The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  Around A.D. 400, the Hmong succeeded in establishing an independent kingdom in the Honan, Hupeh, and Hunan provinces. Since even among themselves they were (as Father Jean Mottin, a modern French missionary in Thailand, has put it) “allergic to all kind of authority,” the power of their kings was limited by a complex system of village and district assemblies. Though the crown was hereditary, each new king was chosen from among the former king’s sons by an electorate of all the arms-bearing men in the kingdom. Since the Hmong practiced polygyny, and kings had an especially large number of wives, the pool of candidates was usually ample enough to afford an almost democratically wide choice. The Hmong kingdom lasted for five hundred years before the Chinese managed to crush it. Most of the Hmong migrated again, this time toward the west, to the mountains of Kweichow and Szechuan. More insurrections followed. Some Hmong warriors were known for using poisoned arrows; others went into battle dressed in copper and buffalo-hide armor, carrying knives clenched between their teeth in addition to the usual spears and shields. Some Hmong crossbows were so big it took three men to draw them. In the sixteenth century, in order to keep the Hmong from venturing outside Kweichow, the Ming dynasty constructed the Hmong Wall, a smaller version of the Great Wall of China that was one hundred miles long, ten feet tall, and manned by armed guards. For a time the Hmong were contained, but not controlled. Gabriel de Magaillans, a Jesuit missionary who traveled through China in the seventeenth century, wrote that they “pay no tribute to the emperor, nor yield him any obedience…. The Chinese stand in fear of them; so that after several trials which they have made of their prowess, they have been forced to let them live at their own liberty.”

  The Chinese tried to “pacify” and “sinicize” the Hmong by telling them that they had to surrender their arms, that they had to wear Chinese clothes, that the men had to cut their hair short, and that they were forbidden to sacrifice buffalos. Those who submitted were called the “Cooked Miao” those who refused were the “Raw Miao.” There were a lot more Raw Miao than cooked ones. In 1730 or thereabouts, hundreds of Hmong warriors killed their wives and children, believing they would fight more fiercely if they had nothing to lose. (It worked for a while. Thus unencumbered, they seized several passes, severing Chinese supply lines, before they themselves were all killed or captured.) In 1772, a small army of Hmong squashed a large army of Chinese in eastern Kweichow by rolling boulders on their heads while they were marching through a narrow gorge. The Manchu emperor, Ch’ien-lung, decided he would be satisfied with nothing less than the extermination of the entire Hmong tribe, a goal whose unsuccessful pursuit ultimately cost him twice what he had spent conquering the entire kingdom of Turkestan. Ch’ien-lung dispatched another general to the Hmong regions. After many months of sieges and battles, the general told Sonom, the Hmong king of greater Kintchuen, that if he surrendered, his family would be spared. Sonom swallowed this story. When he and his family were brought before the emperor, they were chopped into bits, and their heads were placed in cages for public exhibition.

  It is, perhaps, no surprise that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a large number of Hmong decided that they had had enough of China. Not only were they fed up with being persecuted, but their soil was also getting depleted, there was a rash of epidemics, and taxes were rising. Although the majority of the Hmong stayed behind—today there are about five million Hmong in China, more than in any other country—about a half million migrated to Indochina, walking the ridgelines, driving their horses and cattle ahead of them, carrying everything they owned. As was their custom, they went to the highlands, settling first in what are now Vietnam and Laos, and later in Thailand. For the most part, they built their villages in places where no one else wanted to live. But if the local tribes objected or demanded tribute, the Hmong fought back with flintlock blunderbusses, or with their fists, and usually won. Father Mottin quotes an official who said, “I saw a Meo take my son by the feet and break his spine against the posts of my hut.” After the French established control over Indochina in the 1890s, the Hmong rebelled against their extortionate tax system in a series of revolts. One of them, called the Madman’s War, which lasted from 1919 to 1921, was led by a messianic figure named Pa Chay, who had a habit of climbing trees so that he could receive his military orders directly from heaven. His followers blew away large numbers of colonial soldiers with ten-foot-long cannons made from tree trunks. Only after the French granted them special administrative status in 1920, acknowledging that the best way to avoid being driven crazy by them was to leave them alone, did the Hmong of Laos, who constituted the largest group outside China, settle down peaceably to several unbroken decades of farming mountain rice, growing opium, and having as little contact as possible with the French, the lowland Lao, or any of the other ethnic groups who lived at lower elevations.

