FRESNO, California -Making her way through hundreds of Indochinese refugees waiting for English class to begin, Barbara Christl shakes her head as she holds out the morning newspaper. "Here. This is the problem," she says, heaving the paper on her desk. The day's front page feature is a ten-years-after look at refugees from the Vietnam War. The headline says, "Indochinese Refugees Adapt Quickly in U.S." The story opens describing a Vietnamese man in Houston who came to the United States a decade ago with nothing. Today he is on his way to becoming a "Texas tycoon." The piece quotes a former official of the U.S. Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy as saying Indochinese refugees have "shown a remarkable ability to enter into mainstream American economic life." Christl, director of English as a Second Language programs for Fresno County, looks like she is ready to scold a child. "You see, people think the problem has gone away. Or if not, that things are moving in that direction."
Here, the problem has just begun. Since 1979 the counties of California's Central Valley have become home to 30,000 displaced foot soldiers from the Vietnam War. Fresno County alone is refuge for 15,000 of them. But they are not the soon-to-be tycoon success stories. They are mountain dwellers from the jungle peaks of Laos, primitive tribes, trained by the American Central Intelligence Agency to collect intelligence on North Vietnamese troop movements in Laos, disrupt communist supply lines headed for South Vietnam and rescue downed U.S. flyers shot down just east of their mountain home in North Vietnam. They call themselves the Hmong. To those who knew of their existence during the Vietnam War they are known as the CIA's "secret army" in Laos.
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.
Ten years ago, as North Vietnamese troops took control of Saigon and communist Pathet Lao soldiers prepared to subdue the government of Laos, the Hmong began to stumble out of the jungle and swim the Mekong River to Thailand. They had gained a reputation as fierce fighters attempting to protect their mountain redoubt and their association with the CIA sealed their fate in the eyes of the communist victors. They knew they would not escape the wrath of the Pathet Lao and their benefactors, the North Vietnamese.
Since 1975, the United States has brought some 700,000 Indochinese refugees into the country. The 65,000 Hmong, like all the refugees, were placed wherever sponsors could be found. Within the space of 72 hours these mountain people were taken from bamboo-thatched huts in refugee camps along the Mekong River and put into 2- and 3-bedroom apartments in Philadelphia, Minneapolis and other major American cities. They were unaware of how to deal with the simplest of tasks for Americans: turning on and off lights; using the refrigerator, stove or oven; paying bills.
"It's just like a dream, like a movie
Imagine you go to the Moon some way and when you wake up you are on the Moon somewhere and you have to live by that society
you don't know where you are, you don't really know," says Kou Yang, now a social worker in Fresno.
Rev. Norman Johnshoy, who often finds himself explaining the Hmong to perplexed locals, says, "One of the best descriptions is to think of them as a people who made one airplane flight from the 16th century to the 21st. And if you can conceive of something like that happening in a time machine, then you have a pretty good notion of the perplexity that these people must have experienced."
The cultural disorientation the Hmong face on arrival in the United States is shared by the other Indochinese refugees, but the Hmong bring a special history that makes their long-term settlement much more difficult. Unlike the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, the Hmong are a "preliterate" people, which means most are unable to read and write in their own language. Actually, until 30 years ago when Christian missionaries standardized the language and wrote it down, the Hmong had no written language. Unlike European immigrants and many Indochinese, the Hmong have a simple, agrarian vocabulary. Europeans and Vietnamese pick up the English language in months of study, Hmong take years to learn.
"We see (Europeans) in ESL classes as well and they can zip through ESL in no time because you simply substitute what a word means in your language and you learn what that word means in this language. For (the Hmong) there is no word in their language that means the word they're trying to learn," Barbara Christl says.
While a very small number of Hmong are educated and have become teachers, businessmen, engineers and farmers, the great majority -estimates run 80 to 95 percent -do not have jobs and do not have skills to work in the United States. When Christl reads that the Vietnamese Texas tycoon "isn't unique among the 700,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians" in the United States she fears the secret soldiers of Laos will become the hidden refugees in America whose wrenching cultural assimilation will be overshadowed by the success stories of those Indochinese more able to cope. It is a fate the Hmong should not suffer, she says, because of the crucial role they played for the United States in the Vietnam era. Lionel Rosenblatt, refugee coordinator for the United States in Thailand just after the war and again in 1978-81, explains that the Hmong became pivotal for the U.S. military strategy in Laos because "according to the Geneva Accords of 1960 there were no foreign troops to be stationed in Laos."
"Of course the Vietnamese Army was there in abundance, but the American military did not put ground combat troops into Laos and the Hmong really formed our army -a very unique relationship with the Hmong, therefore, that we didn't have with any other group on the ground in Indochina."
Because of that relationship many of the Hmong who arrived in the United States after two decades of war knew nothing else but fighting and nothing else but the support of the U.S. military. Moua Geu, who runs the Long Chien market in Fresno -namesake of the secret CIA operations center in Laos -remembers his relationship with the Americans this way: "They had a lot of powers and they were the ones who brought us guns, gold, clothes, food."
