The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

  Lia’s doctors expected her to die quickly, and they assumed that she would stay at Valley Children’s, where she could be made comfortable during her remaining hours or days. One social worker, trying to be helpful, suggested a local mortuary that the Lees might want to contact. Nao Kao was furious. “They wanted to keep her there and they didn’t want to send her to Merced and they’d already found a funeral home for her in Fresno,” he recalled. “But I refused to listen. I said, No, I want them to send her home. I want them to bring her to Merced so she can die here for the older children to see. So then they wanted me to sign some papers because they said when she gets out of the hospital she is going to die anyway.”

  The papers were a court order that Jeanine Hilt arranged, with full cooperation from Valley Children’s Hospital, as soon as she learned of the Lees’ wishes. Although Foua and Nao Kao would have preferred to take Lia back to their apartment, it was decided that she should be transferred to MCMC for supportive care. The Superior Court of the State of California recorded the following declaration, written by Jeanine on behalf of Foua and Nao Kao, “In the Matter of LIA LEE, a Dependent Child of the Juvenile Court”:

  Lia Lee is our daughter and has resided back in our home since April 1986 after having been in foster care for ten months…. She has since contracted pneumonia [sic] and is now in a coma with irreparable brain damage. Valley Children’s Medical Center is unable to provide any further medical care at this point, and we are requesting that Lia be transported by ambulance back to Merced Community Medical Center and then released to us if authorized by Dr. Neil Ernst. We would like to be able to bring Lia home to be with her family before she dies.

  We declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct to the best of our knowledge. Executed on December 5, 1986, in Merced, California.

  Nao Kao Lee, Father

  Foua Yang, Mother

  12

  Flight

  At the age of three and a half, my family including all the other relatives decided it to move to Thailand,” wrote Lia’s sister May in an autobiography she was assigned in her eighth-grade Language Arts class at Merced’s Hoover Junior High School.

  On our way to Thailand was something my parent will never forget. It was one of the scariest time of my life, and maybe my parents. We had to walked by feet. Some of family, however, leave their kids behind, kill, or beat them. For example, one of the relative has tried to kill one of his kid, but luckily he didn’t died. And manage to come along with the group. Today, he’s in America carrying a scar on his forehead.

  My parents had to carried me and two of my younger sisters, True and Yer. My mom could only carried me, and my dad could only my sister, True with many other things which they have to carry such as, rices (food), clothing, and blankets for overnight. My parents pay one of the relative to carry Yer. One of my sister who died in Thailand was so tire of walking saying that she can’t go on any longer. But she dragged along and made it to Thailand.

  There was gun shot going on and soldier were close to every where. If there was a gun shot, we were to look for a place to hide. On our trip to Thailand, there were many gun shots and instead of looking for a place to hide, my parents would dragged our hands or put us on their back and run for their lifes. When it gets too heavy, my parents would tossed some of their stuff away. Some of the things they had throw away are valuable to them, but our lives were more important to them than the stuffs.

  “You have had an exciting life!” wrote her teacher at the end of the essay. “Please watch verbs in the past tense.”

  The Lees’ “trip to Thailand,” which took place in 1979, was their second attempt to escape from Laos after the war. On their first attempt, in 1976, they and about forty other families from Houaysouy, with whom they were fleeing, were captured by Vietnamese soldiers on the third day of their journey, while they were hiding in an abandoned rice field. They were herded back to their village at gunpoint. “Even when our children had to go to the bathroom in the forest, they still held a gun at them, and the guns were as big as the children,” recalled Nao Kao. Phua, one of the Lee daughters, fell ill and died soon after their return. “At that time a lot of people were decaying and there wasn’t medicine, and so we didn’t have eight children anymore. We had seven.”

  The Lees spent three more years in Houaysouy, under intermittent guard. Like most Hmong villages in Sayaboury, Houaysouy had seen no fighting during the war, and none of its men had been recruited by Vang Pao. Sayaboury is the only province in Laos that lies west of the Mekong, and this natural barrier had isolated it from the prolonged warfare that destroyed hundreds of villages on the other side of the river. After the war, however, Houaysouy was tossed into the political melee along with the rest of the country. Because they were Hmong, the village’s residents were regarded as traitors and were systematically abused by the occupying forces from the former North Vietnam.

