The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  The most frequent accusation I heard was that the Hmong were terrible drivers. They seemed fine to me, so I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and asked John McDoniel, the manager, what he thought. He said, “In many respects I am happy to have these people as neighbors, but as far as driving ability goes—well, that’s another matter. Violations of pedestrian right-of-way. Going through stop signs. Not realizing their speed. All errors of judgment. Also, when they come to get their licenses, some of them cheat on the written test.”

  “How do they cheat?” I asked.

  “They sew,” said Mr. McDoniel.

  “They sew?”

  Mr. McDoniel, who wore trifocals and looked a little like Ed Wynn, opened the top left drawer of his desk. “Well, the ones who don’t know English can’t read the questions, and they answer at random and take the corrected answer sheets home and share them with their friends. Some of them just memorize the dots on the page. Five different tests, forty-six questions, three answers—let me see, 46 times 15 is 690 dots. They’re very good at memorization, but that’s an awful lot of dots, so quite a few of them bring in these little cribs.”

  He reached in the drawer and took out an eyeglass case. In flawless cross-stitch—a different color for each of the test’s five versions—a paj ntaub artist had sewn microscopic X’s to indicate whether, for each question, the correct answer was the first, second, or third option.

  Next he took out a checked coat. On each lapel, certain squares had been blocked in with thread.

  Next he took out a striped pullover with almost invisible white stitches down the front and along each sleeve.

  Next he took out a white shirt with minute blue stitches on the cuffs.

  “Real neat work, isn’t it?” he said admiringly.

  I concurred. Then I asked, “What do you do when you catch someone using one of these?”

  “He fails the test, and we confiscate the crib.”

  It occurred to me that an awful lot of Hmong must exit from the Department of Motor Vehicles wearing fewer clothes than when they walked in.

  Late that night, I lay on the floor in Bill Selvidge’s study, where I was staying. Next to my sleeping bag I had taped photographs of Hmong: Hmong children from the National Geographic wearing paj ntaub; Hmong teenagers from the Merced Sun-Star wearing jeans; the Lee family, wearing slightly off-kilter American clothes, in pictures I had taken myself. I found them all very beautiful, and I often stared at them for hours when I couldn’t sleep. That night, for some reason, the phrase “differently abled”—a substitute for “disabled” that had enjoyed a brief vogue among progressive journalists—kept buzzing around my head. I had always disliked the term, which struck me as euphemistic and patronizing. Suddenly, I realized why it was keeping me awake. I had been trying all day to decide whether I thought the Hmong were ethical or unethical, and now I saw it: they were—in this case, it was a supremely accurate phrase—differently ethical.

  The Hmong, it seemed to me, were abiding, in spades, by E. M. Forster’s famous dictum that it is better to betray one’s country than one’s friend. Since they had never had a nation of their own, and had been persecuted by every nation they had inhabited, they could hardly be expected to harbor an extravagant respect for national jurisprudence. Rules and regulations were particularly breakable if they conflicted with the group ethic—which, after all, is an ethic, not just an excuse to flout someone else’s ethic. Hmong folktales are heavily populated with characters, clearly meant to be perceived as virtuous, who lie to kings, dragons, dabs, and other authority figures in order to protect their families or friends. I had heard innumerable modern versions in which some synecdochical representative of the U.S. government had played the role of righteously deceived dab. In the Thai camps, Hmong had claimed their children were older than they really were, so they could receive larger food allotments; claimed their parents were younger than they really were, because it was rumored that the United States considered old people undesirable; and told immigration officials that collateral relatives were members of their immediate families. In the United States, they had claimed their children were younger than they really were, so they could stay in school longer; lied to doctors in order to get disability benefits; claimed they had separated from a spouse in order to increase the family’s welfare allowance; and, among the younger generation, let friends copy their schoolwork. Not all the Hmong I knew had done these things. Most had not. But those who had were unashamed. In fact, the ones who had lied to immigration officials had been amazed, when they reached the United States and discussed their experiences with their American sponsors, to find that their behavior was regarded as unethical. What would have seemed unethical—in fact, unpardonable—to them was leaving their relatives behind.

