The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  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 qeej, 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 paj ntaub—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 mi
litary 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:

  I began to collect the phrases used regularly to describe the Hmong by agency officials who worked in Ban Vinai. The word I heard most often was “filthy,” followed closely by “dirty,” and often part of a cluster of terms that included “scabies,” “abscesses,” “feces,” and “piles of garbage.” A phrase regularly employed to cover a multitude of perceived sanitation sins was the following, “They’re one step out of the Stone Age, you know.” A meaning-packed word heard about the Hmong almost every day was “difficult,” and its ramified derivatives: “difficult to work with,” “the most difficult group,” “set in their ways,” “rigid,” “stubborn,” “you cannot get through to them,” “backward.” One dedicated humanitarian agency employee who had worked with the Hmong for several years told me that “the hand of God is on this place,” but as for the Hmong living here, “they’re a fearful lot…you cannot work with them.”

  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.

  According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which supervised Ban Vinai, every refugee problem has three possible “durable solutions”: local integration, voluntary repatriation, and resettlement in another country. Thailand, which was buffeted simultaneously by refugees from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, emphatically rejected the first solution. The Hmong emphatically rejected the second solution. In 1981, they also began to reject the third solution, leading Ban Vinai to become a kind of never-ending camp, or, as one U.S. refugee official termed it, “a non-durable non-solution.” In 1984, Eric E. Morris, the U.N. deputy refugee representative in Thailand, said in bewilderment, “This is a unique situation historically. The Hmong are the first refugees we know who were offered resettlement and in large numbers simply turned it down.” Some of them worried that the Hmong resistance movement in Laos, which was fueled by manpower and leadership in Ban Vinai, as well as by money funneled through the camp from refugees in the United States, would collapse if they left Asia. Most of them, however, had heard rumors about life in America from earlier immigrants, and were just plain scared: of tenements, of urban violence, of welfare dependence, of never being able to farm again, of being forbidden to sacrifice animals, of being thrown in jail if their grandfathers smoked opium, of ogres, of dinosaurs, and—as they made clear during the notorious 1982 meeting on the Ban Vinai soccer field—of doctors who ate the livers, kidneys, and brains of Hmong patients.

  Ban Vinai started to look pretty good. It may have been dirty, crowded, and disease-ridden, but culturally it was still powerfully Hmong. Women sewed paj ntaub (though some of them forsook the old motifs of elephant’s feet and ram’s horns for embroidered soldiers with bayonets); men made jewelry (though when silver was unavailable some of them melted down discarded aluminum cans); many families raised chickens or tended small vegetable plots. Most compellingly, according to Dwight Conquergood,

  no matter where you go in the camp, at almost any hour of the day or night, you can simultaneously hear two or three performances, from simple storytelling and folksinging to elaborate collective ritual performances for the dead…including drumming, stylized lamentation, ritual chanting, manipulation of funerary artifacts, incense, fire, dancing, and animal sacrifice. Nearly every morning I was awakened before dawn by the drumming and ecstatic chanting of performing shamans.

  The older a Hmong was, the less willing he or she was to leave. “At the camp, the cultural tradition was still there,” Blia Yao Moua told me. “There was patrilineage. Children still listened to Grandpa. What is the good to go over there to America if all that change? And a lot of elderly people, though they never, never say it openly to strangers, what really haunt them is they are afraid in America they will not have a good funeral ceremony and a good grave, and that is more important than any other thing in the world.”

  Thailand closed Ban Vinai in 1992. Its 11,500 inhabitants were told they absolutely, positively had only two choices: to apply for resettlement in another country, or to return to Laos. As an interim measure, the resettlers were to move to one camp, and the repatriators to another. Panic ensued. Hmong who for more than a decade had resisted coming to the United States now decided it was the safer of two abhorrent options—and then were rejected. With the support of the United States, where anti-immigrant sentiment was gathering steam, the Thai government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees instituted a new and more stringent set of eligibility requirements under which nearly 2,000 Hmong applicants were denied refugee status. Since 1991, about 7,000 Hmong have uneasily returned to Laos, persuaded that repressive conditions there have slackened: no more forced collectivization, no more seminar camps. Although those who repatriate in groups are assigned to lowland sites, may not return to their home villages, and may not practice slash-and-burn agriculture, at least their families (or
so they have been assured) will no longer be in danger. There have been reports, however—all of them denied by the Laotian, Thai, and U.S. governments and by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—that some Hmong have been forced by Thai authorities to return to Laos against their will, and, once there, have been persecuted or killed.*

  More than 10,000 Hmong, most of them inhabitants of Ban Vinai, simply said no to both choices and fled—whether temporarily or permanently, no one knows—to the sanctified grounds of Wat Tham Krabok, a Buddhist monastery north of Bangkok. Surrounded by coercive pressures on all sides, they managed to find a way out, as they had done so many times before during their intransigent history, by moving in a direction none of their keepers could have predicted.

  Thai authorities were reportedly astonished that 10,000 Hmong had managed to slip through their fingers. They should have known better. For as long as there have been Hmong, there have been ways to get out of tight spots. In the greatest of all Hmong folktales, Shee Yee, a healer and magician who was the forerunner of today’s txiv neebs, was once ambushed by nine evil dab brothers who ate human flesh and drank their blood. In the version collected by Charles Johnson, the brothers lay in wait for Shee Yee at a mountain crossroads where nine paths led to every corner of the earth, and where the rocks looked like tigers and dragons. When the brothers transformed themselves into water buffalos, so did Shee Yee. When they tossed him on their horns, he changed back into a man, and he chopped them into small pieces with his magical saber. When the pieces joined together and came back to life, he turned into a cloud and mounted high in the sky. When the brothers became a strong wind, Shee Yee became a drop of water. When one of the brothers became a leaf that would catch the drop of water, he became a deer, and he ran into the forest. The brothers became wolves, and they chased Shee Yee until the sun was low in the western sky, hanging at the edge of the earth. Eight of the brothers were too tired to go on, but the oldest one kept running. When Shee Yee saw an abandoned rat’s burrow, he changed himself into a rat. The oldest brother turned into a cat, and waited at the edge of the burrow. Shee Yee changed into a caterpillar with stinging fuzz, and the cat spat him back into the hole. As he waited in the hole, Shee Yee got angrier and angrier. When the cat fell asleep, Shee Yee turned himself into a very tiny red ant. Quickly and fiercely, he bit the cat on the testicle. Then he went home to his wife.