Before coming to the United States their contact with the outside world had been through CIA operatives and other military men who armed them and directed their forays into the jungle. Before the CIA they had fought for the French when they were the dominant military might in the region. For generations before the war the Hmong (pronounced Mung) stuck closely to their mountain tops, relying on the labor of large families and tightly knit clans to survive on subsistence farming and the export of their only cash crop, opium. The Chinese, who harassed the Hmong out of Southern China near the end of the 1800s, called them Miao -barbarians -and later the Lao called them Meo, a different word with the same meaning.