  Nao Kao Lee, who couldn’t read a word of English, had passed his driving test, in precisely the manner John McDoniel had described, by memorizing where to place the X’s on his answer sheet. He had been asked to make a set of prescribed pencil marks; he had done so. In fact, his success on the test—which seemed to him a purely technical challenge, not an assessment of his ability to drive safely—was a triumph of intelligence over bureaucracy. However, it never would have occurred to him to go to so much trouble if he had been able to pass by conventional methods. (Not long after my conversation with John McDoniel, the California Department of Motor Vehicles instituted oral and written tests in Hmong, and the rate of cheating among Hmong applicants declined to a level comparable with that of Merced’s other ethnic groups.) Nao Kao viewed his driver’s license as a matter of patent necessity: how else was he to visit his relatives? The family came first, then the clan, then the Hmong people, and everything and everybody else ranked so far below those three that it would have been blasphemy to mention them in the same breath. I believe that Nao Kao, like most Hmong, would rather die than deceive a member of his family or clan.

  The group ethic enabled Nao Kao not only to pass his driving test but to make unequivocal decisions in every sphere of his life, to assess people’s characters with confidence, and to operate almost entirely within the supportive Hmong community rather than within the larger and harsher world of America. On a larger scale, the exigent pull of ethnic solidarity was what made the Hmong so openhanded, so good at teamwork, and so warm. But it seemed to me that, especially for the community’s educated leaders, the obligation to put the group before the self also had some negative consequences: stress, loss of privacy, a punishing sense of responsibility. Nao Kao’s age and his lack of English insulated him from the conflicts and ambiguities of having one foot in one culture and one in another. His life, if not joyous, was at least clear. This was not the case with the Hmong who shared high status in both the Hmong and the American communities.

  Dang Moua was an exception. He had so much forward momentum that stresses and doubts simply flowed off him, like water from a torpedo. Also, although Dang spent many hours doing what nearly all literate, English-speaking Hmong of his generation did—deciphering other people’s junk mail, filling out their tax forms, telephoning agencies, translating notes from school—he charged for these tasks. Most Hmong did them for free. I heard about one multilingual woman, once a nursing administrator in Xieng Khouang province, who had worked as a Hmong liaison after settling in Minnesota. She became so exhausted by the incessant demands of the Twin Cities’ Hmong community, both during and after work hours, that she moved to Merced without telling her clan and got a job that allowed her to deal only with Americans. “Don’t call her,” I was told. “She’s trying to lie low.” Family loyalty—the group ethic concentrated to an even more potent form—also had its downside. Pa Vue Thao, the interpreter who had made an herbal compress to heal Jan Harwood’s broken leg, told me he had once been offered a lucrative job at U.C. Davis. He had turned it down, with regret but without hesitation, after his father, angry that Pa Vue would even consider leaving his relatives in Merced, asked him, “Does money mean more or does the family mean more
?”

  In the early seventies, out of the more than 300,000 Hmong in Laos, there were only thirty-four—all men—who were studying at universities overseas. Two of them had resettled in Merced: Blia Yao Moua and Jonas Vangay. Both had won scholarships to the Lycée Nationale, Vientiane’s most elite secondary school, and had obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from French universities. Jonas left a job as a computer analyst in a Paris suburb to immigrate to the United States in 1983, just after the largest wave of Hmong refugees, most of them illiterate farmers like the Lees, had been admitted. Blia came the same year, leaving an executive position at an international packaging company. “I move here to help because it was my moral responsibility,” he told me. “If my generation stay in France, we would feel guilty.” Blia and Jonas were more intellectually cosmopolitan not only than every Hmong they knew, but also than every American they knew, including myself. Their leadership roles in Merced had earned both of them respect, but little money, and, as far as I could see, little peace of mind.