  The history of the Hmong yields several lessons that anyone who deals with them might do well to remember. Among the most obvious of these are that the Hmong do not like to take orders; that they do not like to lose; that they would rather flee, fight, or die than surrender; that they are not intimidated by being outnumbered; that they are rarely persuaded that the customs of other cultures, even those more powerful than their own, are superior; and that they are capable of getting very angry. Whether you find these traits infuriating or admirable depends largely on whether or not you are trying to make a Hmong do something he or she would prefer not to do. Those who have tried to defeat, deceive, govern, regulate, constrain, assimilate, intimidate, or patronize the Hmong have, as a rule, disliked them intensely.

  On the other hand, many historians, anthropologists, and missionaries (to whom the Hmong have usually been polite, if not always receptive, as long as the proselytizing has not been coercive) have developed a great fondness for them. Father Savina wrote that the Hmong possessed “a bravery and courage inferior to that of no other people,” because of which “they have never had a homeland, but neither have they ever known servitude and slavery.” William Robert Geddes, an Australian anthropologist, spent most of 1958 and 1959 in Pasamliem, a Hmong village in northern Thailand. (Though more Hmong lived in Laos and Vietnam, most Western observers in the last half century or so have worked in Thailand because of its stabler political situation.) Geddes did not find his fieldwork easy. The villagers were too proud to sell him food, so he had to transport his supplies by packhorse, nor would they allow themselves to be hired to build him a house, so he had to employ opium addicts from a Thai village lower down the mountain. However, the Hmong eventually won his deep respect. In his book Migrants of the Mountains, Geddes wrote:

  The preservation by the Miao of their ethnic identity for such a long time despite their being split into many small groups surrounded by different alien peoples and scattered over a vast geographic area is an outstanding record paralleling in some ways that of the Jews but more remarkable because they lacked the unifying forces of literacy and a doctrinal religion and because the features they preserved seem to be more numerous.

  Robert Cooper, a British anthropologist who spent two years studying resource scarcity in four Hmong communities in northern Thailand, described his research subjects as

  polite without fawning, proud but not arrogant. Hospitable without being pushy; discreet respecters of personal liberty who demand only that their liberty be respected in return. People who do not steal or lie. Self-sufficient people who showed no trace of jealousy of an outsider who said he wanted to live like a Hmong yet owned an expensive motorcycle, a tape-recorder, cameras, and who never had to work for a living.

  From his post in the Hmong village of Khek Noi, also in northern Thailand, Father Mottin wrote in his History of the Hmong (a wonderful book, exuberantly translated from the French by an Irish nun who had once been the tutor to the future king of Thailand, and printed, rather faintly, in Bangkok):

  Though they are but a small people, the Hmong still prove to be great men. What particularly strikes me is to see how this small race
has always manged [sic] to survive though they often had to face more powerful nations. Let us consider, for example, that the Chinese were 250 times more numerous than they, and yet never found their way to swallow them. The Hmong…have never possessed a country of their own, they have never got a king worthy of this name, and yet they have passed through the ages remaining what they have always wished to be, that is to say: free men with a right to live in this world as Hmong. Who would not admire them for that?

  One of the recurring characters in Hmong folktales is the Orphan, a young man whose parents have died, leaving him alone to live by his wits. In one story, collected by Charles Johnson, the Orphan offers the hospitality of his humble home to two sisters, one good and one snotty. The snotty one says:

  What, with a filthy orphan boy like you? Ha! You’re so ragged you’re almost naked! Your penis is dirty with ashes! You must eat on the ground, and sleep in the mud, like a buffalo! I don’t think you even have any drink or tobacco to offer us!

