with the Vietnamese, the Chinese-Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Lao—all of whom, particularly the Cambodians, fared poorly compared to the general population—and see how the Hmong stacked up: Most depressed. Most psychosocially dysfunctional. Most likely to be severely in need of mental health treatment. Least educated. Least literate. Smallest percentage in labor force. Most likely to cite “fear” as a reason for immigration and least likely to cite “a better life.”

The same bleak ground was covered from the Hmong point of view by Bruce Thowpaou Bliatout, a public health administrator in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Bliatout, who is Hmong, explained in an article on mental health concepts that such issues as job adjustment and family happiness are regarded by the Hmong as problems of the liver. If patience, as Charles Johnson noted in
Dab Neeg Hmoob
, is attributed to a long—that is, a robust and healthy—liver, what Americans would call mental illness is attributed to a liver that has become diseased or damaged through soul loss. According to Bliatout, who provided case histories for each one, some illnesses common among Hmong in the United States are:

Nyuab Siab

Translation: Difficult liver.

Causes: Loss of family, status, home, country, or any important item that has a high emotional value.

Symptoms: Excessive worry; crying; confusion; disjointed speech; loss of sleep and appetite; delusions.

Tu Siab

Translation: Broken liver.

Causes: Loss of family member; quarrel between family members; break of family unity.

Symptoms: Grief; worry; loneliness; guilt; feeling of loss; insecurity.

Lwj Siab

Translation: Rotten liver.

Causes: Stressful family relations; constant unfulfillment of goals.

Symptoms: Loss of memory; short temper; delusions.

Before I came to Merced, Bill Selvidge described to me the first Hmong patient he had ever seen. Bruce Thowpaou Bliatout would have diagnosed this patient as having a difficult liver; Bill thought of it, not so differently, as a broken heart. “Mr. Thao was a man in his fifties,” said Bill. “He told me through an interpreter that he had a bad back, but after I listened for a while I realized that he’d really come in because of depression. It turned out he was an agoraphobe. He was afraid to leave his house because he thought if he walked more than a couple of blocks he’d get lost and never find his way home again. What a metaphor! He’d seen his entire immediate family die in Laos, he’d seen his country collapse, and he never
was
going to find his way home again. All I could do was prescribe antidepressants.”

Mr. Thao turned out to be the first of a long procession of depressed Hmong patients whom Bill was to treat over the next three years. Bill cut to the nub of the matter when he described the man’s profound loss of “home.” For the Hmong in America—where not only the social mores but also the sound of every birdsong, the shape of every tree and flower, the smell of the air, and the very texture of the earth are unfamiliar—the ache of homesickness can be incapacitating. In “Lament upon Leaving Our Country,” a Hmong poet named Doua Her wrote:

John Finck of the Rhode Island resettlement office once took a party of Hmong from Providence to visit Plimoth Plantation, a reconstructed Pilgrim village with thatched houses and free-running chickens. When it came time to leave, one of the older men in the group asked Finck, “Can we move here and make this our home?”

Dang Moua, the energetic grocer-cum-interpreter-cum-pig-farmer, mentioned once that after thirteen years in the United States, he dreamed of Laos every night and had never once dreamed of America. “I talk to more than one hundred Hmong about this,” he said. “I talk to General Vang Pao. Same thing for everyone.” In a heroic act of denial, only ten percent of the Hmong refugees polled in a Minnesota survey said they were certain they would spend the rest of their lives in the United States; the rest were either certain or hopeful that they would die in Laos. John Xiong, a Hmong leader in Merced, told me, “All the older people, they say, We want to go back. We born over there, we come here. Very nice country but we don’t speak the language, we cannot drive, we just stay home isolated. Over there we can have a little piece of farm, raise chicken, pig, and cow, don’t forget to wake up early, harvest on time, make enough this year to another coming year. That’s it. Then we feeling like peaceful. Here, we do right and they say wrong. Then we do wrong and they say right. Which way we go? We want to go home.”

The home to which the older Hmong dream of returning—which they call
peb lub tebchaws
, “our fields and our lands”—is prewar Laos. Their memories of wartime Laos are almost unrelievedly traumatic: a “bereavement overload” that critically magnifies all their other stresses. Richard Mollica, a psychiatrist who helped found the Indochinese Psychiatry Clinic in Boston, found that during the war and its aftermath, Hmong refugees had experienced an average of fifteen “major trauma events,” such as witnessing killings and torture. Mollica has observed of his patients, “Their psychological reality is both full and empty. They are ‘full’ of the past; they are ‘empty’ of new ideas and life experiences.”

“Full” of both past trauma and past longing, the Hmong have found it especially hard to deal with present threats to their old identities. I once went to a conference on Southeast Asian mental health at which a psychologist named Evelyn Lee, who was born in Macao, invited six members of the audience to come to the front of the auditorium for a role-playing exercise. She cast them as a grandfather, a father, a mother, an eighteen-year-old son, a sixteen-year-old daughter, and a twelve-year-old daughter. “Okay,” she told them, “line up according to your status in your old country.” Ranking themselves by traditional notions of age and gender, they queued up in the order I’ve just mentioned, with the grandfather standing proudly at the head of the line. “Now they come to America,” said Dr. Lee. “Grandfather has no job. Father can only chop vegetables. Mother didn’t work in the old country, but here she gets a job in a garment factory. Oldest daughter works there too. Son drops out of high school because he can’t learn English. Youngest daughter learns the best English in the family and ends up at U.C. Berkeley. Now you line up again.” As the family reshuffled, I realized that its power structure had turned completely upside down, with the youngest girl now occupying the head of the line and the grandfather standing forlornly at the tail.

