On May 9, 1975 Khaosan Pathet Lao, the newspaper of the Lao People’s Party announced the agenda: “It is necessary to extirpate, down to the root, the Hmong minority.”
I imagine sun-dappled jungle floors, a young man and a young woman, peeking at each other through lush vegetation, smiling shyly and then walking away slowly, lips bitten by clean, white teeth. Slow movements toward each other again, like in a dance. An orchestra of nature: leaves and wind and two shadows, a man and a woman, moving in smooth motions on even ground. How fanciful I am.
My mother says she would not have married my father had she known that in doing so she would have to leave forever her mother and everyone else who loved her.
With her fingers she dug into the moist ground of a bamboo patch. In the shallow hole, she placed all the pictures of her brothers, her mother herself. She felt the bamboo trunk with her hands in the dark. If she ever touched that bamboo again, she told herself forming the words on her lips, she would remember. One day, she would find the pictures again.
My heart hurt more than my body-the flesh can take blows, the heart suffers them. […] The soldier who hit me was an older man. I was like a prisoner. I stood still, and then I walked into the place they would keep me. And I kept thinking: I was a man, too. I had a wife and a child. But it didn't matter because we had no home anymore.
For the adults, the stench and the humiliation of human waste were the worst part of that long week.
I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.
Although my grandma had always looked like an old person to me, in the camp, she never rested like one. She was always busy selling her herbal remedies because health care was bad in the camp and people were scared of Western medicine. Because Grandma was the type of woman who looked like she knew things, and did, people came to her for medicinal remedies frequently. Once they heard about her talent for healing, even the Thai men, the ones who wore guns and kept us in place, came to her, mostly for concoctions to nurse their sexually transmitted diseases. She was the only person whom I knew who could safely venture out of the camp under the supervision of armed guards.
Still, to be a ferocious tiger with a raging heart caught in a cave blocked by boulders was too mean.
I had never had brothers. I could not see any good changes that a boy would bring to my life. Still, if my father wanted one so badly, fine. I was too young to grasp the position that my mother was in.
It is many years from now. We are in America. The girls are grown and married. You and I—we are alone. First, you died. I did not live long without you. One day, I died in a silent house. There was nowhere to go. You were waiting for me. We wandered around, you and I. We walked in big American cities with loud cars and bright lights. Our spirits walked in lonely circles. How would we ever get back to the hills of Laos, the land of the ancestors?
On October 20, 1980, the St. Paul Dispatch published a story titled “Hostility Grows Toward Hmong.” On June 11, 1987, the headlines read similarly, “Hmong Gardens Vandalized for the Third Time This Spring.” My family arrived in July; we were just beginning. On the streets, sometimes people yelled for us to go home. Next to waves of hello, we received the middle finger.
Money was like a person I had never known or a wall I had never breached before: it kept me away from my grandma. I saw no way to climb this wall. Sometimes I thought so much about money that I couldn’t sleep. Money was not bills and coins or a check from welfare. In my imagination, it was much more: it was the nightmare that kept love apart in America.
My parents tried their best at English, but their best was not catching up with Dawb’s and mine. We were picking up the language faster, and so we became the interpreters and translators for our family dealings with American people. In the beginning, we just did it because it was easier and because we did not want to see them struggle over easy things. They were working hard for the more important things in our lives. Later, we realized so many other cousins and friends were doing the same.
A part of me grew protective of the little boy and the unspoken expectations of the man he would have to become.
The adults continued having nightmares. They cried out in their sleep. In the mornings, they sat at the table and talked to us about their bad dreams: the war was around them, the land was falling to pieces, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers were coming, the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts. In their dreams, they met people who were no longer alive but who had loved them back in their old lives. There were stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night. My aunts and uncles in California farmed on a small acreage, five or ten, to add to the money they received from welfare. My aunts and uncles in Minnesota, in the summers, did “under the table” work to help make ends meet if they could, like harvesting corn or picking baby cucumbers to make pickles.
I had the freedom to stand strong in the wake of love and to perhaps choose my own mother—instead of a man.
Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might each have an easier one apart; love is the reason why you choose a life with someone, and you don’t turn back although your heart cries sometimes and your children see you cry and you wish out loud that things were easier. Love is getting up each day and fighting the same fight only to sleep that night in the same bed beside the same person because long ago, when you were younger and you did not see so clearly, you had chosen them. I wrote that we'll never know if Romeo and Juliet really loved because they never had the chance.
There was a clear division: the Hmong heart (the part that held the hands of my mom and dad and grandma protectively every time we encountered the outside world, the part that cried because Hmong people didn’t have a home, the part that listened to Hmong songs and fluttered about looking for clean air and crisp mountains in flat St. Paul, the part that quickly and effectively forgot all my school friends in the heat of summer) or the American heart (the part that was lonely for the outside world, that stood by and watched the fluency of other parents with their boys and girls […] The more I thought about it, the sicker I became[.]
Dawb, in her usual hurry to succeed, had enrolled in the post-secondary program at Hamline University: the parking situation was more affordable than the University of Minnesota. We didn’t talk about our dreams of the University. The choice became as simple as easier parking.
My younger brother and sister could not take care of themselves. They were still just children, so I did not want to marry. Your grandfather was old. I cried at the ground when my cousin agreed to the marriage. There was nothing I could do. I had to marry him.
My grandfather was not a bad man, as my grandmother grew to know and love him.
Aren't you proud?
The guide apologized at this point for no longer being able to take Grandma directly to each place where they had been during the five years in the jungle. He explained that after all, it had been a war, and they had been running for their lives, and their homes had been only made of banana leaves, stacked on top of small tree limbs. There would be no markers left. There was no way anyone could remember the many places they had hidden, one mountain cave or the next. He only wanted her to do her best.
A woman alone, she carried us through with her guidance. Long after our father died, she taught us how to find lives in a world where life was hard to come by. She, a woman, taught us how to be men.
