The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  “I want to tell them the story of my grandfather,” continued Martin. “For the last twenty years of his life, he had to eat Epsom salts because he started using those laxatives and he couldn’t stop. Do they know what Epsom salts are? Terrible-looking stuff. Magnesium sulfate.” Koua looked baffled; I’m not sure how he translated “magnesium sulfate.” “So if I could send my spirit back in time to talk to my grandfather, I would say, Grandfather, don’t start down that road! Take Metamucil! But don’t put it in her formula, okay? Formula is milk, and milk constipates people. You might as well feed her glue. They could try putting the Metamucil in a bottle of prune juice, okay? Prune juice would unplug anything. That would be a real depth bomb. Do they know what prune juice is?”

  They obviously didn’t, and neither did Koua. When he reached that point in his translation, he simply inserted the English words “prune juice” into the middle of a long Hmong sentence. I preferred not even to imagine how he translated “depth bomb.”

  “It is made out of plums,” explained Martin. “You take a plum and you dry it. Then you make juice out of it. I am going to write it down for them so they can look for it in the store.” And on a piece of yellow paper, in huge capital letters, he wrote:

  PRUNE JUICE

  Nao Kao took the piece of paper and looked at it blankly. Even if he had been able to read the words, he had no idea what a prune was.

  “Now, Koua,” said Martin, “before we leave, I was just curious. I was noticing Lia has some bands on her wrists, and I was recently reading in a book about Hmong people and the Hmong religion, and I wondered how did they explain what happened to Lia in terms of their religion?”

  The Lees’ faces closed as abruptly as a slammed door.

  “He said they don’t know anything about that,” said Koua.

  I thought: But they just spent an hour the other night talking about how dabs steal souls! They would have gone on for another hour if May Ying hadn’t had to get home. What had come over them today? It seemed as if my open, animated, garrulous friends, faced with someone they viewed as an authority figure—even though he would probably have quit his job before he ever treated them coercively—had entered a vegetative state themselves. They hadn’t said twenty words since Martin arrived. They hadn’t laughed, smiled, or looked him in the eye. And then I thought: these must be the people Neil and Peggy have been dealing with all these years. No wonder everyone but Jeanine thinks they are impenetrable and stupid. Of course, Martin had undergone an equally unseemly metamorphosis himself, from savant to bumbler. It was as if, by a process of reverse alchemy, each party in this doomed relationship had managed to convert the other’s gold into dross.

  “Well,” said Martin, rising with difficulty from the floor, “it looks as if that is the best we can do today. They have my card”—which of course might as well have been written in cuneiform—“and they should remember I am here to help them. If you folks can get the prune juice, I would advise it. Goodbye, Mr. Lee. Goodbye, Mrs. Lee.”

  As we walked to Martin’s car, with Koua trailing silently ten paces behind, Martin frowned. He knew that the visit had gone badly, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. Had he not been courteous? Had he not shown his respect for the Hmong culture by expressing an interest in the Lees’ spiritual beliefs? Had he not refrained from criticizing them, even when he felt they were wrong?

  “I gave them my full shot,” he said. “You saw how patiently I explained things to them.” He sighed, long and slow. “I do the best I can. On some days I think of Lia as a character in a Greek tragedy. By Euripides, perhaps. On other days—well, I just think about Metamucil.”

  16

  Why Did They Pick Merced?

  My first day in Merced, several months before I met the Lees, I drove around and around in my rented car, looking for Hmong, and didn’t see a single one. My friend Bill Selvidge had told me one out of every six Merced residents was Hmong, and it was on the strength of that prodigious statistic that I had come. I thought he must have made a mistake. The people who strolled their babies along the sycamore-lined avenues north of Bear Creek and gunned their pickups down the quaintly superannuated main street—I didn’t know yet that most of the fancy business had shifted to the Merced Mall uptown—all looked as homegrown as characters from American Graffiti, which was set in Modesto, the next big town up Highway 99. When I stopped in the R Street Exxon for gas, I asked Frank, the man who Windexed my windshield, whether he knew where the Hmong lived.

  “That part of town across the tracks is just crawling with them,” Frank said. “It’s so crowded with Hmongs you can’t hardly move. I sure know we got a lot of them. What I don’t know is why they’re here. I mean, why did they pick Merced?” He then volunteered an anecdote about some Hmong who had been caught fishing in a county lake without licenses. “When the police came, they got down on their knees. They thought they were going to be executed!” He threw back his head and laughed.