Dr. Lee’s exercise was an eloquent demonstration of what sociologists call “role loss.” Of all the stresses in the Hmong community, role loss—the constellation of apparent incompetencies that convinced Lia’s mother she was stupid—may be the most corrosive to the ego. Every Hmong can tell stories about colonels who became janitors, military communications specialists who became chicken processors, flight crewmen who found no work at all. Dang Moua’s cousin Moua Kee, a former judge, worked first in a box factory and then on the night shift in a machine shop. “When you have no country, no land, no house, no power, everyone is the same,” he said with a shrug. Major Wang Seng Khang, a former battalion commander who served as leader for 10,000 Hmong in his refugee camp, took five years to find a job as a part-time church liaison. Even then, he depended on his wife’s wages from a jewelry factory to pay the rent and on his children to translate for him. Of himself and his fellow leaders, he said, “We have become children in this country.”

And in this country the real children have assumed some of the power that used to belong to their elders. The status conferred by speaking English and understanding American conventions is a phenomenon familiar to most immigrant groups, but the Hmong, whose identity has always hinged on tradition, have taken it particularly hard. “Animals are responsible to their masters, and children to their parents,” advised a Hmong proverb that survived unquestioned for countless generations. In prewar Laos, where families worked in the fields all day and shared a single room at night, it was not uncommon for children and their parents to be together around the clock. Remoteness and altitude insulated their villages from the majority culture. Hmong children here spend six hours in school and often several more at large in their communities, soaking up America. “My sisters don’t feel they’re Hmong at all,” my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, once told me. “One of them has spiked hair. The youngest one speaks mostly English. I don’t see the respect I gave elders at that age.” Lia’s sister May said, “I know how to do
paj ntaub
, but I hate sewing. My mom says, why aren’t you doing
paj ntaub?
I say, Mom, this is America.”

Although Americanization may bring certain benefits—more job opportunities, more money, less cultural dislocation—Hmong parents are likely to view any earmarks of assimilation as an insult and a threat. “In our families, the kids eat hamburger and bread,” said Dang Moua sadly, “whereas the parents prefer hot soup with vegetables, rice, and meat like tripes or liver or kidney that the young ones don’t want. The old ones may have no driver’s licenses and they ask the young ones to take them some place. Sometimes the kid say I’m too busy. That is a serious situation when the kid will not obey us. The old ones are really upset.” Rebellious young Hmong sometimes go beyond refusing to chauffeur their parents, and tangle with drugs or violence. In 1994, Xou Yang, a nineteen-year-old high-school dropout from Banning, California, robbed and murdered a German tourist. His father, a veteran of the war in Laos, told a reporter, “We have lost all control. Our children do not respect us. One of the hardest things for me is when I tell my children things and they say, ‘I already know that.’ When my wife and I try to tell my son about Hmong culture, he tells me people here are different, and he will not listen to me.”

Sukey Waller, Merced’s maverick psychologist, once recalled a Hmong community meeting she had attended. “An old man of seventy or eighty stood up in the front row,” she said, “and he asked one of the most poignant questions I have ever heard: ‘Why, when what we did worked so well for two hundred years, is everything breaking down?’” When Sukey told me this, I understood why the man had asked the question, but I thought he was wrong. Much has broken down, but not everything. Jacques Lemoine’s analysis of the postwar hegira—that the Hmong came to the West to save not only their lives but their ethnicity—has been at least partially confirmed in the United States. I can think of no other group of immigrants whose culture, in its most essential aspects, has been so little eroded by assimilation. Virtually all Hmong still marry other Hmong, marry young, obey the taboo against marrying within their own clans, pay brideprices, and have large families. Clan and lineage structures are intact, as is the ethic of group solidarity and mutual assistance. On most weekends in Merced, it is possible to hear a death drum beating at a Hmong funeral or a
txiv neeb
’s gong and rattle sounding at a healing ceremony. Babies wear strings on their wrists to protect their souls from abduction by
dabs
. People divine their fortunes by interpreting their dreams. (If you dream of opium, you will have bad luck; if you dream you are covered with excrement, you will have good luck; if you dream you have a snake on your lap, you will become pregnant.) Animal sacrifices are common, even among Christian converts, a fact I first learned when May Ying Xiong told me that she would be unavailable to interpret one weekend because her family was sacrificing a cow to safeguard her niece during an upcoming open-heart operation. When I said, “I didn’t know your family was so religious,” she replied, “Oh yes, we’re Mormon.”

Even more crucially, the essential Hmong temperament—independent, insular, antiauthoritarian, suspicious, stubborn, proud, choleric, energetic, vehement, loquacious, humorous, hospitable, generous—has so far been ineradicable. Indeed, as George M. Scott, Jr., has observed, the Hmong have responded to the hardships of life in the United States “by becoming
more
Hmong, rather than less so.” Summing up his impressions of the Hmong in 1924, François Marie Savina, the French missionary, attributed their ethnic durability to six factors: religion; love of liberty; traditional customs; refusal to marry outside their race; life in cold, dry, mountainous areas; and the toughening effects of war. Even though their experience here has been suffused with despair and loss, the 180,000 Hmong who live in the United States are doing passably or better on the first four counts.
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