Roundup — The Hmong in America

From the Detroit Asian Youth Project (via brownfemipower and wsoft.heart):

On September 17, 2006, teenager Chonburi Xiong was fatally shot twenty-seven times in his own home by Warren police officers. Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith and an internal police investigation determined that the shooting was justified. However, the family disputes this and has filed a lawsuit against the city of Warren and four police officers, alleging gross negligence, intentional misconduct and violation of Xiong’s civil rights.

From the Detroit News:

Friends and family of a Warren teenager fatally shot by police in September are stepping up efforts to draw attention to alleged police brutality and racial discrimination in the city.

Members of the Hmong community and other Asian Pacific American groups have joined with the NAACP in the wake of the shooting death of Chonburi Xiong, 18, of Warren. He would have turned 19 in February.

Warren police fatally shot Xiong, who is Hmong, 27 times in his home after a domestic violence disturbance.

The group has planned a memorial Saturday to remember Xiong and raise questions about police brutality and discrimination, said Stephanie Chang, a mentor with the Detroit Asian Youth Project, which promotes youth leadership and community involvement.

"No teenager deserves to be shot by the police 27 times in his own home," she said. "There's been a growing pattern of community suspicion of police in Warren."

We don't know much yet about the details surrounding the shooting of Chonburi Xiong. Nevertheless, the story sets off serious alarm bells in my head, not least because it comes right on top of the beating of Hai Vo into a coma and the murder of Cha Vang.

The Hmong in Wisconsin are currently fighting for legislation that would require state schools to teach some Hmong history. Today's Capital Times editorialized:

The recent fatal shooting of a Hmong hunter in a northeast Wisconsin incident that may involve racial and ethnic prejudice provides a powerful reminder that there are many Wisconsinites who have a lot to learn about the tens of thousands of Hmong who immigrated from Laos to this state after the end of the Vietnam War.

State Reps. Donna Seidel, D-Wausau, and Fred Kessler, D-Milwaukee, have come up with a sound proposal for beginning the process. Their Hmong Migration Education Act would direct school boards to provide instruction about the recent history of the Hmong people.

I'm in favor of legislation that insists that our public education demonstrate a civic dimension in the perspectives that are taught. That means sharing all our stories, so that we all see each other as human beings.

I'll never forget a conversation I had in China with a white American priest-professor from the Midwest, who thought he was somehow complimenting Chinese folks when he said, "Yes, there is some racism against the Chinese in the States, but I think a lot of that is because many Americans mistake the Chinese for the Vietnamese and the Hmong, who are dirty and uneducated, unlike the Chinese." I was only 19 at the time and this was a white professor wearing a priest's collar saying these things to me, so I wasn't able to confront the incredible racism in those words.

All these years later, I feel like little has changed in mainstream American attitudes toward the Hmong. According to Susan Barbieri's article "Forgotten Soldiers":

Hmong veterans are aware that many Americans do not welcome refugees who do not speak English. They know that many are unaware of how the Hmong took orders from Americans, cooked food for them, guarded them, carried them when they were wounded, wrapped their bodies when they were killed. [ Pictured: Hmong General Vang Pao and CIA advisor Fred Sass in Laos, 1960.]

When their American friends left in 1974, Hmong hopes for a free Laos were dashed. Tou Yang, 41, constantly relives the years after the American pullout, when he and the other Hmong resisters were trapped in the mountains, valleys, and jungles that teemed with hostile troops. Though his body is here in Minnesota, Tou Yang's spirit walks in post-1974 Laos. "The Americans left and we felt abandoned and there was no escape. We couldn't get to Thailand; we couldn't get to freedom; our leaders left us. Now that we are in America, we still feel like we've been abandoned," he said.

While serving in special guerrilla units during the Vietnam War, between 10,000 and 20,000 Hmong men, women and children were killed, and more than 100,000 fled to Thai refugee camps. There are 27,000 Hmong in Minnesota, and an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 of them fought in the CIA's special forces. [ Pictured: Hmong soldiers assist the CIA's Air America.]