  Martin Kilgore told me later that Dumb Hmong stories were a lamentable staple of Merced’s agricultural community, some of whose members had hundred-year-old roots in the Central Valley. “In Fresno, the Aggies make ethnic jokes about the Armenians,” he said. “In Stanislaus, it’s the Portuguese. Here, it’s the Hmong.” There was the Hmong mother who heard a policeman say, “If your child misbehaves, you can always chain him to the TV,” and took it literally. There were the Hmong farmers who fertilized their crops with human excrement. There were the Hmong tenants who punched holes in their walls to communicate with their relatives next door. There was the large Hmong family who lived in a one-bedroom, second-floor apartment. The American couple who lived below them complained that their roof was leaking. When the landlord checked, he found the Hmong had all moved into the bedroom, covered the floor of the living room with a foot of dirt, planted vegetables, and watered them.

  Who knew whether these stories were true? In the climate that had fostered Frank’s genial bigotry, did it matter? As a Hmong proverb puts it, “All kinds of vessels can be plugged, but you can’t plug people’s mouths.” Over the last century and a half, the Central Valley had involuntarily swallowed wave after wave of foreign-born settlers: Mexicans, Chinese, Chileans, Irish, Dutch, Basques, Armenians, Portuguese, Swedes, Italians, Greeks, Japanese, Filipinos, Yemenites, East Indians. Each had occasioned its own individually tailored flurry of xenophobia, of which the Dumb Hmong stories were merely the most recent model. In the 1880s, the Anti-Chinese Association of Merced had served a similar defensive purpose, provoked by the Cantonese who had come to pan gold along the Merced River and lay tracks for the Central Pacific Railroad, and stayed to work in the brick factory near Bear Creek and run fan-tan parlors along 14th Street. So had the Merced County Anti-Japanese Association, which had tried to expel Japanese farmers in the 1920s. So had Merced’s 200-to-1 vote, just before the end of World War II, against permitting Japanese-Americans interned in relocation camps to return to their old homes.

  I followed Frank’s directions and crossed the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad, a freight line that parallels 16th Street in south Merced, which used to be Chinatown before it was razed in 1950 to make room for Highway 99. He was right. On the wrong side of the tracks, everyone was Hmong: the first Hmong I had ever seen. In front of the dingy two-story apartment buildings, coveys of children were chasing each other, kicking balls—they had learned soccer at Ban Vinai—and playing txwv, a form of jacks in which pebbles are tossed and caught. The parking lots harbored more potted herbs than cars, and there were two community gardens, as dense and green as vest-pocket rain forests, striped with rows of bok choy, bitter melon, and lemongrass. In a local grocery, Soua Her and his wife, Yia Moua, sold fifty-pound bags of rice, quail eggs, shredded squid, audiocassettes by local Hmong bands, sequins for decorating paj ntaub, mentholated tape for treating headaches, sticky ointments for treating bruises, camphor balm for drawing out fevers, and aromatic wood chips for making a tea that, as Yia Moua explained to me, �
��flush out the bad dead blood after lady have baby.”

  I had no idea at the time, but I had landed in the most intensely Hmong place in the United States. Fresno and Minneapolis-St. Paul have larger Hmong populations, but Merced’s Hmong constitute a far greater fraction of the local population. When I first visited Merced, the fraction (just as Bill Selvidge had promised) was one sixth; now it is one fifth. That critical mass, as Blia Yao Moua put it, “lets us keep more Hmong culture here than in Vientiane.” Sometimes I felt that the other cities of the Central Valley—Fresno, Visalia, Porterville, Modesto, Stockton, Sacramento, Marysville, Yuba City—were mere suburbs of Merced. Hmong families constantly drove from city to city to visit relatives, and if they moved elsewhere in the valley, they returned to Merced for subclan gatherings, just as residents of satellite settlements in Laos had returned to their home villages. With fourteen Hmong clans—Cheng, Fang, Hang, Her, Kong, Kue, Lee, Lor, Moua, Thao, Vang, Vue, Xiong, and Yang—represented in Merced, young people had no problem finding exogamous marriage partners. It was easy, even on short notice, to find a txiv neeb to negotiate with a pathogenic dab, an herbalist to concoct a healing tisane, a clan elder to mediate a dispute, or a qeej player to guide a dead person’s soul back through the twelve heavens with his hauntingly resonant cluster of six steamed bamboo tubes. (In Merced, where bamboo is hard to come by, qeejs are sometimes made of PVC plumbing pipe. It is said that if the qeej player is good, the soul will have no trouble following directions from the plastic.*)

