by Michele Lee
We walked to Uncle Lai’s car, a rented four-wheel drive, its sides splashed with dried sprays of dirt from rural travels to villages. Two short young Hmong women and a short young Hmong man had accompanied Uncle Lai. I missed their names and again I was reminded of Minnesota. It begins, I thought. Certain titles for aunts who weren’t immediate blood aunts and titles for cousins who weren’t immediate blood cousins, and relatives who had particular variations in how I addressed them based on whether they were from Mum’s side or Dad’s. The people in the back seat weren’t related to Mum or Dad, that’s what I did glean, but I wasn’t sure how they were related to Uncle Lai.
We drove to the outskirts of Vientiane, to spend the night in town before heading out to a village. Laotians, seemingly all in thongs, walked languidly along the crumbly edges of the roads, under banana trees, meandering back to their cement houses where shade and satellite TVs awaited, the screens glassy with images of Thai soap operas.
There were numerous Hmong people in the driveway of the house we arrived at, people who also moved with slow languor. Aunt Houa, the wife of Mum’s half-brother, straightened up at the sight of me alighting from the four-wheel drive, and a smile spread across her face like seeping honey. There had been a misunderstanding about when I was coming and she’d gone to the airport a day earlier expecting me to be there, and now she seemed pleasantly surprised to see me at all. I was confused by her too. She held a broom, she’d been sweeping, giving the impression that she lived at the house. She didn’t, however; the house belonged to the other passengers in the car and Aunt Houa was from Nam Hi, where we were headed tomorrow. Aunt Houa was just being helpful and indiscriminately cleaning and minding all the children under the carport.
She couldn’t speak any English. She wore a sports jacket and a sarong.
At least there was a monkey – a lia – in a cage in the garden, under a canopy of evergreen leaves, to add another disorienting element to the situation.
I slept for twelve hours. At one point I was roused by gentle hands and I reared up as the women strung a mosquito net over my bed. Then I dropped stone-heavy back onto my pancakethin mattress and slept. And slept, shrouded in netting.
I woke up around 6 a.m. In Melbourne, it was 9 a.m.
For breakfast we ate steamed rice and fish in broth. We sat in the kitchen area, which was a separate room from the main house: the adults sat at the big table, the children at an adjacent smaller table. I groggily nudged a bobbing fish head around in my bowl, skirting it around the mustard greens like a lone dodgem car. When the meal was over, the women cleared the dishes; they buzzed with activity and purpose. I knew it’d be polite to waft about in a gesture of helpfulness but suddenly I felt ploddy. Someone noticed and shooed me away to freshen up with a shower in the bathroom. I undressed in semi-lightness and inserted my toiletries into the various crevices in the cliffface of the shower cubicle. The showerhead was attached to a hose, and its resting crook wasn’t even stomach-high, so I had to hold up the hose above my head the whole time to get the water running over my body.
Backing out of the driveway, I saw someone else have a shower too and in full view of passersby. A child, a small boy, had pooed his pants. One of the grandmothers – I’m not sure whose – squatted beside him, washing his spindly legs. As grains of poo streamed off him into the water, the little boy watched Uncle Lai’s four-wheel drive disappear.
It was going to be a long drive to Nam Hi. Uncle Lai was driving. Aunt Houa sat in the back seat with two of her older daughters, my cousins. The younger children sat in the ute tray, their hair whipped by the wind. Also, a young man was travelling with us. He was garbed in neat attire, looking somewhat like a funeral attendant. He had a sweetheart in one of the neighbouring villages.
Uncle Lai stared out quietly and peacefully over the steering wheel as he drove. I knew he was living in Laos until his savings ran out. I didn’t think he was here to find a wife, which is why some Hmong men come back to the motherland. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Lai with a sweetheart in any village. He struck me as asexual.
We dropped off one of my older cousins at a bus station. She lived in Vientiane with her husband but she’d come out to the house last night especially to see me. And now that she had, she waved me bye with a satisfied smile and invited me to come and visit her. I said yes in Hmong, which was what you always did when someone asked you to visit – which they always did. You didn’t have to visit them, and I might never see her again.
