In America, They Cut Your Head OffAmong the Hmong
Immediately after finishing college, I worked for eight months in Khao-I-Dang, a camp for Khmer refugees in southeastern Thailand on the Cambodian border. The inhabitants of Khao-I-Dang were the remnants of the Cambodian middle class that had been devastated in the “killing fields”; that is, they were fairly modern people with an all-too-sophisticated understanding of their terrible political predicament. They had had their fill of Asia, which meant to them communism and starvation and horror and genocide. Many of them knew French and all of them were desperate to emigrate to France or Canada or Australia or, especially, the United States. Everything they did — whether cultivating the friendship of foreign relief workers, smuggling gold and precious stones in and out of the camp, or learning English — they did fervently. They seemed to imagine the United States as a kind of super-Cambodia, a nation abundantly blessed with every virtue they recalled from the prewar Cambodia that existed only in their nostalgic memories: peaceful, palm-lined streets; rivers teeming with big, succulent carp; a benevolent, generous, well-ordered government; markets forever flowing with cheap rice and bananas and mangos; and though there were said to be lots of white people in America, most of them, no doubt, were bright young doctors and kindly relief workers, just like the Americans they met in Khao-I-Dang. And rich! Everybody in America was rich, and they would go to America and would soon be rich, too. The resettlement of Cambodians abroad was just then getting underway, and very few refugees had made it all the way through the pipeline of transit camps that led from the border to Bangkok and thence to Indonesia or the Philippines and to the United States or elsewhere. There was no one sending word back to the camps, no one to temper their dreams. American relief workers, for the most part, were in awe of the Cambodians as survivors; we felt like the G.I.s must have felt in 1945 when they opened the gates of Dachau and saw the supreme humanity that imbues those who have suffered the gravest calamities. I, for one, certainly wasn’t going to tell any Cambodians that America might not pan out exactly as they hoped. Typically, Western relief workers were able to put in about three months in Khao-I-Dang before burning out in the face of the bottomless needs of 150,000 people and the camp’s dispiriting atmosphere of sickness, desperation, and boredom. I was cocky and headstrong, though; I convinced myself that I was “indispensable” and managed to hang on for most of a year before I could admit to myself that I was tapped out and all but useless, just like the too-long-in-the-jungle “station agents” that populate Conrad’s tales of colonial futility. I had to leave Khao-I-Dang. For a month I wondered listlessly and aimlessly around Bangkok, taking in the stench of two-stroke exhaust and rotting fruit and millions of sweating bodies. What would I do now? I couldn’t bear to bring my Asian adventure to a close, but I knew I couldn’t endure any more of the chaos of the Cambodian border. Then, in the spring of 1981, I got a break: a job offer from a British-based “volag” (that is, a volunteer agency) called The Ockenden Venture, which ran a school in the Sob Tuang Refugee Camp in Nan Province of northern Thailand. The camp was “glai lao” — just across the border from Laos — and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees had established the camp to harbor the Hmong, Yao, Mian, and Lao refugees who had fled from the repressive new Vietnamese-dominated regime in Laos. Rumor had it that Vietnamese planes were dumping clouds of a neurotoxin known as “yellow rain” on their villages in reprisal for aiding the CIA’s “secret war” against the communist Pathet Lao. The camp was very primitive; in fact, it was more or less typical of the hilltop villages the Hmong have built and abandoned for many centuries as they’ve gradually made their way from central China to the mountainous regions of Laos and northern Thailand. Traditionally, these tribal people have been seminomadic, moving into a wilderness area, making a precarious living for a few years from opium poppies and crude rice terraces, and then moving south once the land gave out. The only difference between Sob Tuang Camp and nearby “Thai” villages of Hmong and Yao people was that these refugees were not allowed to plant opium poppies, or even rice, and they had nowhere else to go but the United States and other western nations. The United Nations provided them with enough rice and supplies to sustain life, and the Thai army prevented them from moving any deeper into Thailand. And so they sat in Sob Tuang, ostensibly waiting for resettlement abroad, but evincing little interest in their political fortunes or their future. The women did most of