  The anthropologist Eric Crystal once told a reporter for the Merced Sun-Star how extraordinary it was to hear the Hmong language spoken in the Kmart on J Street, when fifteen years earlier it had been impossible to hear it anywhere in the Western world. Crystal is a former free-speech activist who overflows with so many ideas and enthusiasms that he effervesces rather than converses. He has studied Merced’s Hmong community, and he once curated a local exhibit of Hmong folk objects: bamboo vegetable baskets, opium harvesting knives, shamanic regalia. When I went to see Crystal in his office at U.C. Berkeley and told him I was living in Merced, he became so excited he started bouncing up and down in his chair. “You’re so lucky!” he exclaimed. “If I lived down in that place, I’d be running around with the Hmong every minute! I mean, I just love Merced. Not that the Hmong aren’t a hassle. They are a huge hassle. When I first went down there they were kind of hostile. You know, what the hell do you want? Who the hell do you think you are? Fuck off! The Mien are so delighted when anybody pays attention to them that they practically ask you to move in with them about two minutes after you sit down. The Cambodians are really happy if you show that you are interested in Cambodia. But the Hmong—they just test you every minute. Once you pass the test, though, they are fantastic. The Hmong are one of the best organized, most focused groups you could find any place on earth. They have the best leadership, they’re the most able to cooperate among themselves, they’re the most committed to preserving their ethnic identity, they’re the most conscious of their own place in the world. You can see all that down in Merced. Those Hmong are really into being Hmong.”

  The longer I spent in Merced, the more often I found myself asking: How in heaven’s name could this have happened here? How could more than 10,000 villagers from the mountains of Laos possibly be living in a place that hosted the Yosemite Dental Society Smile Contest and the Romp ’n Stompers Square Dance; that sent out Welcome Newcomer kits (which no Hmong had ever requested) containing fliers for the Sweet Adeline Singers and the Senior Citizens Whittling Workshop; and that awarded ribbons at its annual county fair for Best Infant Booties, Best Lemon Pie, and Best Udder?

  In other words, as Frank had asked, “Why did they pick Merced?” The answer to that question, as I gradually found out, boiled down to two words: Dang Moua. It is probably a good thing that Frank does not know Dang, the indefatigable grocer, interpreter, and pig farmer who had once been a clerk-typist at the American Embassy in Vientiane. If Frank were to learn that from the Hmong point of view Dang bears the same relation to Merced that Daniel Boone bore to Kentucky or the Pied Piper bore to Koppelberg Hill, he might not be properly grateful. On the other hand, Dang might impress him by his almost unbelievably sedulous pursuit of the American dream. The first time I walked into Dang’s office at California Custom Social Services, the interpreting and liaison agency he had founded, he was on the phone. He was talking rapidly in Hmong, but every once in a while, when he collided with a concept for which there was no Hmong equivalent, he threw in an English term: “lack of communication,” “deposition,” “application,” “bank manager,” “conflict of interest.” Dang was round-faced and sturdy, with a CEO’s air of authoritative self possession. He wore a large Casio watch that beeped and a large gold ring that said “D.” His business card was red, white, and blue. Commercial patriotism evidently ran in the family. His cousin, Moua Kee, whose office adjoined Dang’s, supported his family largely by teaching Hmong about Christopher Columbus, Betsy Ross, and the advantages of the bicameral system in preparation for their naturalization examinations. Although he raised sacrificial pigs, Dang was selective in his spiritual dogmas, and for reasons of expedience he had excluded dabs. “I call myself a multi-religious believer,” he explained. “I don’t believe in ghost because I like to be the boss of the ghost, and if you are afraid of ghost, the ghost is your boss.” It was clear that no one would ever be Dang’s boss but Dang.