We drove on, the road getting bumpier the more remote we went. The chassis of the ute stretched and jerked on the uneven surfaces, which weren’t asphalted over, not like the popular Route 13 connecting Laos’s big towns – Vientiane, Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang. The typical tourist trail. It was mainly locals who headed out to Nam Hi on these dirt roads, and maybe the occasional aid worker. Missionaries at one time, I’m sure.
We stopped at a roadside pineapple stall up on the slant of a mountain. Uncle Lai, a thoughtful guest, wanted to buy fruit so that we would arrive in Nam Hi with food to offer. He picked up a few of the studded golden skulls, testing their weight and examining their spiky fronds.
I asked the girls manning one section of the pineapple stall if they were Hmong. They giggled and bunched together even more closely, like the pineapples in front of them.
‘What sort of Hmong are you?’ I asked them.
They giggled, bunched up. They said, ‘Hmong Vang.’
Hmong Vang like Mum used to be and like her halfbrother, Uncle Vanxahy. He’d been called away for duties and that’s why he’d sent Aunt Houa into Vientiane to greet me rather than coming himself.
He was home when we arrived in Nam Hi. He was tall too, taller than me – at last, someone Hmong who towered over me. Even in a quick glance I could locate Mum’s face in his. It was the straight nose and the way the eyes hung around it, the way the cheeks fanned out from the eye socket. His hair had a frizz, causing a mini afro to sprout out from his head. It explained my little brother Xang’s thick hair, which always sat as though it’d been blasted upwards by a hair dryer.
‘You’ve come,’ Uncle Vanxahy said.
It was an iteration of the obvious but Hmong people usually say ‘You’ve come’ rather than ‘Hello’. I don’t think there’s a word for ‘Hello’. In writing, you might be more formal and say ‘Be well’ but when you greet someone face-to-face you say ‘You’ve come’. Even if you used the rhetorical variation ‘You’ve come, haven’t you?’, you weren’t genuinely posing a question. The appropriate response to ‘You’ve come’ or ‘You’ve come, haven’t you?’ is to confirm that, yes, you have indeed come. The next question is related to your family. Some of the elderly people inside the house wandered up to me and said, ‘You’re my niece’s daughter, then?’, to which I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ and the enquiring person departed, their suspicions confirmed.
There were children, more of my cousins. Their shyness prevented them from approaching so they loitered in the murky corners of the living room, their fists curled at their mouths, and then they drifted away, eyes still glued to me.
‘Here, Uncle,’ I said, ‘My mum said to give you this.’
I handed him $1200 in Lao kip. This wasn’t a traditional custom, some fiscally friendly handshake of hello. Like a lot of Hmong people who’d resettled in First World countries, for years Mum had hoarded a percentage of her new-found wealth and sent an adequate sum back to her relatives in Laos, the ones she couldn’t get reunion visas for. Uncle Vanxahy was grateful. He told me that Mum’s money had helped him erect the wall that separated the beds from the general living and dining area.
He pointed at the walls and I obliged a lingering glance.
He apologised for the modesty of the house. The floors were cement, the walls were thatched. In the kitchen, the ground was a hard-baked earth and there was no electricity but live fire pits.
After pineapple, out on the back porch, we tried to have a conversation.
‘You can’t s
peak Hmong, then?’
‘No, not really.’
‘This is a pity,’ he said. ‘I have so much to say to you but we can’t speak.’
‘I know,’ I said, and laughed ineffectually at the situation.
And the conversation ended.
We sat together in silence. I surveyed the garden. There was a showering area to the left, with a fence around it offering some modesty when people washed. The rest of the yard was dirt beds and well-worn paths. Chickens scuttled by, not staying within any boundaries. A dog lay on the ground, resting his spotty chin on his forepaws.
We sat.
Uncle Vanxahy sighed. He said, ‘Life here is very, very hard to like.’