  The Orphan may not have a clean penis, but he is clever, energetic, brave, persistent, and a virtuoso player of the qeej, a musical instrument, highly esteemed by the Hmong, that is made from six curving bamboo pipes attached to a wooden wind chamber. Though he lives by himself on the margins of society, reviled by almost everyone, he knows in his heart that he is actually superior to all his detractors. Charles Johnson points out that the Orphan is, of course, a symbol of the Hmong people. In this story, the Orphan marries the good sister, who is able to perceive his true value, and they prosper and have children. The snotty sister ends up married to the kind of dab who lives in a cave, drinks blood, and makes women sterile.

  3

  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

  When Lia was about three months old, her older sister Yer slammed the front door of the Lees’ apartment. A few moments later, Lia’s eyes rolled up, her arms jerked over her head, and she fainted. The Lees had little doubt what had happened. Despite the careful installation of Lia’s soul during the hu plig ceremony, the noise of the door had been so profoundly frightening that her soul had fled her body and become lost. They recognized the resulting symptoms as qaug dab peg, which means “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” The spirit referred to in this phrase is a soul-stealing dab; peg means to catch or hit; and qaug means to fall over with one’s roots still in the ground, as grain might be beaten down by wind or rain.

  In Hmong-English dictionaries, qaug dab peg is generally translated as epilepsy. It is an illness well known to the Hmong, who regard it with ambivalence. On the one hand, it is acknowledged to be a serious and potentially dangerous condition. Tony Coelho, who was Merced’s congressman from 1979 to 1989, is an epileptic. Coelho is a popular figure among the Hmong, and a few years ago, some local Hmong men were sufficiently concerned when they learned he suffered from qaug dab peg that they volunteered the services of a shaman, a txiv neeb, to perform a ceremony that would retrieve Coelho’s errant soul. The Hmong leader to whom they made this proposition politely discouraged them, suspecting that Coelho, who is a Catholic of Portuguese descent, might not appreciate having chickens, and maybe a pig as well, sacrificed on his behalf.

  On the other hand, the Hmong consider qaug dab peg to be an illness of some distinction. This fact might have surprised Tony Coelho no less than the dead chickens would have. Before he entered politics, Coelho planned to become a Jesuit priest, but was barred by a canon forbidding the ordination of epileptics. What was considered a disqualifying impairment by Coelho’s church might have been seen by the Hmong as a sign that he was particularly fit for divine office. Hmong epileptics often become shamans. Their seizures are thought to be evidence that they have the power to perceive things other people cannot see, as well as facilitating their entry into trances, a prerequisite for their journeys into the realm of the unseen. The fact that they have been ill themselves gives them an intuitive sympathy for the suffering of others and lends them emotional credibility as healers. Becoming a txiv neeb is not a choice; it is a vocation. The calling is revealed when a person falls sick, either with qaug dab peg or with some other illness whose symptoms similarly include shivering and pain. An established txiv neeb, summoned to diagnose the problem, may conclude from these symptoms that the person (who is usually but not always male) has been chosen to be the host of a healing spirit, a neeb. (Txiv neeb means “person with a healing spirit.”) It is an offer that the sick person cannot refuse, since if he rejects his vocation, he will die. In any case, few Hmong would choose to decline. Although shamanism is an arduous calling that requires years of training with a master in order to learn the ritual techniques and chants, it confers an enormous amount of social status in the community and publicly marks the txiv neeb as a person of high moral character, since a healing spirit would never choose a no-account host. Even if an epileptic turns out not to be elected to host a neeb, his illness, with its thrilling aura of the supramundane, singles him out as a person of consequence.