  Dang Moua and his family used to live in Richmond, Virginia, where they were the only Hmong. The first time they saw snow there, soon after they arrived from Thailand in early 1976, Dang thought someone had come while they were asleep and sprayed all the trees with salt. He worked eighteen hours a day, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., folding newspapers, a job that took little advantage of his five languages and made him so “deep sleepy,” as he put it, that he feared if he kept it up, “I notice I must be dead in three years.” He earned $2.90 an hour. In his spare time—I have always wondered when that was—he went to the Richmond library and read about prevailing climates, soil conditions, and crop yields in other states. His brother, who lived in southern California, mentioned that the Central Valley had good weather and many different ethnic groups. Dang had heard through the Hmong grapevine that General Vang Pao was planning to buy a large fruit ranch near Merced, and that also influenced his decision. “So I go buy a white 1970 stick-shift Hornet for $550,” he recalled. “I tell my sponsor from the American church, Tomorrow I will leave to California. He was very surprise! He say, You know, it’s a robbery, it’s an earthquake out there, but I say my mind is made. So then he say, You return that car and we will give you a V-6 Cherokee. I say, I thank you for that but if I take your car I owe you something. They were so mad! Next morning, I burn some joss stick and pray for my ancestor to lead me for a safe trip. My sponsor say, You don’t need to do that, you should pray to the Lord! I say, Your Lord let me have too many problem here in America. So I put a pan of water outside with some rice to pray to the god of the mountains, and my tears come. I never cry in my life, not even going to Thailand, and that was hell, but now I cry. I say, I’m small but I am an adult person. I have to pursue now my plan.”

  With the back end of his Hornet nearly scraping the ground beneath the trunkful of clothing, pots, pans, dishes, and a television set, and the front end sticking up so high he could barely see over the hood, Dang drove his family west for two days and two nights on Interstate 40, following the sun. He arrived in Merced with $34. It was mid-April 1977. The skies were so clear that he could see the Coast Range to the west and the Sierras to the east. The air was sweet with almond blossoms. In mid-summer Merced is an oven, and in the winter, a chilling fog blows off the reservoir whose resident dab, according to Foua, once caught her and followed her home. But in the spring—as Steinbeck’s Joads were told as they approached the great green expanse, after making a journey much like the Mouas’—the Central Valley is “the purtiest goddamn country you ever
seen.” There were miles and miles of ripe peaches and figs, which Dang got a job picking, and jackrabbits and squirrels he could easily trap for dinner. The town itself was clean and quiet, with an orderly grid of streets laid out by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1872. There were no beggars or derelicts. Flat as a bowling green and 167 feet above sea level, Merced was in some ways an outlandish address for a montagnard, but it was better than Richmond, and it was incalculably better than the slums of Hartford and Detroit, where some of Dang’s clanspeople lived. Most people drive through Merced en route from one place to another—Sacramento to Bakersfield, San Francisco to Yosemite—but to Dang, worn beyond weariness by the journey from Laos to Thailand to Virginia to California, it was the long-desired terminus. Vang Pao’s plan to buy the fruit ranch failed, partly because the County Board of Supervisors had public misgivings about the refugees it might attract and partly because the general had an inauspicious dream the night before he was to sign the contract. Nonetheless, the favorable buzz about Merced and the rest of the Central Valley had already spread to discontented Hmong communities across the United States. A trickle, and then a flood, of dilapidated cars began to stream in from the east.

  “It was just wild!” recalled Eric Crystal. “You’d see these Arkansas plates and stuff on the streets, I mean they were just pouring in from all over the place! Merced is incredible now, but it was particularly incredible then.” It is doubtless easier to wax enthusiastic about the Hmong of Merced if you are a visiting anthropologist than if you are a resident taxpayer. “S’pose a fella got work an’ saved, couldn’ he get a little land?” Tom Joad had asked, and he was told, “You ain’t gonna get no steady work.” So it was with the Hmong, who couldn’t get the high-end agricultural jobs because they had no English and no experience and couldn’t get the low-end ones because Mexican migrants had already filled them. At first the Merced Sun-Star treated the newcomers like exotic guests, though it was chary of printing the word “Hmong,” which could be found in no atlas or dictionary. (Local reporters called the Hmong “Laotians” Dang Moua’s five languages were “a local dialect, Laotian, Thai, French, and English.”) Soon, however, the Hmong—for whom the code word became “refugees”—started to make headlines: “Refugees Drain Limited Services” “Refugee Students Jam the Schools” “Supervisors Ired by Meager State Funds Allocated for Area Refugees” “More $$$ Needed for Refugees.”