  I knew Blia Yao Moua best. There was a period of a few months when I spent almost every afternoon sitting in his office, a windowless cubicle with fake wood paneling, asking questions about Hmong religion, military history, medical practices, kinship patterns, weddings, funerals, music, clothing, architecture, and gastronomy. It was from Blia that I learned, for example, that if I wronged another person, I might be reborn in my next life as my victim’s buffalo and used for farm work; that what American doctors called the Mongolian spot—a bluish birthmark on the buttocks of many Asian babies—was in fact the place where the babies had been spanked, in utero, by a dab; and that the shoes Hmong corpses wore for burial had upturned toes. Blia looked like a frayed aristocrat, with a high domed forehead and finely drawn features. Although he was almost exactly my age—in his mid-thirties when we first met—I always felt like a child in his presence, partly because I sat in a chair with a tiny desk attached, the way I had in sixth grade, and partly because he knew so much more than I did and was so patient with my ignorance. I remember countless occasions, after I had asked him to provide a rational explanation for a nonrational custom, when he just shook his head gently and said, “Anne, may I explain to you again. The Hmong culture is not Cartesian.”

  Blia was the executive director of Lao Family Community, a mutual-assistance organization that helped Merced’s Hmong community negotiate the public-assistance labyrinth, apply for job training, resolve community conflicts, and keep abreast of news from Laos and Thailand.* It was quartered in an old truck depot near the Kmart. Signs on the wall, next to Hmong-language handouts on fair housing laws and disability insurance, said PLEASE HELP YOURSELF OUT and YOU MAY WANTED NEWS. The Hmong community might not always meet the expectations of the American community, but it certainly knew how to run itself. Blia once drew me a flowchart—which was Cartesian—delineating how his organization worked. “At the top is the president and advisory board of eight,” he explained. “Then eleven Board of Director. Then seventeen district leaders. Then our 6,000 members. Let us say we need a hundred dollars to help out person who will be evicted. The seventeen district leaders carry the news, and everyone donate five cents or ten cents. Tomorrow we get that money. Or if one person die, tomorrow money will flow back to help that family. If there is change in welfare rules, we get out information the same way. If someone have problem with their child, we can solve problem inside Hmong community before it gets to the police. This way, 6,000 people we can serve with four or five people working in our office. No problem.”

  No problem, that is, if those four or five people had no private life whatsoever. Blia’s eyes were often puffed and bloodshot from lack of sleep. Once he came to work after staying up all night mediating between the Merced police and a Hmong family who, while bringing a sacrificed pig home from Fresno, had had a traffic accident that distributed parts of the pig across the northbound lanes of Highway 99. He spent another night dealing with three teenaged girls who had run away from their homes in Fresno and stolen some money from an uncle in Merced. After persuading the uncle not to report the theft to the police, Blia took the girls home, woke his pregnant wife, and asked her to cook them a meal while they waited for their parents. The parents were not grateful. “They are angry because I should have acted more severely,” he told me. “I did not know until they arrive, but I am related to all those families by my clan and my wife’s clan. That is terrible! In our culture, this means I have same duty as parents to give the children a lesson. I should have spank them. I did not do my right duty.”

  I saw Blia’s face light up only once, the time he described an ambitious housing scheme he had conceived. “I would like to share with you what we are dreaming of for the future,” he said. “Some of us hope to establish a Hmongtown, on the other side of Childs and Gerard Avenues. If we can make the financial package to buy this land, we can build two, three hundred houses. The Hmong house in Laos has a cross like an X at the top. We can do that here too. Each family can have a small garden. We can have our own Hmong shopping center. Our Hmongtown will boost morale because people will take good care of it. We will lose face if white person is seeing that Hmongtown is dirty. Having our own town will help Hmong people to become more economically self-sufficient. If this dream can come true, this will be very good for Hmong image!”