Vietnam veteran Bob Anderson is deeply involved with the local Hmong population and often travels to Laos.... "The Hmong who fought in (General) Vang Pao's army understood they were fighting for the Americans and that they were in some sense an American army. They often mention the promise that was made. It's not clear who made it and when, but some promise was made that if the war went badly, the Hmong would be taken care of," Anderson said. "The Hmong were used."

Here's an extensive excerpt from Sucheng Chan's book Hmong Means Free:

The Hmong living in the United States today came from Laos, a small landlocked country in mainland Southeast Asia. Their ancestors originated in southwestern China, in the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Hunan. For several thousand years, the central Chinese government dominated by Han Chinese basically left the Hmong alone, as long as they paid their tributes to the Chinese. However, the last dynasty in China, the Ching (1644-1911), founded by Manchus, followed a different policy. Ching armies and officials oppressed the Hmong, who rose in rebellion. In the early nineteenth century, this political persecution, along with increasing population pressure, led some of the Hmong to migrate southward into mainland Southeast Asia, where they settled in the mountainous regions of northern Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.

Today there are still more Hmong in China — estimates range from 2.8 to 5 million, depending on whether one counts only the Hmong or combines all their cognate groups — than in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world combined. There has never been an accurate count of how many Hmong live in each of the Southeast Asian countries. Virtually all those who have settled in the United States, however, have come from Laos, where they may have numbered as many as three hundred thousand in the 1960s. Perhaps half of that number remains in Laos today and little is known about how they are faring. The hundred thousand or so now in the United States were forced to come here as a result of their "American connection." [ Pictured: Hmong in China.] [...]

More than sixty ethnic groups belonging to several linguistic families are found in Laos. The dominant political and cultural group, the Lao, belongs to the Tai-speaking peoples called the Lao Loum ("Lao of the lowlands"). The Lao people occupy the lowlands of the Mekong valley on both sides of the Thai-Laotian border, and those in Laos comprise a little less than half of the total Laotian population.  They grow rice in wet paddies for their staple and sugarcane and tropical fruits as cash crops. In the highlands dwell the Lao Theung "Lao of the mountain slopes"), who speak Mon-Khmer languages and occupy the lower elevations, and the Lao Soung ("Lao of the mountain tops"), who speak Tibeto-Burman languages and live at elevations above three thousand feet. The two major Lao Soung groups are the Hmong and the Iu Mien.

The word Hmong means "free." However, older generations of Western scholars and the lowland Lao have referred to the Hmong as Meo, which means "savage" -- a term that the Hmong find derisive and unacceptable. The Iu Mien have been called Yao or Man in the existing literature, while the Lao Theung have been called Kha, which means "slave" -- another derogatory name. [ Pictured: Hmong women at market in Laos.] [...]

In the history of Western colonialism in Southeast Asia, the French were relative latecomers. The Portuguese set up trading posts in Southeast Asia in the late fifteenth century, the Spanish claimed the Philippines in the sixteenth, the Dutch colonized Indonesia in the seventeenth, the British established settlements in Malaya in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth, but the French did not make any real efforts to acquire colonies in that part of the world until the midnineteenth century, though some French Catholic missionaries and traders had begun coming to Siam and Vietnam by the latter part of the seventeenth century. [...]

The French made little effort to develop Laos economically, socially, or culturally. After discovering that their hopes of creating a river empire in the colony was but a pipe dream, the only resource they tried to exploit was the country's tin deposits. They built few roads and no railways in Laos, as they had elsewhere in French Indochina. In the six decades that the French ruled Laos, they did not establish a single high school in the colony. In 1940, a total of only seven thousand Laotian youngsters were attending primary school. Those who desired and could afford a high school education had to go to Vietnam or France to get one. To make Laos pay for itself, the French found four ways to raise revenue: by levying a head tax on all males between the ages of eighteen and sixty; by taxing the sale of opium, alcohol, and salt; by requiring each adult male to perform unpaid corvee labor; and by establishing a government monopoly on opium. [...]

Unlike many Hmong adults, who received no education at all in Laos and are therefore illiterate and lack basic classroom skills, Hmong children are able to benefit more from their schooling in America. In a study of Hmong first-, second-, and third-graders in Minneapolis, Renee Lemieux found that there is a positive correlation between a child's English proficiency and his or her perceived level of adjustment and his or her degree of self-esteem. Thus, from a Euro-American middle-class perspective, the faster the children of refugees master English and internalize American values and norms, the better they will feel about themselves and the more easily they will fit into the larger society. [ Pictured: Performance at the 5th Annual Hmong Art and Music Festival.]