the work — hauling water and preparing meals and tending children — and the rest of the time sat squatting in gossip circles as they embroidered the colorful cloth that is the hallmark of Hmong culture. The men, meanwhile, now relieved of their traditional duties of defending and moving the tribe, had little to do but sit around betting on cockfights. I lived in a small room in the Ockenden Venture school. My job was to design a very basic course of English language instruction and train a group of six young Hmong men to carry it out. I had a tough time adjusting to the ethos of camp life up here in the north. Khao-I-Dang had seemed a temporary, political improvisation crammed with panicky Cambodians; Sob Tuang had all the heavy-limbed intractability of rural poverty anywhere in the Third World. Whereas Khao-I-Dang had an almost military orderliness to its even rows of bamboo houses, identical as barracks, Sob Tuang was like any remote hill tribe village, a chaotic scattering of tiny huts built with whatever was at hand: bamboo and thatch and leaves and mud, as well as scrap wood, oil drums hammered flat, and the blue plastic sheeting so ubiquitous in refugee camps. Whereas everything in Khao-I-Dang had proceeded chop-chop (which is, incidentally, the only Khmer word I know of that seems to have gotten, somehow, into a typical American vocabulary), here in Sob Tuang a torpor hung on the hills like the thick haze that rises from the valleys when the rice stubble is burned after the harvest. Whereas, in Khao-I-Dang, my bamboo schoolhouse was every day full to bursting with Cambodians who would arrive hours before me to secure a place, here in Sob Tuang my six Hmong teachers-to-be would trickle in one by one, at ten-thirty and eleven and twelve, for a ten o’clock class. And whereas the Cambodians down south were passionate to get to an America they only thought they knew something about, these Hmong and Yao tribesman were receiving a steady stream of the most bizarre information directly from their relatives in the United States. I only learned about this gradually. Except for my six students, who only knew as much English as I could teach them, there were no refugees here for me to speak with in French, and certainly my Thai, much less my Hmong, wasn’t good for much conversation. (The Hmong, in fact, were often marvelous linguists who could speak several dialects of their own language, as well as Yao, Mian, and Lao. But damn little English.) Since my students quickly got bored with classroom instruction, most of my “lessons” consisted of group walks around the camp, with running conversations like “What is that? That is a pig. Spell ’pig.’ P - I - G. Do you like to eat rice? Yes, I like to eat rice every day.” We would watch kids kicking an empty can between huts. “What are they doing? They are playing football.” We would pause outside certain huts where old men lay empty-eyed, passing around a slender bamboo water pipe from which rose a thin blue smoke. “What are they doing? They are smoking. What are they smoking? They are smoking opium.” My young friends slowly shook their heads and rolled their eyes: Old people these days. My daily presence along the dusty pathways that meandered along the camp’s hilltops created very little stir amongst the refugees, certainly nothing like the rock-star scenes that had prevailed whenever I had walked around Khao-I-Dang. It was such a blessed relief for me to arouse only mild, respectful curiosity, for my presence to be no big deal, that I didn’t much pause to think it strange that the Hmong weren’t more interested in me. Shouldn’t they have been? After all, they knew that, barring some kind of political miracle, they would never return to Laos; America was to be their new home. The Cambodians had been consumed with curiosity about the United States and would even wait in line for the privilege of asking me to explicate a word or a pop-culture allusion they’d found in a ragged, filthy, much-annotated, six-month-old copy of Time. (“Sir! This ’My Sharona’ — it is a famous poem?”) Here in Sob Tuang the refugees regarded me with only the mildest interest, as though some of the boys had simply brought home a new dog that happened to be six feet tall and red-headed. From time to time we would be invited inside a hut for tea. Typically, an entire extended family, perhaps a dozen people, would live inside a single room. The kitchen was the half of the dirt floor covered with ashes and bits of charcoal; the bedroom was the stack of straw mats that were unrolled at night. In many of the houses I visited, a nail had been driven into one of the posts that supported the walls, and from this nail hung the family’s most expensive and prized possession: a cheap Chinese cassette deck. Now, I had been briefed about the Hmong. I had been told that, before the wars in Indochina, they had had about as little contact with modern technology as it was possible for human beings to have on the planet Earth. The Peace Corps types who filled me in avoided pejorative words like “primitive” — they were careful to praise the Hmong’s sophisticated understanding of nature and their highly developed oral culture — but I got the picture. The Hmong and the other hill tribes were definitely not of the twentieth century. The “Secret War” had changed all that, though, and had changed it in bizarre ways. For instance, there was a report of a refugee who had piloted a C.I.A.