"CIA is the one who helped us, supported us a lot and we consider them as a mother and father," he says in a sing-song English, marked by the tonal sounds of his native tongue.
Because of that relationship, the Hmong expected more than they got when they arrived in America. In 1981, during a trip to Ban Vinai refugee camp in northeast Thailand, many refugees responded to the question, "What will you do in the United States?" with the answer, "Whatever the government tells me to do." It was a great shock to Moua Geu and his comrades when they arrived and the government they had known, that had supported them all their lives, could not be found. "Even if we lost, they promised they would take us to the United States, but when we got here, we have no idea who the CIA is, we don't know where they went."
If the Hmong were unprepared for the United States, Americans were also unready for them. In almost every aspect of their lives the Hmong rely on an entirely different set of beliefs and values than their new neighbors. They are a polygamous people. Men have the right to marry as many women as they can afford to support. The more children they had the richer they could become because they could cultivate more land. Hmong men were told before coming to the United States that they would have to divorce all but one wife and on paper they did so. But Hmong leaders in Fresno admit that, once here, the traditional family unit is preserved often with the husband living again with all his wives. Also, while Christian missionaries did write down the Hmong language, they were less successful converting them to the Western God. Most of the Hmong are still animistic, worshipers of good and evil spirits and the spirits of their dead ancestors, all who must be revered with complex rituals and animal sacrifices.
Some benign incidents have been the unavoidable result of these differences. Fresno Police Officer Marvin Reyes swallows hard when he recounts the first time he was invited to a Hmong celebration in a downtown apartment complex. Several women were butchering a live pig in the kitchen. Next to the carcass, beside a blood-soaked wall, the head of the animal stuck out of a bucket, waiting to be cooked as the centerpiece of the meal.
Diana Carter, a clerk at a thrift bakery frequented by the Hmong, said she mistrusted them at first because they would not directly look at her. Later, she learned the Hmong cast their eyes down as a sign of respect.
Another incident was described by Elaine Perez, a Fresno County family planning official. A Hmong couple taught to use condoms through the creative use of a broom handle returned to the birth control clinic after the woman became pregnant. They followed the instructions to the letter, they said. The broom handle had been put in the cornner of the bedroom dutifully covered with the birth control device.
Some cultural misunderstandings have led to more solemn consequences. A Hmong man ran a stop sign in a van filled with Hmong workers headed for
FRESNO, California -Making her way through hundreds of Indochinese refugees waiting for English class to begin, Barbara Christl shakes her head as she holds out the morning newspaper. "Here. This is the problem," she says, heaving the paper on her desk. The day's front page feature is a ten-years-after look at refugees from the Vietnam War. The headline says, "Indochinese Refugees Adapt Quickly in U.S." The story opens describing a Vietnamese man in Houston who came to the United States a decade ago with nothing. Today he is on his way to becoming a "Texas tycoon." The piece quotes a former official of the U.S. Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy as saying Indochinese refugees have "shown a remarkable ability to enter into mainstream American economic life." Christl, director of English as a Second Language programs for Fresno County, looks like she is ready to scold a child. "You see, people think the problem has gone away. Or if not, that things are moving in that direction."
Here, the problem has just begun. Since 1979 the counties of California's Central Valley have become home to 30,000 displaced foot soldiers from the Vietnam War. Fresno County alone is refuge for 15,000 of them. But they are not the soon-to-be tycoon success stories. They are mountain dwellers from the jungle peaks of Laos, primitive tribes, trained by the American Central Intelligence Agency to collect intelligence on North Vietnamese troop movements in Laos, disrupt communist supply lines headed for South Vietnam and rescue downed U.S. flyers shot down just east of their mountain home in North Vietnam. They call themselves the Hmong. To those who knew of their existence during the Vietnam War they are known as the CIA's "secret army" in Laos.
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.
Ten years ago, as North Vietnamese troops took control of Saigon and communist Pathet Lao soldiers prepared to subdue the government of Laos, the Hmong began to stumble out of the jungle and swim the Mekong River to Thailand. They had gained a reputation as fierce fighters attempting to protect their mountain redoubt and their association with the CIA sealed their fate in the eyes of the communist victors. They knew they would not escape the wrath of the Pathet Lao and their benefactors, the North Vietnamese.
Since 1975, the United States has brought some 700,000 Indochinese refugees into the country. The 65,000 Hmong, like all the refugees, were placed wherever sponsors could be found. Within the space of 72 hours these mountain people were taken from bamboo-thatched huts in refugee camps along the Mekong River and put into 2- and 3-bedroom apartments in Philadelphia, Minneapolis and other major American cities. They were unaware of how to deal with the simplest of tasks for Americans: turning on and off lights; using the refrigerator, stove or oven; paying bills.