What is seldom recognized, however, is that Hmong families are paying a heavy price for their children's acculturation. Some children have become a source of distress to their parents and a cause of family disunity. The dilemma that Hmong parents face can be simply stated: while they very much want their children to become educated (good academic performance is viewed as an achievement in and of itself, and also as the only means that Hmong families have to ensure their future economic security), they are realizing that, paradoxically, school is the very place where their children are learning behavior that contradicts the parents' own teachings. While the adults appreciate the ability of the children to serve as cultural brokers — to read documents written in English, to communicate with various authorities, to interpret in all kinds of settings — they, in particular the fathers, cannot help but resent the "power accorded the children by their schooling, a power that underscores the men's inability to support their families and the reduced status that results."

Older men — commonly understood to be those over forty, given the premature aging that Hmong experienced as a result of their hard lives in Laos — are having an especially difficult time adapting to life in the United States. The contrast between Hmong culture and American culture is especially great in the honor accorded the aged. In Hmong society, as in most Old World cultures, old people are very much respected, so that individuals do not fear growing old. Even when old people are no longer economically productive or occupying positions of authority, they continue to enjoy respect within their families. There are multiple ways in which deference is shown to old people: reserving special seats for them, serving them choice foods, using honorifics to address them, assuming certain postures of deference, such as bowing in front of them, taking care of their bodily needs, and holding special celebrations in their honor. Among the Hmong, age is defined not only by number of years but also by a person's status within his or her family, by his or her ability to perform hard, physical labor, and by the use of generational titles. That is to say, kinship terminology is used to reinforce respect for age.

In American society, on the other hand, old people are often pushed aside to make room for those who are younger and more vigorous. The nonwhite elderly, in particular, faces what one scholar has called "double jeopardy" — suffering not only from old age but also their minority status. Even more so than other minority elderly people, the Hmong elderly experience further privation due to their poverty and social marginality in the United States. The most painful moments they endure, however, occur when their own children and grandchildren no longer consult them, listen to their advice, or show them any respect. Unable to speak English, dependent on others to drive them places, fearful of taking public transportation in case they get lost, victimized by crime in the low-income neighborhoods where many of them live, many older Hmong men may sit at home with nothing to do except watch television. Having lost their traditional roles as elders — wise men who solve problems, adjudicate quarrels, and make important decisions — they feel useless and helpless. As one of them put it, "Where is my dignity if I cannot do anything for myself?" Said another, "We have become children in this country."

There are quite a few resources online...

Learn About Hmong offers introductory material on Hmong culture.

The Hmong Studies Internet Resource Center has many good links.

Hmong Today and the Hmong Times offer news and views.

The Hmong American Partnership offers civic services and programs.

Hmong youth culture at CHAT.

Kao-Ly Tang writes Hmong Contemporary Issues.

Gary Yia Lee brings a certain scholarly angle.

Jeff Lindsay has put together an excellent web page on the Hmong from what you might call the mainstream American angle, including the following email from a retired career soldier and Vietnam veteran named Jack Austin Smith:

The war in Vietnam was fought on several fronts and I served in two them. The main American battle ground was in the Southern end of South Vietnam. In order for the North Vietnamese forces to fight us there, it was necessary for their supplies and troops to go through Laos and Cambodia on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and Laos was controlled by a Pro-Communist Government at that time. Therefore America was not allowed to have any forces on the ground, although we were allowed to bomb and attack North Vietnamese troops with our aerial forces. About 99% of the combat forces on the ground were Hmong irregulars who were persuaded by Americans to forget about being neutral, and to fight the N. Vietnamese regulars (not relatively poorly trained Viet Cong guerrilla forces). We supplied air cover, but every combat trooper knows aircraft can't take and hold ground. We depended on the Hmongs to do this. Without modern arms, without medical help.

