The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  More $$$ were needed because of an economic catastrophe that began in Merced in the early eighties and continues today. Merced was never rich. During the last three decades it has ranked between number 35 and number 53, of California’s fifty-eight counties, in per capita income. It was limping along comfortably enough, however, until the Hmong came—an event that happened to coincide with a nationwide recession as well as deepening cutbacks in both federal and state social programs. Seventy-nine percent of the Hmong in Merced County—as compared with eighteen percent of the county’s other residents—receive public assistance. By 1995, Merced had achieved the unwanted distinction of having a greater fraction of its population on welfare than any other county in the state. The federal government picks up half the welfare costs, the state picks up 47½ percent, and the county picks up 2½ percent. That 2½ percent sounds like a pittance, but in recent years, it has amounted to nearly two million dollars annually—two and a half times as much as it was in 1980—to which is added nearly a million dollars in administrative costs. While scrambling to meet its other financial obligations, the county has found those millions by closing three libraries; ceasing to maintain twenty-one of its twenty-four parks; leaving five sheriff posts vacant; increasing the caseloads of all six of its judges; reducing the staff of its probation department; reducing road maintenance; cutting the budgets for arts and culture, recreation, senior citizens’ programs, and veterans’ services; and transferring all its fire departments to the state department of forestry. The welfare reform bill, if it is not revised, will only make matters worse by forcing the county, which is unlikely to let its residents starve, to make up for at least some of the evaporated federal funds. I asked a county social worker what would happen if neither the bill nor the demographics of Merced’s population were to change. “Bankruptcy,” she said.

  Of course, the Hmong are not solely—or even primarily—responsible for Merced’s fiscal crisis. Merced has plenty of white and Hispanic welfare recipients. They occasion less notice and less resentment than the Hmong because, although their numbers are large, their percentages are small: that is, most of the Hmong are on welfare, and most of the members of Merced’s other ethnic groups are not. And although welfare has become the most conspicuous focal point for public rage, Merced County has been simultaneously strained by several other even more expensive problems: the accelerating transfer of agricultural work from people to machines; double-digit unemployment—about three times the national level—almost every month since 1980; the 1995 closing of Castle Air Force base, which had provided more than a thousand jobs to local residents; and a 1992 restructuring of California sales and property taxes that returned more to the state and less to the county.

  The crucial distinction is that you cannot see a restructured property tax, but when you drive down almost any street on the South Side, you can certainly see the Hmong. In a county where seven out of ten people voted for Proposition 187, California’s 1994 referendum to ban public services to illegal immigrants, even legal immigrants are unlikely to be received with open arms. That is not to say that everyone in Merced grumbles about the Hmong. The local churches have always treated them generously. And a small but fervent corps of well-educated professionals, most of them liberal transplants from other cities, concur with Jeff McMahon, a young reporter at the Sun-Star who told me, “The one thing that makes Merced different from every other dusty little town in the Central Valley is that there are so many Southeast Asians here. Their culture is a blessing to this community. How else would Merced ever earn a place in history?” The Sun-Star now features a Cultural Diversity Page, and the tourist brochure distributed by the Merced Chamber of Commerce includes, next to pictures of the county courthouse and the local wildlife museum’s stuffed polar bear, a photograph of a smiling Hmong woman (albeit dressed in a Lacoste polo shirt) holding a dazzlingly green armful of lettuce and string beans. Especially during the eighties, when the Hmong were novel and exciting, many of Merced’s women rallied to their cause. Volunteers in the Befriend-a-Refugee Program took Hmong families to the Applegate Zoo and invited them to backyard barbecues. Dan Murphy’s wife, Cindy, taught Hmong women how to use sewing machines and self-cleaning ovens. Jan Harwood, a 4-H Club youth adviser, organized a course (locally referred to as the tidy-bowl class) to train Hmong women for housekeeping jobs. Jan’s interpreter, a man named Pa Vue Thao, was so impressed by the enthusiasm with which she demonstrated the use of Lysol, Comet, and Spic and Span that when Jan broke her leg, he reciprocated by gathering moss from the 4-H Camp’s trees and teaching her how to make an herbal compress to reduce the swelling.

  The warmest welcome I ever saw the Hmong receive was a Naturalization Ceremony, held in the boardroom of the Merced County Administrative Building, in which eighteen Hmong—as well as two lowland Lao, nine Mexicans, five Portuguese, three Filipinos, two Vietnamese, two Indians, a Thai, a Korean, a Chinese, an Austrian, and a Cuban—became American citizens. Each received a copy of the Constitution, a history of the Pledge of Allegiance, a picture of the Statue of Liberty, a congratulatory letter from the President of the United States, a little American flag, and—courtesy of Lodge No. 1240 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks—unlimited free soft drinks. Standing next to a mounted copy of the Merced county song (“We are known for sweet potatoes / And milk and chickens too / Tomatoes and alfalfa / And almonds great to chew”), Judge Michael Hider told the assembled multitude, many of whom could not understand a word but listened respectfully nonetheless, “We’ve all come together from many places to form one great country—including myself, for my father was a naturalized citizen who came from Lebanon. In America, you don’t have to worry about police breaking down your doors. You can practice any religion you want. There’s such complete freedom of the press that our newspapers can even attack our leaders. If the government feels they need your land, they cannot just take it away from you. Most importantly, every one of you has the same opportunity as the person sitting next to you. My father never could have dreamed that his son would be a judge. Your children can be doctors. I just get carried away when I talk about how wonderful it is to be a citizen of the United States! Congratulations! You’re one of us!”