-provided helicopter in raids against the Pathet Lao but, before coming to Thailand, had never once seen a car. When I saw those cassette decks, then, I thought I was seeing “poverty”: the first meager inroads of modern commercial culture into one of the last untapped markets. I thought it a damn shame that the Hmong were being spoiled by the same junk pop music I’d heard all over Thailand; after all, I was fresh out of college, fresh out of the political-science courses that had given me a keen eye for “exploitation” and “Coca-Cola imperialism.” In fact, that was the least of what I was seeing: those cassette decks represented the same amazing technological leapfrogging that had taken a premodern tribesman and, bypassing the age of the automobile completely, strapped him into the cockpit of a Bell-Huey attack chopper. In exactly this way the Hmong were bypassing the age of literacy. To be sure, the Hmong language does exist in written form. Early in the century, I was told, a French monk, a missionary, had studied the strange seven-tone tongue, with its weirdly beautiful music of grunts and squeaks, and somehow managed to render it in the Roman alphabet. A Bible had thus been produced in Hmong so that these remote Asiatic people might learn the folkways of a semi-nomadic, tribal people whose five-thousand-year-old lives differed little from those of the Hmong; God knows what they made of it. I could never get a fix on how many Hmong had learned to read and write. Sometimes the women would include phrases of Hmong in their embroidered cloths, but my students told me that they were just copying, that these weird-looking words like “NCO TXOG THBUM NYOB” were to the embroiderers just abstract geometric figures. Few Hmong had attended formal school, and few of those had attended formal school for long. . . . Then the war came along and disrupted even that. For most Hmong, it was back to square one: oral tradition — but with the new twist of cheap modern recording technology and a sophisticated international postal system. It took me a long time to understand all this, and for the refugees it was so mundane, so quotidian, that they didn’t bother to bring it to my attention. They didn’t know they were a Western anthropologist’s dream come true — why should they? And hell, I was just an English major anyway, attempting to address something that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees regarded as something of a problem: these future Americans were showing precariously little interest in learning English. I had been so overwhelmed by the desperate eagerness of the Cambodians to learn English, and the stinking low-country heat of southern Thailand, that this stint in Sob Tuang seemed like a kind of high-country, psychedelic, mango-munching vacation. Oh, I did my best to instill in a few nice young guys the rudiments of English, but the Hmong, I knew, would learn it the same way my German great-grandparents had learned it: through feet-first immersion in America. Gradually I began to understand the importance of the batches of thick manila envelopes that were sporadically dumped at the camp gate by the Thai post truck at the farthest reach of its route. These envelopes had come from far across the sea, and a few of them contained letters written in Hmong or in the gorgeous curlicues of Lao, but mostly they contained American cash, instamatic-type photographs, and homemade cassette tapes. I had the equation that cassette-equals-music so embedded in my mind that I didn’t twig at first — these were their letters. After ten years of war, privation, and refugee camps, Hmong tribespeople were finding themselves in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Biloxi, Mississippi — wherever kindly church and service groups had ponied up to sponsor a family of those poor unfortunate victims of communist tyranny over there in . . . well, not Vietnam, but you know, one of those sad, broken countries. America being America, and this being the first year of the Reagan era in which godly volunteerism was to supplant godless Big Government, the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees was conducted in a chaotic, ad hoc free-for-all of good intentions, sudden budget cuts, and a near-total ignorance of these people and their various cultures. The Vietnamese were