  “If you did anything,” said Nao Kao, “the Vietnamese would kill you. If you stole a knife or food, they would call the citizens to come and watch and they would just shoot you right there. If you harvested three hundred buckets of rice in a year, the Vietnamese would take two hundred. If you had five chickens, they would take away four and leave you one. The Vietnamese would give you only two yards of material”—here Foua interrupted, saying, “and it wasn’t good material!”—“to make clothes for the whole family. I ask you, if it is like this, how do you divide that cloth between ten people?”

  In the spring of 1979, the Lees’ infant son, Yee, died of starvation. “My little baby was cold and hungry and I was hungry too,” said Foua. “I didn’t have anything to eat, and the baby just ate my milk, and I didn’t have any more milk. I just held him like this and he died in my arms.”

  One month later, the Lees, along with about four hundred other members of the Lee, Yang, Vang, and Xiong clans, decided to try to escape again. This was the journey May described in her essay.

  “The saddest thing was that I had a couple of really beautiful horses,” said Nao Kao, “and I had to just take the rope off and let them go in the forest and I never knew whether they were alive or not. Then we just left. We had bought a lot of guns and hidden them, and the young men would walk in the front and the side, and they would hold the guns. The Vietnamese found out that we were running away. They started to burn all around us so we couldn’t walk. The flames were as high as our house here in Merced. Some fires were in the front and some fires were in the back, and the children were really scared. But some people were really brave and they just jumped through the flames and somehow we survived. After we crossed the fire, the Vietnamese thought we were taking the usual route where most Hmong go, and they planted some mines in the ground. But we went a different way, and the Vietnamese walked into their own trap and they got hurt. We carried the babies and when we came to steep mountains we tied ropes to the children and the old people and we pulled them up. It was cold and the children were hungry. I was very scared because we had a lot of children and it would be easy for the soldiers to kill them. Some other people who came from our village just before us, two of their little children started running across a rice field, and the Vietnamese shot them, I don’t know how many times they shot them, but their heads were all squashed.” After twenty-six days on foot, the Lees crossed the border into Thailand, where they spent a year in two refugee camps before being cleared to emigrate to the United States. Their daughter Ge, whom May described in her essay as being “so tire of walking saying that she can’t go on any longer,” died in the first camp.

  The Lees never considered staying in Laos. They and the 150,000 other Hmong who fled to Thailand after the war were exercising the immemorial Hmong preference for flight, resistance, or death over persecution and assimilation. The Hmong rapidly learned that because most of them had either supported the United States or attempted to remain neutral, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic viewed them as enemies of the state. (The twenty percent who had supp
orted the communist cause were rewarded with soft treatment and, in some cases, government positions. To teach a lesson on the importance of subordinating ethnicity to party principles, some were selected to execute pro-American Hmong prisoners.) Three weeks after General Vang Pao was airlifted to Thailand, nearly 40,000 Hmong men, women, and children marched toward Vientiane. Some say they hoped to cross the Mekong River and rejoin their leader; others say they planned to ask the Vientiane government for guarantees of security. Outside the town of Hin Heup, Pathet Lao troops opened fire on several hundred of these Hmong while they were crossing a narrow bridge over the Nam Lik River. At least four were killed by gunfire or drowning. Dozens were wounded. When he heard about the Hin Heup Massacre, former Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, a neutralist who was kept on as an “adviser” to the new government, is said to have remarked to a foreign diplomat, “The Meo [Hmong] have served me well. It is unfortunate that the price of peace in Laos is their liquidation.”