  But while I was listening to Judge Hider, I thought of a conversation I had had not long before with Dr. Robert Small, the unfalteringly opinionated MCMC obstetrician, whose views are shared by a large segment of Merced’s population. “I and my friends were outraged when the Hmong started coming here,” he told me. “Outraged. Our government, without any advice or consent, just brought these nonworking people into our society. Why should we get them over anybody else? I’ve got a young Irish friend who wants to get a U.S. education and wants to work. He can’t get in. But these Hmong just kind of fly here in groups and settle like locusts. They know no shame, being on the dole. They’re happy here.” When I mentioned the high rate of depression among Hmong refugees, Dr. Small said, “What do you mean? This is heaven for them! They have a toilet they can poop in. They can drink water from an open faucet. They get regular checks and they never have to work. It’s absolute heaven for these people, poor souls.”

  I had also spoken with the more temperate John Cullen, director of the Merced Human Services Agency, which administers public assistance. “Merced has been a fairly conservative, WASPy community for many years,” he said. “The other nationalities that are part of our community came here over a long period of time, but the Hmong came in one big rush. They were a jolt to the system. That inevitably causes more of a reaction. And they do take more than their share of the county’s income. You can’t deny that the county has been seriously, seriously impacted. I think Merced’s reaction to the Hmong is a matter of water swamping the boat, not a matter of racism.”

  On occasion, however, it is a matter of racism. One day Dang Moua was walking out of his grocery store, the Moua Oriental Food Market, when a man he had never seen before drove by and started yelling at him. “He is maybe forty-year-ol
d person,” recalled Dang. “He is driving ’84 Datsun. He say to me, Shit man, why you come to this country? Why didn’t you die in Vietnam? Well, my father always say to me, if someone act like a beast to you, you must act like a person to him. So I try to smile and be nice. I say, I’m a citizen just like you are. I say, Give me your phone number, you come to my house and eat Hmong food and we talk two or three hour. But he run away. Maybe he is veteran and he convince I am enemy.”

  Dang’s hypothesis is not as farfetched as it sounds. Many people in Merced have confused the Hmong with the Vietnamese—including the former mayor, Marvin Wells, who once informed a Chamber of Commerce luncheon that the “Vietnam refugees” in California were “a problem.” It is not uncommon to hear the Hmong called “boat people,” although Laos is landlocked, and the only boat most Hmong are likely to have seen was the bamboo raft on which they floated, under fire, across the Mekong River. At least the real boat people, the former South Vietnamese, were United States allies. A more unsettling assumption was revealed by the MCMC maintenance man who, conflating the Hmong with the Vietcong, told Dave Schneider that the hospital was patronized by “too many fucking gooks.”

  Over and over again, the Hmong here take pains to explain that they fought for the United States, not against it. Dang Moua is a one-man public-relations outfit, constantly hauling out an old National Geographic with a picture of his uncle in a military uniform, or popping a videotape about the Armée Clandestine into his VCR. One man from a nearby Central Valley town made sure that even after his death there could be no mistake about his past. His tombstone in the Tollhouse Cemetery northeast of Fresno—where dozens of Hmong, reminded of Laos by the hilly topography, chose to be buried until local residents started complaining about their loud funerals—reads:

  BELOVED FATHER AND GRANDFATHER

  CHUA CHA CHA

  APRIL 20, 1936

  FEBRUARY 27, 1989

  HE SERVED FOR THE C.I.A. FROM 1961 TO 1975

  In 1994, there was a demonstration in Fresno by Hmong welfare recipients, many of whom were former soldiers, protesting a new requirement that they work sixteen hours a week in public service jobs, which they called “slavery.” Like older Hmong across the country who still believed in “The Promise”—the CIA’s alleged compensation contract—they assumed that aid with no strings attached was no more than their proper due. They expected the Americans to be grateful for their military service; the Americans expected them to be grateful for their money; and each resented the other for not acting beholden.

  In the Director’s Conference Room at the Merced Human Services Agency, there hangs a huge paj ntaub that tells the story of the end of the war in Laos. In a series of embroidered and appliquéd images, Hmong families try to crowd into four American airplanes at Long Tieng, walk to Thailand carrying huge loads on their backs, attempt to swim across a wide river, settle in Ban Vinai, and, finally, load their belongings onto a bus that will take them to an airplane bound for the United States. Across from the paj ntaub there is a computer from which the welfare files of thousands of Hmong can be accessed. The Lees, like many Hmong families whose records have been kept here, are intimately familiar with the grief chronicled by the paj ntaub but oblivious to the anger induced by the computer files. When I asked Foua and Nao Kao how they felt about being on welfare, Foua said, “I am afraid the welfare will go away. I am afraid to look for a job because I am afraid I could not do it. I am afraid we would not have food to eat.” Nao Kao said, “In Laos we had our own animals and our own farm and our own house, and then we had to come to this country, and we are poor and we have to have welfare, and we have no animals and no farm, and that makes me think a lot about our past.” Neither of them said a word about what Americans might think of them for not working. For them, that was not the issue. The issue was why the American War had forced them to leave Laos and, via a reluctant trajectory that would have been unimaginable to their parents or their parents’ parents, wind up in, of all places, Merced.

