by Anne Fadiman
On another late-night occasion Nao Kao explained that the Hmong often got sick because of their encounters with malevolent dabs, but that the doctors didn’t understand this either and therefore failed to treat these patients effectively. “I will give you an example,” he said. “There is a man named Mr. Xiong, and he has a son who went to swim at Bear Creek.” Bear Creek is a small, muddy river that flows through Applegate Park, north of downtown Merced. “And while Mr. Xiong’s son was sleeping, the dab that lives in Bear Creek came up to him and talked to him and made him sick and restless and crazy. The doctors and nurses in Merced gave this young man shots and medicines, and the young man hated the doctors and nurses, because the only way to cure that kind of sickness is to sacrifice a dog, and this country won’t allow you to kill dogs.” Foua told me that a dab had caught her just the previous week at the county reservoir. She knew this had happened because after she returned home, she felt afraid, and when she closed her eyes, she could sense that a dab was near. She left all the lights on that night to frighten the dab away, and she did not become sick. (Several months later, I was to learn that Merced’s dabs were not confined to natural surroundings. Chong Moua, a Hmong woman who cleaned Bill Selvidge’s house once a week, told me that every Hmong in town knew about the dab who lived at the intersection of Highway 99 and G Street. This dab liked to cause accidents by making Hmong drivers fall asleep or making the cars of approaching Americans invisible.)
The longer I spent with the Lees, the more firmly Foua took me in hand. She improved my manners by teaching me, via May Ying, how to say please and thank you in Hmong. When she learned that I occasionally got headaches, she gave me detailed instructions on how to treat them by rubbing an egg-covered coin up and down my body. I think she was disappointed that I never actually contracted a headache on her premises so that she could heal it then and there. “But you remember,” she said. “Next time, you do it the way I said.”
When Foua had known me for almost a year, she decided to get me married. The Hmong have a phrase, “a flower full of honey and ready for the bee,” which is used to describe a marriageable girl of fifteen or sixteen. I was thirty-five, and had thus been ready for the bee for two decades. When my boyfriend visited me in Merced, Foua realized that she finally had an opportunity to do something about this appalling situation. Her plan, of which she did not inform me in advance, was to dress me as a Hmong bride, a transformation she was certain would render me irresistible.
My makeover took place on a sweltering summer day. The temperature in the Lees’ bedroom must have been well over 100°. Out of a battered suitcase that she kept in the back of her closet, Foua extracted piece after piece of exquisite paj ntaub. (Paj ntaub, which means “flower cloth,” is a traditional Hmong textile art in which geometric or organic designs—spiderwebs, ram’s heads, tiger’s eyebrows, elephant’s feet—are worked in embroidery, batik, appliqué, and reverse appliqué. In Laos, a Hmong man was said to value two qualities most highly in a wife: her ability to sing poetry and her skill at paj ntaub.) Foua had made these clothes for her daughters. They constituted the lion’s share of the family’s wealth.
Assisted by her fourteen-year-old daughter May, the oldest Lee girl still living at home, and by May Ying Xiong, Foua dressed me like a doll. I was completely at their mercy, since I had no idea which garment was coming next and, when it came, what part of my body it was supposed to adorn. First Foua picked up a phuam, a pink-and-black sash at least twenty feet long, and wound it around me like a ribbon around a maypole. Its function was the precise opposite of a girdle’s: it was supposed to fatten me up, to transform me into a healthy Hmong farm wife who looked capable of carrying heavy loads of rice. Then came the tiab, a pink, green, and yellow skirt with about five hundred accordion pleats, which, if it had been spread out, would have been wider than I was tall. Its cross-stitching was so fine it looked like beading. May Ying told me later that it had probably taken Foua the better part of two years to make, and that it would take her several hours to restitch threads through each of its pleats to prepare it again for storage. Over that went a pink brocade sev, a kind of apron, whose paj ntaub work was protected by an American refinement, a layer of plastic wrap. On my upper half I wore a blue-and-black jacket called a tsho (the same word as the Hmong term for “placenta,” one’s first garment) and four hnab tshos, pocketlike bags decorated with dangling silver coins, which were hung bandolier-style across my chest and weighed a ton. Around my neck went a five-tier necklace of hollow silver. Around my calves May Ying wrapped a pair of black puttees called nrhoob. And on my head Foua balanced the pièce de résistance, a kausmom, a pink, green, and yellow hat, bedizened with its own set of silver coins, that was shaped like a pagoda and jingled whenever I moved. Although I nearly died of heat prostration during the forty-five minutes it took Foua, May, and May Ying to wrestle all this stuff onto me, I felt for the first time in my not very fashionable adulthood that I understood the ritual pleasure of women gussying each other up and giggling like crazy in rooms to which men were forbidden entrance.
While all this was taking place, my friend George was sitting in the air-conditioned living room, watching a boxing match on television with Nao Kao and wondering what I was doing. Neither he nor Nao Kao spoke a word of each other’s language, but they communicated in the universal language of male bonding by throwing punches in the air and making appreciative grunts. When I emerged from the bedroom, George was, in a word, stunned. He didn’t think I looked good, exactly. He told me later that I resembled Tom Kitten in “The Roly-Poly Pudding,” after Mrs. Whiskers ties him up and covers him with pie dough. However, Foua’s work must in some way have had the intended effect, because a week later George asked me to marry him. When we told Foua that we were engaged, she didn’t act in the least surprised.
