The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

  Within the economic limitations of blue-collar labor, those 800 families have fared well. Ninety-five percent have become self-sufficient. They work in manufacturing plants in Dallas, on electronics assembly lines in Atlanta, in furniture and textile factories in Morganton, North Carolina. More than a quarter of them have saved enough money to buy their own houses, as have three quarters of the Hmong families who live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the men farm or work in food-processing plants, and the women work for the Amish, sewing quilts that are truthfully advertised as “locally made.” Elsewhere, Hmong are employed as grocers, carpenters, poultry processors, machinists, welders, auto mechanics, tool and die makers, teachers, nurses, interpreters, and community liaisons. In a survey of Minnesota employers, the respondents were asked “What do you think of the Hmong as workers?” Eighty-six percent rated them “very good.”

  This was particularly true in organizations where the Hmong were employed in assembly, or piecework occupations…. In general, employers are impressed by the productivity of the Hmong. Initially, there appears to be a period of some difficulty in training due to English language skills. Once trained, however, Hmong are reported to be better workers than the average American workers.

  Some younger Hmong have become lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers, computer programmers, accountants, and public administrators. Hmong National Development, an association that promotes Hmong self-sufficiency, encourages this small corps of professionals to serve as mentors and sponsors for other Hmong who might thereby be induced to follow suit. The cultural legacy of mutual assistance has been remarkably adaptive. Hundreds of Hmong students converse electronically, trading information and gossip—opinions on the relevance of traditional customs, advice on college admissions, personal ads—via the Hmong Channel on the Internet Relay Chat system. (They include Lia Lee’s older sister True, whose parents are baffled by the two hours she spends each day hunched over a computer terminal at her school.) There is also a Hmong Homepage on the World Wide Web (http://www.stolaf.edu/people/cdr/hmong/) and several burgeoning Hmong electronic mailing lists, including Hmongnet, Hmongforum, and Hmong Language Users Group.*

  The M.D.s and J.D.s and digital sophisticates constitute a small, though growing, minority. Although younger, English-speaking Hmong who have been educated in the United States have better employment records than their elders, they still lag behind most other Asian-Americans. As for Hmong workers over thirty-five, the majority are immovably wedged at or near entry level. They can’t get jobs that require better English, and they can’t learn English on their current jobs. The federal Hmong Resettlement Study cited, as an example, a Hmong worker in Dallas who after three years on the job was unable to name the machine he operated. He stated that he never expected a promotion or a pay raise other than cost-of-living increases. Other Hmong have been thwarted by placing a higher value on group solidarity than on individual initiative. In San Diego, the manager of an electronics plant was so enthusiastic about one Hmong assembly worker that he tried to promote him to supervisor. The man quit, ashamed to accept a job that would place him above his Hmong coworkers.

  For the many Hmong who live in high-unemployment areas, questions of advancement are often moot. They have no jobs at all. This is the reason the Hmong are routinely called this country’s “least successful refugees.” It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce—the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority. Instead, we have trained the spotlight on our best-loved index of failure, the welfare rolls. In California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where, not coincidentally, benefits tend to be relatively generous and eligibility requirements relatively loose, the percentages of Hmong on welfare are approximately forty-five, forty, and thirty-five (an improvement over five years ago, when they were approximately sixty-five, seventy, and sixty). The cycle of dependence that began with rice drops in Laos and reinforced with daily handouts at Thai refugee camps has been completed here in the United States. The conflicting structures of the Hmong culture and the American welfare system make it almost impossible for the average family to become independent. In California, for example, a man with seven children—a typical Hmong family size—would have to make $10.60 an hour, working forty hours a week, to equal his welfare stipend and food stamp allowance. But with few marketable skills and little English, he would probably be ineligible for most jobs that paid more than the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, at which he would have to work an improbable eighty-two hours a week in order to equal his welfare allotment. In addition, until the mid-nineties in most states, if he worked more than one hundred hours a month—as a part-time worker trying to acquire job skills, for example, or a farmer in the start-up phase—his family would lose their entire welfare grant, all their food stamps, and their health insurance.*

  The 1996 welfare reform bill, which in its present form promises to deny benefits to legal immigrants, has stirred up monumental waves of anxiety among the Hmong. Faced with the possibility of having their assistance cut off, some have applied for citizenship, although many middle-aged Hmong find the English language requirement an insuperable obstacle. (The hurdles are lower for older Hmong who came to the United States shortly after the end of the war in Laos. The language rule is waived for “lawful permanent residents” age fifty or older who have been in this country for at least twenty years, and for those age fifty-five or older who have been here at least fifteen years. The Lees, who are considering applying for citizenship, would qualify for this waiver.) Some Hmong have moved, or are planning to move, to states with better job markets. Some will become dependent on their relatives. Because a few states will probably elect to use their own funds to assist legal immigrants, some will simply continue to depend on welfare in altered, reduced, and more precarious forms.