  One afternoon in Merced, I was invited to tea at the small, spartan apartment of Blia Yao Moua, the Hmong leader who had arranged my first meeting with the Lees. Blia’s father was the chao muong, or administrative leader, of the city of Xieng Khouang. He was assassinated, presumably by the Pathet Lao, when Blia was nine. Two of Blia’s brothers died during the war. I asked Blia what had happened to the Hmong after the war was lost. In polished but idiosyncratic English—like Jonas Vangay, he had learned it after he was fluent in Hmong, Lao, Thai, and French—he replied, “People from the Western sphere cannot understand what it was like. In the new vision of the country of Laos, there is no reason to let the Hmong live. If you don’t agree with the Pathet Lao, they can kill you just like a pig or a chicken. They try to force you down to the lowlands. If you don’t go, they would kill the animals and burn everything in your village: your house, your rice, your cornstalk. They separate Hmong families and send the kids far away from the parents. They make you change your name so there would be no more clan names. They tell you to stop speaking Hmong. You are not supposed to practice Hmong rituals. When I was a boy, my mother would call in the txiv neeb whenever we were sick, even if it was just a headache, but after the war, anybody that would do that, security would hear about it, and a few days later they would come to take you to a kind of meeting, and ask you the reason, and if your explanations are too rightist, they would take you away. They wanted Hmong culture to disappear. But the Hmong cannot be assimilated. The Chinese cannot assimilate the Hmong. The Pathet Lao cannot assimilate the Hmong. After two thousand years we can still say we are Hmong.”

  The Lees consider themselves fortunate to have been permitted to return to their village after their capture in 1976, even if living conditions were miserable. Many highland Hmong were forcibly relocated to lowland or plateau areas, where they were assigned to state-owned collective farms. The traditional Hmong fear of the lowlands proved justified. Resettled families frequently contracted tropical diseases to which they had not previously been exposed—particularly malaria, which is borne by mosquitoes that cannot survive at high elevations. In highland villages that were left intact, any Hmong who was found practicing slash-and-burn agriculture was arrested. Most villages were infiltrated by Pathet Lao soldiers. “Very politely, one who seemed to be the leader would ask each Hmong family to shelter, by turns, two of their comrades who ‘only want to serve you,’” wrote the Hmong scholar Yang Dao.

  But the Hmong soon realized that the two Pathet Lao placed in their family had as their sole mission to watch them day and night…. Soon the husband did not dare talk to his wife, nor the parents to their children. The two Pathet Lao were listening to every word and spying on every move. Nobody could trust anybody. From time to time, the people would be awakened in the middle of the night and the houses searched under the pretense that a “reactionary” was hiding there. Then the husband or the son was led away, a gun against his back, to an unknown destination.

  The unknown destination was often a “seminar camp” near the Lao-Vietnamese border. Seminar camps, which combined forced labor and political indoctrination, were not reserved for the Hmong, although many Hmong who had held government positions or worked for American agencies were sent there, some for years. More than 10,000 Lao intellectuals, civil servants, teachers, businessmen, military and police officers, and other suspected royalist sympathizers were also interned in camps, as well as the king, the queen, and the crown prince, all three of whom died there. The prisoners cleared land, tilled fields, felled trees, built roads, and were hitched like animals to plows. Some of them were also forced, at gunpoint, to search for and remove unexploded cluster-bombs.

  “I know two people who were sent to seminar camps,” Blia Yao Moua told me. “One of them my wife and I asked him to lunch here in Merced. He don’t want to eat. It is very strange because he was hungry for many years. One day when he’s working in the camp he sees a lizard. He picks it up very fast because if a guard sees you do that he would hit you to death. He puts it in his pocket and when no one is watching he gets it out and eats it immediately. He’s very happy. That lizard is fresh meat! He told me that story. That man, every day he had to sign a confession accepting you are wrong by collaborating with the Americans. Every day his confession became better. After two years, three years, five years, that speech became part of himself. Before he was in the camp he had a very strong personality. After ten years it changed him. The camp has completely broken his personality.”