"It's just like a dream, like a movie
Imagine you go to the Moon some way and when you wake up you are on the Moon somewhere and you have to live by that society
you don't know where you are, you don't really know," says Kou Yang, now a social worker in Fresno.
Rev. Norman Johnshoy, who often finds himself explaining the Hmong to perplexed locals, says, "One of the best descriptions is to think of them as a people who made one airplane flight from the 16th century to the 21st. And if you can conceive of something like that happening in a time machine, then you have a pretty good notion of the perplexity that these people must have experienced."
The cultural disorientation the Hmong face on arrival in the United States is shared by the other Indochinese refugees, but the Hmong bring a special history that makes their long-term settlement much more difficult. Unlike the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, the Hmong are a "preliterate" people, which means most are unable to read and write in their own language. Actually, until 30 years ago when Christian missionaries standardized the language and wrote it down, the Hmong had no written language. Unlike European immigrants and many Indochinese, the Hmong have a simple, agrarian vocabulary. Europeans and Vietnamese pick up the English language in months of study, Hmong take years to learn.
"We see (Europeans) in ESL classes as well and they can zip through ESL in no time because you simply substitute what a word means in your language and you learn what that word means in this language. For (the Hmong) there is no word in their language that means the word they're trying to learn," Barbara Christl says.
While a very small number of Hmong are educated and have become teachers, businessmen, engineers and farmers, the great majority -estimates run 80 to 95 percent -do not have jobs and do not have skills to work in the United States. When Christl reads that the Vietnamese Texas tycoon "isn't unique among the 700,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians" in the United States she fears the secret soldiers of Laos will become the hidden refugees in America whose wrenching cultural assimilation will be overshadowed by the success stories of those Indochinese more able to cope. It is a fate the Hmong should not suffer, she says, because of the crucial role they played for the United States in the Vietnam era. Lionel Rosenblatt, refugee coordinator for the United States in Thailand just after the war and again in 1978-81, explains that the Hmong became pivotal for the U.S. military strategy in Laos because "according to the Geneva Accords of 1960 there were no foreign troops to be stationed in Laos."
"Of course the Vietnamese Army was there in abundance, but the American military did not put ground combat troops into Laos and the Hmong really formed our army -a very unique relationship with the Hmong, therefore, that we didn't have with any other group on the ground in Indochina."
Because of that relationship many of the Hmong who arrived in the United States after two decades of war knew nothing else but fighting and nothing else but the support of the U.S. military. Moua Geu, who runs the Long Chien market in Fresno -namesake of the secret CIA operations center in Laos -remembers his relationship with the Americans this way: "They had a lot of powers and they were the ones who brought us guns, gold, clothes, food."
"CIA is the one who helped us, supported us a lot and we consider them as a mother and father," he says in a sing-song English, marked by the tonal sounds of his native tongue.
Because of that relationship, the Hmong expected more than they got when they arrived in America. In 1981, during a trip to Ban Vinai refugee camp in northeast Thailand, many refugees responded to the question, "What will you do in the United States?" with the answer, "Whatever the government tells me to do." It was a great shock to Moua Geu and his comrades when they arrived and the government they had known, that had supported them all their lives, could not be found. "Even if we lost, they promised they would take us to the United States, but when we got here, we have no idea who the CIA is, we don't know where they went."
If the Hmong were unprepared for the United States, Americans were also unready for them. In almost every aspect of their lives the Hmong rely on an entirely different set of beliefs and values than their new neighbors. They are a polygamous people. Men have the right to marry as many women as they can afford to support. The more children they had the richer they could become because they could cultivate more land. Hmong men were told before coming to the United States that they would have to divorce all but one wife and on paper they did so. But Hmong leaders in Fresno admit that, once here, the traditional family unit is preserved often with the husband living again with all his wives. Also, while Christian missionaries did write down the Hmong language, they were less successful converting them to the Western God. Most of the Hmong are still animistic, worshipers of good and evil spirits and the spirits of their dead ancestors, all who must be revered with complex rituals and animal sacrifices.
Some benign incidents have been the unavoidable result of these differences. Fresno Police Officer Marvin Reyes swallows hard when he recounts the first time he was invited to a Hmong celebration in a downtown apartment complex. Several women were butchering a live pig in the kitchen. Next to the carcass, beside a blood-soaked wall, the head of the animal stuck out of a bucket, waiting to be cooked as the centerpiece of the meal.
Diana Carter, a clerk at a thrift bakery frequented by the Hmong, said she mistrusted them at first because they would not directly look at her. Later, she learned the Hmong cast their eyes down as a sign of respect.
Another incident was described by Elaine Perez, a Fresno County family planning official. A Hmong couple taught to use condoms through the creative use of a broom handle returned to the birth control clinic after the woman became pregnant. They followed the instructions to the letter, they said. The broom handle had been put in the cornner of the bedroom dutifully covered with the birth control device.
Some cultural misunderstandings have led to more solemn consequences. A Hmong man ran a stop sign in a van filled with Hmong workers headed for
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