After the fall of Saigon we pulled out of Southeast Asia and left the Hmongs to continue the fight without air support. When we left, the Hmong had to fight both the Laotians and the N. Vietnamese. They could not fight tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft with rifles. A great many Hmongs were slaughtered in their villages. Many were slaughtered at airfields where they waited for evacuation planes that never came. A few were able to fight every foot of the way across Laos and cross the Mekong River into refugee camps in Thailand where they were further mistreated by rather corrupt UN and Thai officials. Out of a estimated 3,000,000 prewar Hmong population less than 200,000 made it to safety. One other ill informed or stupid writer said "they were all gone" meaning, I guess, that the combat Hmongs were all dead, they are wrong. Most of the survivors are in Australia, France and here among us.

Now I don't know about those heroes who have never heard a shot fired in anger, but I am embarrassed that my country so mislead these people. The Hmongs gave up literally everything for us: their country, their homes, their peaceful way of life, most of their families, everything that we would cherish. We promised them our continued support and then we bugged out.

You mentioned having relatives who fought in Vietnam and I hope they all survived. However their chances would have been much less if the Hmongs hadn't intercepted over 50% of the N. Vietnamese troops and supplies. If you truly loved your relatives, you should be grateful for the Hmongs' sacrifices.

And of course, Wikipedia brings us "the Wikipedia angle", which is not so much an angle as it is an endless sequence of angles layered on top of one another, compiled and blended until it all blurs together.

Comments

[Sylvia]

Just as a heads-up, blue found the links about the U.S. giving Hmong Tier 3 terrorist status and an AI article about a hold on a Thailand deportation of 153 Hmong refugees back to Laos.

[brownfemipower]

amazing group of links kai--thanks so much for posting them--Donna at the silence of our friends has some more links as well--

[Nanette]

Great links and laying out of the history, Kai. I think I mentioned that there is a large Hmong community where I live?

Things have gotten a little better and more accepting, just in the time I've lived here (but not totally, of course), but the part about the kids resonates. That pulling between various cultures (that of their parents, their American friends and peers, expectations of them, both bad and good, and so on) just seems to seems to leave some barely coping. Well, they cope, but some compensate by forming gangs for protection and for a sense of belonging - something not unfamiliar to the young (and not so young) of other marginalized cultures, that's for sure.

One thing that I think is good is that there is a yearly Hmong New Year's celebration, held at the fairgrounds here... well publicized in the media, well attended, and where the culture, the food, and many things can be seen and participated in, and I think this has helped lessen the "stranger" aspect, a bit as children (not only Hmong) have grown up with this event as just part of the backdrop of the city... which, as you know, can linger on for centuries, actually. But still.

I like that it is held there... the irony of it. There is actually a fair held there as well, each year, but not too long ago it also came out that during the World War II years, the place was also used as sort of a way station, to hold the Japanese-American citizens from other areas who were on their way to the US detention camps.

Anyway, am off to follow the links and look in at bfp's and Donna's.

Oh, and ebog gary is back, and has a long, wide-ranging post up, just chock full of stuff about his trip, and plans and so on. Most excellent.

[Kai]

Sylvia, thanks for the heads up!

BFP, actually you started it...teamwork! :-)

Nanette, actually I'd been meaning to put together a post about the Hmong ever since your comment about the Hmong in your community and the conversation on the bus you described (and that crush and all that, yeah I remember). Actually your comment pretty much planted the seed for this post. So thank you!

[Kay Olson/Blue]

A fantastic collection of information! Thanks. I've learned a lot from this.

[Professor Zero]

Ditto - This kind of history does not get nearly enough attention, so it's great to see you hitting it!

[wsoftheart]

Nice post and collection of links! Great place to for a quick overview of references. Good work. :)

[Angel H.]

My name is Angel, and I'm an ignorant American...

Seriously, though I had no knowledge whatsoever of the history and current tribulations of the Hmong people. I found this post through the Erase Racism Blog Carnival, and I've learned so much.

Thank you!

[monie yang]

Wonderful site and posts. As a Hmong college student currently attending UNCC, I thought I knew as much as I possibly could about my own culture but after reading your posts and following up with their respective links, I've found out a few things I never knew about. Thanks and keep writing =)

[Kai]

monie yang, thanks for your kind words, and I'm so glad you found the post and links useful! Peace.