It was still light. Uncle Vanxahy told me to ‘Go and have fun at the local market.’ He asked me to buy him a watch. The one on his wrist was no longer working.
The local market was fifteen minutes’ drive away. Uncle Lai drove; the chassis of his car still rocked on the roads out here but not too wildly. We passed an outdoor gathering on the way.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, smiling. ‘Looks like fun to you?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Lao people. Wedding, maybe?’
It didn’t look like a wedding. Not that I knew whether or not Lao people held their weddings under trees. I knew that they didn’t swing chickens or recite chants, that they had regarded Hmong people as peculiar hillbillies. I saw a marquee. Lao men and women in pretty sarongs were milling about outside.
The market was bustling with the atmosphere of a strip mall in suburbia. Dirt patches out the front served as a car park. We parked near the many motorcycles, all tilted to their sides, and then we ambled into the front section of the market, which had a tin shelter over it. A few vendors sold cheap and cheery clothes imported from Thailand, displayed either on tables or hanging front-on from a taut string line, giving the ghostly impression of headless and limbless people hovering midair. Another vendor sold plastic shoes, mainly sandals and thongs, the kind that let your toes breathe and flex. There was underwear for sale too, full briefs in a limited number of styles, no G-strings. Three people sold watches, all displayed in cloudy glass cabinets. I asked one person for a price and he punched numbers into a calculator and held it up for me to see. I bought Uncle Vanxahy a new Casio watch for about $15.
In the back section of the market, behind the tin shed, there were open-air rows of fresh vegetables laid out for inspection on top of cloths and tarps. The vegetables didn’t vary greatly from stall to stall. One person might be selling a greater pile of snake beans and another more bunches of coriander. I strolled through the aisles, head craning over piles and bunches. An elderly Hmong woman squatted. She was cooking triangles of pounded sweetened rice over a mound of heated rocks.
‘Can I please take your photograph?’ I asked her.
Her head was bent. She barely lifted it. ‘Yes, go ahead, young man, take my picture and show everyone back home how poorly we live.’
I liked dressing in masculine clothes and back in high school relief teachers mistakenly called out ‘Michael Lee’ when reading out the roll-call but it was unusual for someone to actually think I had testicles.
I assumed it was my short hair.
I snapped a photo.
The twin cities in Minnesota were different from Nam Hi: fewer triangles over hot coals and more malls, including the Mall of America, the biggest one in the country. Having fun at this particular market required parking your SUV in a multi-storey parking lot and then surrendering a whole day to shopping. Every stall inside was sheltered, and every stall had four walls, and there were no open-air vegetable shops. You could buy many kinds of watches and for less than $15, and many types of G-strings and many dresses to wear them with. And when you wanted to take a break, there was an aquarium and an amusement park on the ground floor.
Not only were there more things to buy in America, there were more of my clanspeople: Hmong Lee. Whereas Mum’s family had died over the decades or stayed on in villages in Laos, Dad’s family had splintered off into nearly every continent on the Earth, eventually coalescing in Minnesota, the state of a thousand lakes and nine months of cold and snow – the unlikeliest place to reconvene a race of subtropical people. Grandpa had avoided the cold, to his credit, and he and his younger children had first been accepted for migration to Paris, and because he couldn’t duplicate an agricultural life there, he moved the family to French Guiana where one of his older daughters lived, and then because so many Hmong were in America and so many of his children in Minnesota, he gave in, entered the country on a short-term visa and never left. And it was a big family he was reuniting with: he had three wives and over thirty children, and a growing number of grandchildren. Two of the wives, First Grandma and Middle Grandma, lived with Grandpa in what was called the Big House. The younger unmarried children – my aunts and uncles – lived here too. Thus, the second floor was a warren of rooms, each teeming impossibly with beds and bunk beds.