  Few things gall the Hmong more than to be criticized for accepting public assistance. For one thing, they feel they deserve the money. Every Hmong has a different version of what is commonly called “The Promise”: a written or oral contract, made by CIA personnel in Laos, that if they fought for the Americans, the Americans would aid them if the Pathet Lao won the war. After risking their lives to rescue downed American pilots, seeing their villages flattened by incidental American bombs, and being forced to flee their country because they had supported the “American War,” the Hmong expected a hero’s welcome here. According to many of them, the first betrayal came when the American airlifts rescued only the officers from Long Tieng, leaving nearly everyone else behind. The second betrayal came in the Thai camps, when the Hmong who wanted to come to the United States were not all automatically admitted. The third betrayal came when they arrived here and found they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits. The fourth betrayal came when Americans condemned them for what the Hmong call “eating welfare.” The fifth betrayal came when the Americans announced that the welfare would stop.

  Aside from some older people who consider welfare a retirement benefit, most Hmong would prefer almost any other option—if other options existed. What right-thinking Hmong would choose to be yoked to one of the most bureaucratic institutions in America? (A tip from “Your New Life in the United States,” on applying for cash assistance: “You should have as many of the following documents available as possible: I-94—take the original, if you can; rent bill or lease; Social Security card; any pay stubs; bank account statement or savings passbook; utility bills; medical bills or proof of medical disability; employment registration card.”) What Hmong would choose to become addicted to a way of life that some clan leaders have likened to opium? And what Hmong would choose the disgrace of being dev mus nuam yaj, a dog waiting for scraps? Dang Moua, the Merced businessman who had kept his family alive en ro
ute to Thailand by shooting birds with a homemade crossbow, once told me, “One time when I am first in America, a Korean man tell me that if someone is lazy and doesn’t work, the government still pay them. I say, you crazy! That doesn’t ring my bell at all! I am not afraid of working! My parents raised me as a man! I work till the last day I leave this earth!” And indeed, Dang held three concurrent nearly full-time jobs, as a grocer, an interpreter, and a pig farmer. He was once a clerk-typist in the American Embassy in Vientiane and speaks five languages, so his success is not one most Hmong could reasonably be expected to emulate. More typical are two middle-aged men who were interviewed in San Diego for a survey on refugee adaptation. The first said:

  I used to be a real man like any other man, but not now any longer…. We only live day by day, just like the baby birds who are only staying in the nest opening their mouths and waiting for the mother bird to bring the worms.

  The second said:

  We are not born to earth to have somebody give us feed; we are so ashamed to depend on somebody like this. When we were in our country, we never ask anybody for help like this…. I’ve been trying very hard to learn English and at the same time looking for a job. No matter what kind of job, even the job to clean people’s toilets; but still people don’t even trust you or offer you such work. I’m looking at me that I’m not even worth as much as a dog’s stool. Talking about this, I want to die right here so I won’t see my future.

  These men were both suffering from a global despair to which their economic dependence was only one of many contributing factors. In the survey for which they were interviewed, part of a longitudinal study of Hmong, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, the Hmong respondents scored lowest in “happiness” and “life satisfaction.” In a study of Indochinese refugees in Illinois, the Hmong exhibited the highest degree of “alienation from their environment.” According to a Minnesota study, Hmong refugees who had lived in the United States for a year and a half had “very high levels of depression, anxiety, hostility, phobia, paranoid ideation, obsessive compulsiveness and feelings of inadequacy.” (Over the next decade, some of these symptoms moderated, but the refugees’ levels of anxiety, hostility, and paranoia showed little or no improvement.) The study that I found most disheartening was the 1987 California Southeast Asian Mental Health Needs Assessment, a statewide epidemiological survey funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the National Institute of Mental Health. It was shocking to look at the bar graphs comparing the Hmong with the Vietnamese, the Chinese-Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Lao—all of whom, particularly the Cambodians, fared poorly compared to the general population—and see how the Hmong stacked up: Most depressed. Most psychosocially dysfunctional. Most likely to be severely in need of mental health treatment. Least educated. Least literate. Smallest percentage in labor force. Most likely to cite “fear” as a reason for immigration and least likely to cite “a better life.”

  The same bleak ground was covered from the Hmong point of view by Bruce Thowpaou Bliatout, a public health administrator in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Bliatout, who is Hmong, explained in an article on mental health concepts that such issues as job adjustment and family happiness are regarded by the Hmong as problems of the liver. If patience, as Charles Johnson noted in Dab Neeg Hmoob, is attributed to a long—that is, a robust and healthy—liver, what Americans would call mental illness is attributed to a liver that has become diseased or damaged through soul loss. According to Bliatout, who provided case histories for each one, some illnesses common among Hmong in the United States are:

  Nyuab Siab

  Translation: Difficult liver.

  Causes: Loss of family, status, home, country, or any important item that has a high emotional value.