doing all right; most of them came from a sophisticated urban middle class that had had plenty of contact with Americans during the war, and with western civilization — the French brand — before that. American life was a bit tougher on most of the Cambodians; they came from a more rural, slower-paced country and had much less experience with Americans during the war, and to be sure they were still traumatized by the horrors of the Pol Pot era. But the Hmong! Imagine being a fresh-off-the-plane Hmong tribesman, finding yourself in Bismarck, North Dakota. The church that sponsored your passage assumed that a “family” meant an American-style nuclear family — Mom and Pop and the kids — and you were barely able to persuade them to include a couple of grannies too. Your real family, with its five-generation tangle of cousins and second wives and second cousins and third wives, is still back in Sob Tuang, waiting for more sponsors, sponsors that almost certainly won’t be here in Bismarck. The leader of your clan is in Long Beach, California, which might as well be Moscow or Mars. You do not speak the language of Bismarck beyond a few simple greetings and pointing words, and it goes without saying that no one in the tribe of Bismarck speaks Hmong. Everything is unbelievably, numbingly strange: the food, which comes in such odd flavors and colors and quantities, everything sealed in layer upon layer of plastic and paper and metal; the constant exchange of money and the panicky realization that you simply have to have some; the enticingly limitless availability of things coupled with the maddening requirement that you hand over that damned money; the total unavailability of opium, or even decent rice; the insistence by the social worker that your children go to school with Americans, where they are learning, apparently, to shout and roughhouse and disrespect you and your wife and your mother; the further insistence by the social worker that you spend each day, a full eight hours, sweeping and then scrubbing the already clean corridors of a huge building in which people appear to do nothing but sit at desks, reading and writing on television sets, and if you don’t do this, you are made to understand, then the social worker won’t give you any more money; the rundown apartment you’ve been given, with terrifying dark-skinned neighbors who beat up your kids and call them “Chinamen”; the landscape, as flat as a hammered oil drum and bleakly featureless in every direction, with not a mountain in sight; and worst of all the weather, which was nice enough when you arrived but now is much colder than anything you or even your mother ever experienced in Laos, so cold that the rain falls as powdered ice, and falls, and falls. . . . As I began to question my students about the contents of those tapes, and saw the photos that came with them, I realized that these refugees in Sob Tuang didn’t ask me about America because they thought they already knew about America. Little by little I learned of an astounding new America that existed only in the minds of Laotian refugees. It was like the “telephone game,” in which a simple phrase or sentence is whispered from one person to another, to another, to another, and so on, until the last person blurts out, usually in a tone of wrinkle-browed perplexity, “Hog a bowl into your eye?” — a phrase that started out as “Rock and roll can never die.” So it was here: the Hmong were playing a kind of global telephone game in which the experience of modern or even postmodern America was taken in through the sensibilities of a tribal people from Southeast Asia, rendered into language utterly unrelated to English, listened to by people barely out of Laos, then passed along from one refugee to another to one of my students, and finally translated into rudimentary English for me to hear, often in total bewilderment. This Sob Tuang America became a puzzle for me to solve, a set of riddles. I might be told, for example, that in America they — always “they” — have buildings with special walls and these walls have little colored spots on them and you push these spots with your fingers and then money comes out of the wall and you can take as much as you want. I would listen to the accumulation of details, and suddenly they would cohere: ATM! Or toilet, or telephone, or welfare department, or probation officer. Sometimes I would try to rectify misconceptions, but I have to admit that Sob Tuang America was such a phantasmagorical place, sometimes so charming and sometimes so monstrous, that I usually didn’t have the heart to try explaining the “truth,” which, the longer I stayed in Sob Tuang, was becoming as weird to me as it was to them. What kind of country generates Kleenex, or B-52s, or social workers, or lite beer, or skyscrapers, or pet rocks, or Sun City? And where could I begin explaining all this anyway? But the stories