On Sundays, the extended family came to the Big House for day-long family meals. In winters, the heater grunted to life. At the start of the day, the women laid a freshly killed pig on a drop-sheet covering the kitchen floor and squatted around it, chatting and chopping in their Skechers sneakers, while their cleavers danced and shone with blood. Grandchildren raced in and out of rooms, down into the basement – their rivalries and allegiances shifting week to week. In the living room, the men of the family sat discussing world affairs in sanctimonious, barking tones. Hmong, like other Asian languages, is tonal. Meaning removed, the conversation had a swooping sound. Long words flew out and then snapped back.
First Grandma, my blood grandmother, was dismissive of me. ‘Mai Xi doesn’t understand Hmong,’ she said in Hmong to one of my Dad’s sisters. ‘Tell her what I said.’
‘Grandma, I do understand you,’ I protested patiently.
‘Huh?’ she replied and turned back to my aunt, who smiled sympathetically at me. ‘Tell Mai Xi what I said, she doesn’t understand Hmong.’
Grandma disappeared upstairs into the warren. She had a TV in her room and she liked to watch Power Rangers, even though they spoke less Hmong than me.
We returned from the market as Uncle Vanxahy strode around the side of the house. I gave him the watch. As he put it on, he told me to come with him to see his rice paddies – Mum had helped pay for them. I switched from Uncle Lai’s ute to Uncle Vanxahy’s kev, which is a motorised rice plough used for farming. It has a tricycle design with one wheel jutting out the front like a pointy beak and two back wheels that hold a cart on top. This is where I sat, along with Aunt Houa, who hoisted a bright umbrella over our heads. Uncle Vanxahy sat in the driver’s seat at the head of the cart. Three Hmong men jumped in too. There was no rain and no need for an umbrella, and there were no introductions. I assumed the men to be family, most likely Hmong Vang.
And so our Vang crew lurched out in the kev from the driveway of Uncle Vanxahy’s house and we rumbled out onto the road, dipping the pointy kev beak into the pockmarked surface when Uncle Vanxahy couldn’t steer around the many miniature craters. Before turning off the main road, he stopped for fuel – clear hoses were attached to the petrol bowsers and I could see amber petrol bubbling through the hose and into the tank of the kev.
The rice paddies were further away than I expected; it took us many silent minutes to arrive. By then it was getting dark, the night seemed to descend suddenly. I could just make out glints of shiny water lurking under rice reeds. But the real boon was beyond the gate, a small herd of cows. I heard them rustling.
‘See what your mum has helped us buy,’ Uncle Vanxahy said.
We were about to take one home. The cows knew it – this old routine – and tried to escape being caught.
‘Mai Xi, go back into the kev,’ Uncle Vanxahy said. He and the three young men followed the herd for a few metres while Aunt Houa got into the driver’s seat and I stayed in the
cart. Aunt Houa manoeuvred slowly and stopped the kev as one cow was outnumbered by the Hmong Vang. Helpless, the Hmong Vang plucked her from her friends and deposited her into the cart and then strapped her limbs together.
There were no introductions.
Outside Uncle Vanxahy’s house, when we returned with the cow, I could see that Uncle Lai was leaving. He was with the young man in the neat shirt and pants, and they were getting into the ute.
‘We’re going to visit his girlfriend,’ Uncle Lai explained. The young man affirmed with a nod.
‘We’ll be back tomorrow for hub plib,’ Uncle Lai said. ‘Will you be okay tonight?’
I nodded and then paused. ‘Ohhh. That’s what the cow is for,’ I said.
Dad’s family had held a hub plib for me early into my fiveweek stay in Minnesota. As the snow fell outside, the Hmong Lee didn’t capture a cow for my blessing ceremony but instead organised a party with all my aunts, uncles and cousins and ordered for me a super-sized rectangular vanilla sponge from Sam’s Club with the words Welcome Home Michele piped in baby-blue icing. I ended up very welcomed at my party: over a thousand US dollars in cash, more money than I’d ever held, more than what I had brought with me. I spent my ceremonial dollars in the malls: there wasn’t much else to do in the winter except to shop.
Not that the summer here in Laos was busy. For a few hours that night, I chatted with some of my cousins in the living area.
‘Are there fields to tend to?’ they asked, imagining this place called Australia.