  But when I came back to Merced a year later, no one had heard of Hmongtown, and Blia had resigned from his job at Lao Family Community and was selling insurance door-to-door. An American who knew him told me, “Blia is the most burned-out Hmong I ever saw.” He later moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he counsels Asian students and teaches a course on Hmong culture at Metropolitan State University. His telephone number is now unlisted.

  Like Blia, Jonas Vangay translated, mediated, counseled, and interceded on twenty-four-hour call. At the end of his speech at the college and career conference I had attended, Jonas had told his teenaged audience, “Call me any time during the day or night,” and I knew that he would be taken literally. He had heavy family responsibilities as well. Explaining to me once why his family shared their home with two of his brothers, one of whom had nine children, he said, “I have another older brother who is very American now. He refuse to accept our brothers to live with him. He say, Here in the United States it is everyone for himself. I say, I am Hmong. For the Hmong, it is never everyone for himself.”

  Jonas was thin and wiry and handsome, although, like almost every well-educated Hmong I knew, he always looked dog-tired. His real name was Vang Na. He had changed it to Jonas Vangay when he was living in France, because he thought that his résumé would garner more job offers if he did not sound so Asian. He now had two jobs, as a bilingual education specialist for the Merced school system and as a Hmong-language teacher at Merced College. I used to talk to him, using a mixture of English and French, in an elementary school classroom, seated again at a child’s desk. I never asked a question about Hmong history or linguistics that he was unable to answer.

  Because, like Blia, Jonas was always busy but never turned me away, I decided to find a way to thank him for his help. Should I give him a gift? This seemed hazardous; he might feel he should reciprocate. Also, I didn’t trust my gift-selecting instincts. Once, in an attempt to bridge the miles between Laos, Merced, and New York City, I had given Foua and Nao Kao a small plastic globe, only to find that they believed the earth was flat. Should I invite Jonas and his wife to Bill Selvidge’s house? This might confuse them; there was no recognized Hmong category for platonic friends who shared living quarters.

  “Why don’t you invite them to a nice restaurant?” suggested Bill.

  So one evening, at 7:00 sharp, I sat waiting for Jonas in the lounge at a local steakhouse called the Cask ’n Cleaver. He had told me his wife could not join us because she had to take care of their children. I suspected he might also be embarrassed because her English was rudimentary.

  The restaurant’s hostess, who wore a silver lamé top and
a miniskirt, asked me whom I was waiting for.

  “A Hmong man who has helped me with my work,” I said.

  The hostess looked surprised. “I just moved to Merced,” she said, “and I don’t know nothing about the Hmongs. I just saw my first one today. My boyfriend said, That’s a Hmong. I said, How can you tell the difference? They look just like Chinamen to me. My boyfriend says they’re the worst drivers in the world. When he sees one, he goes clear ’cross town to stay away from them! I guess Hmongs don’t come to restaurants like this very often.” (They sure don’t, I thought. And by the way, you’re not fit to polish Jonas’s boots.)

  Jonas arrived forty-five minutes late, saying he had been delayed by a student. I never knew if he had known from the start that he couldn’t make it at seven, and had agreed to the time because he thought that was what I wanted to hear, or whether (the story of his life) he had once again been pulled in two mutually exclusive directions. The dinner was not a success. Despite his five languages, Jonas had difficulty understanding the waitress, a teenager who spoke rapid Valley-Girl, and had to ask me several times what she was saying. Out of politeness—certainly not from lack of sophistication, since he had eaten at plenty of Parisian restaurants that would make the Cask ’n Cleaver look like McDonald’s—he ordered the cheapest entrée on the menu. Our conversation was formal and halting. Jonas was obviously relieved when we left. Afterwards, we stood in the parking lot, talking in the dark.

  “You know, Anne,” he said quietly, “when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.”

  Then Jonas drove home to his wife, his three children, his brothers, his brothers’ wives, his brothers’ ten children, and his ringing telephone.