  Sometimes I felt that the Hmong of Merced were like one of those visual perception puzzles: if you looked at it one way you saw a vase, if you looked at it another way you saw two faces, and whichever pattern you saw, it was almost impossible, at least at first glance, to see the other. From one angle, the welfare statistics looked appalling. From another, it was possible to make out small but measurable signs of progress: that during the past decade, despite the periodic arrival of new JOJs from Thailand, the public assistance rate had declined by five percent; that more than 300 graduates of government-funded job-training programs were now operating sewing machines, making furniture, assembling electronic components, and working in other local industries; that dozens of local Hmong women had started taking English classes following a 1995 change in federal welfare regulations—a warmup to the 1996 bill—that required both parents in intact families to study or work unless there was a child under three or a disabled family member at home. (The requirement to “work” would be more effective if Merced actually had jobs.)

  When you looked at the Merced school system, what you saw again depended on your point of view. From one perspective, the Hmong children—who multiplied at a rate that made Dr. Small just shake his head and keep muttering the word “contraception”—were a disaster. In order to relieve overcrowding and to desegregate schools that would otherwise be almost entirely Asian, Merced has had to bus nearly 2,000 of its elementary and middle-school students; build three new elementary schools, a new middle school, and a new high school; teach classes in more than seventy trailers and, while waiting for them to arrive, in cafeterias, on auditorium stages, and in the exhibition hall of the County Fairgrounds; and switch seven schools to a staggered all-year calendar.

  On the other hand, Hmong children rarely caused disciplinary problems and regularly crowded the honor rolls.* Four of the Lee children received their classes’ Student-of-the-Month awards. Rick Uebner, who taught May Lee’s eighth-grade Language Arts class, once wrote me a letter that described May as “a leader among her peers and a clear-thinking, confident person.” He continued:

  Almost exclusively, the Hmong are hard-working, quick-learning students. Their parents are eager to attend conferences, in spite of language barriers. On many occasions students have acted as interpreters for their parents and me. Typically the parents thank me for teaching their child, ask if he or she is working hard enough, wonder if there is any problem with the child showing proper respect and inquire if there is anything that they can do at home to help.

  At a conference I attended on college and career planning for Hmong teenagers, Jonas Vangay, standing under a sign that said EDUCATION: THE KEY TO YOUR FUTURE, told his almost preternaturally quiet audience, “In America, even when the child is in the stomach, the mother thinks about books and pencils. Your parents grew with knife or hammer or tool. They cannot help you. Let your book be your best friend. For if you cannot learn in school, whose fault is it? Who is to blame?”

  No one said a word.

  “Answer me!” thundered Jonas.

  Finally, in a small voice, a boy said, “Yourself.”

  “Right!” said Jonas. “Do not be afraid! If you are a chicken boy or chicken girl, and you keep quiet, the examination will come and you will fail! Those who cannot learn cannot be successful! We want you to be successful in the year 2000!”

  There was silence in the room. Then the students burst, or crept, into muted applause.

  Although many Hmong teenagers in Merced are as wholesome and deferential as those in Jonas’s audience, a few have joined the Men of Destruction, the Blood Asian Crips, the Oriental Locs, or one of the other gangs which, in a perverse distortion of the group ethic, started spreading through the Central Valley in the mid-eighties. Merced has black and Hispanic gangs as well, but local police officers agree that the Hmong gangs are the most likely to carry guns and the most likely to use them.

  I occasionally heard mutterings about Hmong gangs, but local residents wh
o disliked the Hmong seemed to be far more obsessed with smaller, stranger crimes. I was told countless times that the Hmong kidnapped underage brides. I also heard that they smuggled drugs. The local police department confirmed that opium had been found inside ax handles, picture frames, bamboo chairs, teabags, and packages of noodles. There were also many tales about Fish and Game violations. The Merced Sun-Star ran an article about Hmong who poached bass from the San Luis Reservoir with 1,550-foot setlines, drove deer into ambushes by banging on pots and pans, and served stewed pied-bill grebe for dinner. None of these stories was false, but they were all partial. Left out of the telling were all the extenuating circumstances: that Hmong marriage customs had a cultural context unfamiliar to Americans;* that opium smuggling was uncommon, and most of the contraband was intended for medicinal use by the elderly; that in Laos, all the hilltribes had hunted and fished without rules, seasons, or limits; and that once they reached adulthood, the Hmong here, as in other parts of the country, had a low overall crime rate compared with other people below the poverty line.