that got back to Sob Tuang! “In America, they put you in prison for hunting.” This particular Hmongism turned out to involve a Hmong who couldn’t help but notice the abundance of squirrels in the park near his home — plentiful game. Naturally enough, he went and fetched his crossbow and set to work, just as any self-respecting provider would do. He was mystified, then, when the police arrested him; no one had ever told him that squirrels were out of season. “In America, the house screams when you cook.” The story here was that a Hmong woman, whose family had just taken occupancy of a typical apartment, began to prepare dinner that evening by gathering some sticks and paper litter that she found nearby and built a tidy little fire right on top of the handy little fire-grate in the kitchen. Suddenly the smoke detector was shrieking, somebody in the building called 911, and the next thing anybody knew, an angry fireman was futilely trying to explain that you just can’t build a wood fire on top of a gas range. But how was the poor woman to know? “In America, sometimes the walls work and sometimes they do not.” A social worker who got a call from a Hmong family was told that “the wall didn’t work.” When he arrived he discovered that the family, having decided to move the television, had unplugged it from the living room, brought it into the bedroom, and simply jammed the plug into the wallboard, believing that the whole wall — in fact, the whole building, perhaps the whole country — conducted electric current. The photographs I saw fell into two categories: Here We Are in America with Our American House, and Here We Are in America with Our American Car. In either case, people would be standing stock-straight, stiff and unsmiling, grim inheritors of the American Dream. They were always a bit pudgier than any Hmong I saw in Thailand. My favorite photo pictured a family of eight, lined up in strict order of height, in front of a drab suburban tract house. At one end stood Dad, the tallest at about five-two, and then his stocky wife with a baby strapped to her back, and then the eldest son, eighteen maybe, and then another son with what I learned to call “Hmong hair” (many young Hmong men had taken a vow never to cut their hair “until Laos is free,” and after a few years in the refugee camps they had fabulous manes reaching to their waists), and so on down the line to the family’s tiniest member, Grandma. All were attired in rummage-sale best . . . all except Grandma, in full tribal garb with black turban, copious silver ornamentation, embroidered black tunic and short skirt, and cobalt-blue running sneakers. On the automotive front, a story went around amongst relief workers that Cadillacs had become the Hmong car of choice — it was 1981, and in the aftermath of the mid-’70s oil crisis, used-car lots all over America were filled with gas-guzzlers. One particular Hmong family was delighted to be able to drive off in a huge ten-year-old Cadillac land yacht, but later that day they returned, on foot, demanding their money back because the car was “broken.” It turned out that the car had simply run out of gas, but no one had bothered to tell the new owners that cars have to be refueled periodically. All over America, Hmong families were receiving regular visits from the repo man because no one had fully explained the concept of paying by installments. Again and again Hmong people were making purchases that seemed like great deals, but they didn’t know that a transaction wasn’t completed with the down payment. It didn’t work that way in Laos. “In America, do not go to the hospital because they cut your head off.” One of the saddest and most alarming stories that filtered back to Thailand concerned a phenomenon that was being called “Hmong Death.” It seemed that there were numerous cases of apparently healthy Hmong males who would suddenly, often in the middle of the night, experience anxiety attacks so extreme as to be fatal. There were various medical theories about what might be causing this — delayed toxic reaction to Yellow Rain, or perhaps some kind of psycho-neuro shutdown brought on by extreme culture shock and the almost total breakdown of meaning itself that accompanied resettlement in America. In one case, a man was stricken by a paralyzing panic attack and was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where he shortly died. It so happened that in this particular locality (somewhere in Rhode Island, I believe), local statute stipulates that, in cases of unexplained deaths, autopsies must be performed immediately. The medical examiner had already finished this grim chore when the distraught widow was shown the body of her husband, a body that must have been a Frankensteinian horror, roughly sutured back together. The hospital staff were unable to explain to her that the dismemberment was not the cause of death.