  Symptoms: Excessive worry; crying; confusion; disjointed speech; loss of sleep and appetite; delusions.

  Tu Siab

  Translation: Broken liver.

  Causes: Loss of family member; quarrel between family members; break of family unity.

  Symptoms: Grief; worry; loneliness; guilt; feeling of loss; insecurity.

  Lwj Siab

  Translation: Rotten liver.

  Causes: Stressful family relations; constant unfulfillment of goals.

  Symptoms: Loss of memory; short temper; delusions.

  Before I came to Merced, Bill Selvidge described to me the first Hmong patient he had ever seen. Bruce Thowpaou Bliatout would have diagnosed this patient as having a difficult liver; Bill thought of it, not so differently, as a broken heart. “Mr. Thao was a man in his fifties,” said Bill. “He told me through an interpreter that he had a bad back, but after I listened for a while I realized that he’d really come in because of depression. It turned out he was an agoraphobe. He was afraid to leave his house because he thought if he walked more than a couple of blocks he’d get lost and never find his way home again. What a metaphor! He’d seen his entire immediate family die in Laos, he’d seen his country collapse, and he never was going to find his way home again. All I could do was prescribe antidepressants.”

  Mr. Thao turned out to be the first of a long procession of depressed Hmong patients whom Bill was to treat over the next three years. Bill cut to the nub of the matter when he described the man’s profound loss of “home.” For the Hmong in America—where not only the social mores but also the sound of every birdsong, the shape of every tree and flower, the smell of the air, and the very texture of the earth are unfamiliar—the ache of homesickness can be incapacitating. In “Lament upon Leaving Our Country,” a Hmong poet named Doua Her wrote:

  We remember the bird songs at sunrise.

  We remember the grasshoppers jumping at dawn.

  We remember the sound of heavy raindrops on leaves.

  We remember the song of the male gibbon.

  We remember the fruit trees…the pineapple, banana, and papaya.

  We can still hear the owls cry to each other like we cry.

  John Finck of the Rhode Island resettlement office once took a party of Hmong from Providence to visit Plimoth Plantation, a reconstructed Pilgrim village with thatched houses and free-running chickens. When it came time to leave, one of the older men in the group asked Finck, “Can we move here and make this our home?”

  Dang Moua, the energetic grocer-cum-interpreter-cum-pig-farmer, mentioned once that after thirteen years in the United States, he dreamed of Laos every night and had never once dreamed of America. “I talk to more than one hundred Hmong about this,” he said. “I talk to General Vang Pao. Same thing for everyone.” In a heroic act of denial, only ten percent of the Hmong refugees polled in a Minnesota survey said they were certain they would spend the rest of their lives in the United States; the rest were either certain or hopeful that they would die in Laos. John Xiong, a Hmong leader in Merced, told me, “All the older people, they say, We want to go back. We born over there, we come here. Very nice country but we don’t speak the language, we cannot drive, we just stay home isolated. Over there we can have a little piece of farm, raise chicken, pig, and cow, don’t forget to wake up early, harvest on time, make enough this year to another coming year. That’s it. Then we feeling like peaceful. Here, we do right and they say wrong. Then we do wrong and they say right. Which way we go? We want to go home.”

  The home to which the older Hmong dream of returning—which they call peb lub tebchaws, “our fields and our lands”—is prewar Laos. Their memories of wartime Laos are almost unrelievedly traumatic: a “bereavement overload” that critically magnifies all their other stresses. Richard Mollica, a psychiatrist who helped found the Indochinese Psychiatry Clinic in Boston, found that during the war and its aftermath, Hmong refugees had experienced an average of fifteen “major trauma events,” such as witnessing killings and torture. Mollica has observed of his patients, “Their psychological reality is both full and empty. They are ‘full’ of the past; they are ‘empty’ of new ideas and life experiences.”

  “Full” of both past trauma
and past longing, the Hmong have found it especially hard to deal with present threats to their old identities. I once went to a conference on Southeast Asian mental health at which a psychologist named Evelyn Lee, who was born in Macao, invited six members of the audience to come to the front of the auditorium for a role-playing exercise. She cast them as a grandfather, a father, a mother, an eighteen-year-old son, a sixteen-year-old daughter, and a twelve-year-old daughter. “Okay,” she told them, “line up according to your status in your old country.” Ranking themselves by traditional notions of age and gender, they queued up in the order I’ve just mentioned, with the grandfather standing proudly at the head of the line. “Now they come to America,” said Dr. Lee. “Grandfather has no job. Father can only chop vegetables. Mother didn’t work in the old country, but here she gets a job in a garment factory. Oldest daughter works there too. Son drops out of high school because he can’t learn English. Youngest daughter learns the best English in the family and ends up at U.C. Berkeley. Now you line up again.” As the family reshuffled, I realized that its power structure had turned completely upside down, with the youngest girl now occupying the head of the line and the grandfather standing forlornly at the tail.