  While two or three thousand Hmong were being “reeducated” in Pathet Lao camps—an exercise in coerced submission that violated the core of the Hmong temper—tens of thousands were able to respond to the new regime in more characteristic Hmong fashion, through armed rebellion. After Vang Pao’s departure, former members of the Armée Clandestine organized a resistance movement based in the Phou Bia massif, the highest mountain range in Laos, south of the Plain of Jars. In late 1975, after Pathet Lao forces attacked a group of Hmong, mostly women and children, who were working in a Phou Bia field, Hmong rebels began a campaign of furious retaliation. Using weapons they had concealed in caves, they shot Pathet Lao soldiers, dynamited bridges, blocked roads, blew up food convoys, and—just as Hmong warriors in 1772 had rolled boulders on the heads of the Chinese army in eastern Kweichow—pushed rocks off cliffs while enemy troops were walking below. Although nearly 50,000 Hmong died, Phou Bia did not fall until 1978. Afterwards, Hmong guerrillas continued to live in the jungles along both sides of the Lao-Thai border, crossing back and forth between the two countries, launching irregular raids on the Lao People’s Army. Most of the rebels belonged to a messianic group called Chao Fa (Lords of the Sky), led by Pa Kao Her, a former Vang Pao lieutenant who had broken ranks; some belonged to Neo Hom (the United Laotian National Liberation Front), a group founded in the United States and headed by Vang Pao.* Sporadic resistance by both groups—each of which has dwindled from thousands of guerrillas to three or four hundred—continues to this day, more than two decades after the war’s official conclusion.

  The most widespread Hmong response to the terrors of postwar Laos, however, was migration: the same problem-solving strategy that had moved them around China for more than three millennia and then, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had brought them to Laos. Most feared retribution, though some were motivated more immediately by famine, the consequence both of nationwide resource scarcity and of the increasing Hmong dependence, toward the end of the war, on American rice drops, handouts in resettlement sites, and soldiers’ wages. For nearly 10,000 Hmong, there were no crops to harvest. (Some of the Hmong who left because they were starving were later stigmatized as undeserving “economic migrants” rather than legitimate political refugees.) In June of 1975, the Vientiane Domestic Service, the capital’s official radio station, broadcast the government’s interpretation of the mass Hmong decampment: “With the collusion of the Thai reactionary clique, the U.S. imperialists have now forced the Meo tribesmen to flee from Laos into Thailand. Th
e aim of such an evacuation is not based on the so-called humanitarian basis, but is to exploit their labor at cheap prices and to foster them as their henchmen so that they can be sent back to Laos to sabotage peace in this country in the future.”

  Every Hmong refugee has an exodus story. In the hierarchy of good fortune, my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, and her family, along with the families of other military officers airlifted from Long Tieng, ranked at the top. All they had to do was leave behind every relative who did not belong to their immediate family as well as virtually everything they owned, and, overnight, trade the high status they had enjoyed in Laos for a communal dormitory in a Thai refugee camp, where one bed was provided for their family of eight, and they stood in long lines for every meal, holding bowls for their rations of rice. “You were so lucky!” I heard Nao Kao tell May Ying one night, when they were comparing their postwar experiences. A notch further down—an option for only a few privileged families—was escaping from Vientiane or another urban area by “taxi,” which meant forking over one’s life savings to a Lao driver who, along with his passengers, might or might not be arrested before reaching the Thai border.

  Most Hmong walked. Some traveled in small extended-family bands, others in convoys of up to 8,000 people. I never heard of a Hmong who fled alone. In the first months after the fall of Long Tieng, when Pathet Lao efforts to block the Hmong hegira were still disorganized, it was sometimes possible to drive one’s livestock along major trails. “Those people could just kill their animals along the way, so they didn’t starve,” Nao Kao told me. “They took it really easy.” Later groups followed tiger and elephant trails, or steered clear of established routes altogether, walking the ridgelines whenever they could in order to avoid mines and detection. Most families, like the Lees, took about a month to reach Thailand, though some lived in the forests for two years or more, moving constantly to evade capture, sleeping under bamboo leaves, subsisting on game (though that soon became scarce), fruit, roots, bamboo shoots, the pith of trees, and insects. Desperate to fill their stomachs, some people chopped up their sweat-soaked clothes, mixed them with water and salt, and ate them. They lit fires only at night, so the smoke would not be visible. Sometimes they used fox fire—luminescent rotting wood—to light their way in the dark.