Later, when I complimented Foua on her beautiful needlework, she said matter-of-factly, “Yes, my friends are proud of me because of my paj ntaub. The Hmong are proud of me.” That is the only time I ever heard her say anything kind about herself. She was otherwise the most self-deprecating woman I had ever met. One night, when Nao Kao was out for the evening, she remarked, out of the blue, “I am very stupid.” When I asked her why, she said, “Because I don’t know anything here. I don’t know your language. American is so hard, you can watch TV all day and you still don’t know it. I can’t dial the telephone because I can’t read the numbers. If I want to call a friend, my children will tell me and I will forget and the children will tell me again and I will forget again. My children go to the store to buy food because I don’t know what is in the packages. One time when I went to the hospital I went to the bathroom, and the hall went that way and that way and that way and that way, and I didn’t know which way to go, and I couldn’t get back to where I was because too many sad things have happened to me and my brain is not good anymore.”
When I suggested that I would have had at least as much trouble finding my way around her village in Laos as she had finding her way around MCMC, Foua said, “Maybe, but in Laos it was easy. I didn’t know how to do anything but farm.” Venturing that it couldn’t have been quite so easy as she claimed, I asked her to describe a typical day in Houaysouy, the village in the northwestern province of Sayaboury where the Lee family had lived. She tilted her head to one side for a moment, thinking. Then she said, “In the season when you have to tend to the rice fields, you get up at first cock crow. In the other seasons, you can wake up at second or third cock crow. Even at third cock crow it is before dawn, and it is dark, so the first thing you do is light a lamp. The lamp was like this.” Foua walked into the kitchen and came back holding the bottom three-quarters of a Mountain Dew can, which was filled with oil and had a homemade cloth wick. “In Merced, when the electricity goes out, we still use one like this,” she said.
“First you cook the rice for your children,” she continued. “Then you clean the house with the broom you tied together yourself. After you are finished sweeping you go and
cut wild grasses to give to the pigs, and you cut more for the cows, and you feed the pigs and the cows and the chickens. Then you walk to the fields. You carry the baby on your back, and if you have two children your husband carries one on his back too, and if you have a lot of children you can leave some of the smaller ones home with the big ones. Our parents grew opium, but we just grew rice, and also peppers, corn, and cucumbers. When it is planting time, first you make a hole in the ground like this.” She walked back to the kitchen and, after rummaging around for something with which to demonstrate to me the use of a dibble stick, returned with a cardboard tube that had once held a roll of paper towels, which she proceeded to stab at one-foot intervals into her living room’s brown wall-to-wall carpeting. “Like this. Then you put the seeds in the holes. You and your husband do it together. In other seasons you clear the fields and harvest the rice and thresh and winnow the rice and grind the corn.”
At this point in her narrative, her daughter May walked in, wearing shorts, a T-shirt that said TIME FOR THE BEACH, and pink plastic earrings. May was three and a half when her family left Laos. She sat on the carpet at her mother’s feet and listened. “The farm place was far from where we lived,” said Foua, “farther than from here to Bear Creek. If you leave the farm when it is still light, it is dark by the time you get home. When you get home you go to the stream and carry the water for cooking and bathing in a barrel on your back.” Foua showed me how she had made the pack-barrel, gesturing with her fingers to illustrate how the bamboo was wrapped around the wooden staves. “You bathe the babies by boiling the water and then you pour it with a smaller bowl. The older children can bathe themselves. You bring corn for the chickens and you feed the pigs, and then you cook for your family. We usually just ate leftover rice from our first meal, with a little vegetables, because we ate meat only about once a month. You cook on the hot coals of the fire and you use the fat from the last pig you killed to fry with. The smoke just goes through spaces in the roof. After dinner you sew by the light of that lamp. In the fields you wear clothes that are old and dirty and ripped up, but the children have to have good clothes for New Year’s, so you sew for them at night.”
I asked Foua to describe their house. “It is made of wood from the forest,” she said, “some wood as big as telephone poles. The thatching is bamboo. I helped build it. Our relatives helped us too, and then we help our relatives when they need a house. Our house is all one room but it is very nice. The floor is earth. If you want to sleep, you take some bamboo, you cut it open and split it into small pieces that are springy and make it into a bed. We sleep next to the fireplace where it is warm because we don’t have any blankets. My husband sleeps on one side holding a baby, I sleep on the other side holding another baby, and the older children keep each other warm.”
While Foua was telling me about the dozens of tasks that constituted her “easy” work in Laos, I was thinking that when she said she was stupid, what she really meant was that none of her former skills were transferable to the United States—none, that is, except for being an excellent mother to her nine surviving children. It then occurred to me that this last skill had been officially contradicted by the American government, which had legally declared her a child abuser.
I asked Foua if she missed Laos. She was silent for a few seconds, rocking back and forth on her low bamboo stool while her daughter looked at her, waiting curiously for her answer. Then she said, “When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don’t want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But you don’t speak the language. You depend on other people for welfare. If they don’t give you money you can’t eat, and you would die of hunger. What I miss in Laos is that free spirit, doing what you want to do. You own your own fields, your own rice, your own plants, your own fruit trees. I miss that feeling of freeness. I miss having something that really belongs to me.”
9
A Little Medicine and a Little Neeb
“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, an
d 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.”