  In their attitude toward Lia’s seizures, the Lees reflected this mixture of concern and pride. The Hmong are known for the gentleness with which they treat their children. Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, a German ethnographer who lived with the Hmong of Thailand for several years during the 1930s, wrote that the Hmong he had studied regarded a child as “the most treasured possession a person can have.” In Laos, a baby was never apart from its mother, sleeping in her arms all night and riding on her back all day. Small children were rarely abused; it was believed that a dab who witnessed mistreatment might take the child, assuming it was not wanted. The Hmong who live in the United States have continued to be unusually attentive parents. A study conducted at the University of Minnesota found Hmong infants in the first month of life to be less irritable and more securely attached to their mothers than Caucasian infants, a difference the researcher attributed to the fact that the Hmong mothers were, without exception, more sensitive, more accepting, and more responsive, as well as “exquisitely attuned” to their children’s signals. Another study, conducted in Portland, Oregon, found that Hmong mothers held and touched their babies far more frequently than Caucasian mothers. In a third study, conducted at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minnesota, a group of Hmong mothers of toddlers surpassed a group of Caucasian mothers of similar socioeconomic status in every one of fourteen categories selected from the Egeland Mother-Child Rating Scale, ranging from “Speed of Responsiveness to Fussing and Crying” to “Delight.”

  Foua and Nao Kao had nurtured Lia in typical Hmong fashion (on the Egeland Scale, they would have scored especially high in Delight), and they were naturally distressed to think that anything might compromise her health and happiness. They therefore hoped, at least most of the time, that the qaug dab peg could be healed. Yet they also considered the illness an honor. Jeanine Hilt, a social worker who knew the Lees well, told me, “They felt Lia was kind of an anointed one, like a member of royalty. She was a very special person in their culture because she had these spirits in her and she might grow up to be a shaman, and so sometimes their thinking was that this was not so much a medical problem as it was a blessing.” (Of the forty or so American doctors, nurses, and Merced County agency employees I spoke with who had dealt with Lia and her family, several had a vague idea that “spirits” were somehow involved, but Jeanine Hilt was the only one who had actually asked the Lees what they thought was the cause of their daughter’s illness.)

  Within the Lee family, in one of those unconscious processes of selection that are as mysterious as any other form of falling in love, it was obvious that Lia was her parents’ favorite, the child they considered the most beautiful, the one who was most extravagantly hugged and kissed, the one who was dressed in the most exquisite garments (embroidered by Foua, wearing dime-store glasses to work her almost microscopic stitches). Whether Lia occupied this position from the moment of her birth, whether it was a result of her spiritually distinguished illness, or whether it came from the special tenderness any parent
feels for a sick child, is not a matter Foua and Nao Kao wish, or are able, to analyze. One thing that is clear is that for many years the cost of that extra love was partially borne by her sister Yer. “They blamed Yer for slamming the door,” said Jeanine Hilt. “I tried many times to explain that the door had nothing to do with it, but they didn’t believe me. Lia’s illness made them so sad that I think for a long time they treated Yer differently from their other children.”

  During the next few months of her life, Lia had at least twenty more seizures. On two occasions, Foua and Nao Kao were worried enough to carry her in their arms to the emergency room at Merced Community Medical Center, which was three blocks from their apartment. Like most Hmong refugees, they had their doubts about the efficacy of Western medical techniques. However, when they were living in the Mae Jarim refugee camp in Thailand, their only surviving son, Cheng, and three of their six surviving daughters, Ge, May, and True, had been seriously ill. Ge died. They took Cheng, May, and True to the camp hospital; Cheng and May recovered rapidly, and True was sent to another, larger hospital, where she eventually recovered as well. (The Lees also concurrently addressed the possible spiritual origins of their children’s illnesses by moving to a new hut. A dead person had been buried beneath their old one, and his soul might have wished to harm the new residents.) This experience did nothing to shake their faith in traditional Hmong beliefs about the causes and cures of illness, but it did convince them that on some occasions Western doctors could be of additional help, and that it would do no harm to hedge their bets.