One of the saddest sights I have ever witnessed came shortly before I left Sob Tuang to return to the United States. Very early one morning I heard a low rumbling come from the camp’s front gate. The buses were here — three big ones. For a couple of weeks I’d been told they’d arrive from Bangkok “any day now,” because the American embassy had cleared another fifty families from Sob Tuang for resettlement in the United States. The sleepy Thai sentry at the gate lazily waved them through, and they chugged to a halt near the school. There was no one waiting for them. I’d seen the same scene enacted amongst the Cambodians, but, as with everything else, this scene too would play itself out quite differently amongst the Hmong. In Khao-I-Dang (a vastly larger camp than Sob Tuang), thousands of people mobbed the buses, and there were sometimes dozens of claimants for every name that was read out. Fights broke out, people got hurt. U.S. Embassy officials and refugee leaders would spend the whole day trying to sort out the mess, and when the last sobbing impostor was thrown off the last bus, the chosen few were beaming with excitement and shouting encouragements to the friends and relatives left behind: don’t worry, when we get to America we’ll sponsor you, don’t give up. Hundreds of people remained long enough to see the buses off, waving wildly, sadly, hopefully, as though they were witnessing the Rapture. Here in Sob Tuang, though, the scene was utterly different. The drivers and embassy officials seemed little surprised when no one showed up to meet the buses — they’d been through the same thing before. They shut off the motors and waited. In the course of a long day, just a thin trickle of people made its way down from the huts on the surrounding hilltops and slowly gathered around the buses. Most of them, it turned out, were there not to leave but to see off their relatives. By late in the afternoon, only about a quarter of the people listed on the embassy manifests had actually shown up, and these few were cajoled onto the buses, carrying such accouterments of camp life as blackened cooking gear, opium pipes, bundles of ragged clothes, and blue plastic sheeting — with such meager grubstakes were they setting out for America. Those who could manage it, especially the older women, were dressed in their best ceremonial finery, as they would for a funeral: this journey would be as profound as any passage from life to death, or death to life. They sat dejectedly with their hands dangling out the windows and their faces averted; friends and relatives would reach up and touch those hands in farewell, then turn away quickly, their faces twisted with grief. And then, at dusk, the drivers started the engines, shut the doors, and eased the buses out the gate and down the rutted dirt track from Sob Tuang, down from the mountains, down from Asia, down to America. I was the only one left watching.
© Michael Fleming Sweet Briar, Virginia January, 1998
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The Hmong and other hill tribes had never accepted the whole idea of nation-states, and they were only too eager to accept American weapons and money in return for making war on the hated lowlanders, the Lao. It’s quite doubtful that Cold War ideologies had anything to do with the picking of sides; if the Pathet Lao had had American backing, the hill tribes gladly would have taken their weaponry from the Russians or Chinese.
After I returned to the United States, I went to visit some relatives in St. Paul, Minnesota, who were delighted to be able to take me to their church and point out a Hmong family the church had sponsored. I was just as delighted to have a chance to trot out the little bit of Hmong I had really mastered: “Nya Zhang!” I sang out heartily. “Ko mu dashi?” (“Hello! How are you?” Or more literally, “Where are you going?”) I suppose I expected them to smile broadly and laugh and assail me with a blizzard of happy conversation in the assumption that I understood far more than I did. That had happened countless times in Sob Tuang. Here, though, on this St. Paul sidewalk, this poor little family stood frozen and bewildered, perhaps even a little frightened, before nodding, murmuring the stock response “Wa shi” (“Going to play”), and waiting for me to just go away, which I promptly did. |