There is a fan-made video on YouTube set to the song, “Teardrop” by the trip-hop group, Massive Attack. In this video, images of the cosmos shot from the Hubble Space Telescope are fractured in a kaleidoscope-like fashion. As the song plays, the images morph. The shapes and colours shift, forming new patterns, though remnants of the old linger still. In a similar manner, the Hmong identity, over the years, has shifted, morphed. The Hmong culture has changed, evolved with each new experience the Hmong people have encountered, the new building upon the foundations of the old. To the Yang family and to Kao Kalia Yang, the meaning of being Hmong changes with several significant life moments.
In 1975, at the close of the Vietnam War, to be Hmong meant to be prey. The new communist government in Laos declared execution on all Hmong who had aided the Americans in “The Secret War.” Villages were ravaged. Whole families took to the jungles, fleeing the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers whose sole intent was to kill. The soldiers could not tell a Hmong who had helped versus a Hmong who had not. To them, all Hmong were the enemy, and through the jungles they hunted them like wolves hunting caribou. The soldiers were not the only danger they faced. Sickness and starvation and infection from their wounds also hunted them. Kalia detailed, “They were all torn and broken: shrapnel into skin, blood seeping from scratches, jagged cuts from rocks flying through the air” (Yang 21). For years, they lived under constant threat of disease, death and capture. For years, they made their way through the dense vegetation in hopes of making it out of Laos, of crossing the Mekong River to Thailand with the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese seemingly forever on their tails. When they finally did make it to Thailand, they would find that being prey would fall away to being something else.
In the camps of Thailand, the Yang family and thousands of other Hmong families learned that to be Hmong then meant to be prisoner. The Ban Vinai Refugee Camp was overcrowded and surrounded by fences with armed guards like a prison. For the years they were there, the Hmong could not live, only merely exist, caged like animals. In the eyes of a little girl who grew up in the camp, “When she noticed that they lived in a place that felt like it had an invisible fence made of men with guns who spoke Thai…she learned that Hmong meant contained” (Yang 1). Death and disease lingered in every corner, every shadow. Few had the privilege to go beyond the camp gate. The Phanat Nikhom Processing Center, too, was dusty, unsanitary and “surrounded by a high fence that was as sharp as knives” (Yang 92). More armed guards stood watch in high towers. Contained, they were indeed.
In America, Kalia’s family changed, morphed like the Hubble images in the “Teardrop” video, adapting to their new life in a new land. Several babies were born: Xue, Sheelue, Shoually, Taylor and Maxwell. Kalia herself changed. No longer a little girl, she morphed into a young woman. She graduated from high school and went on to college. Her parents were no longer on welfare. They worked hard and saved enough money to buy their own home, albeit a mouldy one. With the coming of the babies and their parents working, Dawb and Kalia had to assist in taking care of the young ones. For once in their lives, the constant threat of death and danger no longer hung above their heads like it had in Laos and Thailand. They were finally living their lives.
The Hmong people in America met new hardships, but with the support of each other, they pulled through. It is by witnessing this that one realizes, though the surface of Hmong identity may change with the circumstance, the deeper meaning of Hmong identity, the deeper meaning of what it is to be Hmong is always there underneath it all. That is, to be Hmong is to survive, to weather the storm, to face through the adversities life gives them and come out stronger than ever. Kalia tells, “We didn’t come all this way from the clouds just to go back, without a trace. We, seekers of refuge, will find [our dreams]: if not in the world, then in each other” (Yang 274). The Hmong people have faced plethoras of hardship throughout history: exile, persecution, extermination, exile again, containment, relocation. Despite all this, the Hmong people and the Hmong culture live on stronger than ever, and as long as they can support each other, they will never fall.
The images in the video turn, shift as the animation plays on. New patterns evolve right before one’s eyes, but the foundations of the old patterns remain at the core. This is a representative of identity. Over time, who one is changes, evolves with each new experience, though one’s inner core remains. For the Hmong, circumstances changed. Who they had to be changed, but through it all, the intrinsic essence of survival, no matter the odds, forever lives on. That is truly a beautiful thing.
Yang, Kao Kalia. The Latehomecomer. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008. Print.
Posted in Academic Writing
I’m such a fangirl.
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Even skipped the Super Bowl. Now that it’s almost done, I’m probably going to watch even more episodes of what I have on my laptop hard drive. Fun fun fun.
I want to marry an Irish guy. It’d be the epic of all epic to marry Baz himself, but that’s too fantastical a dream, so another nice Irishman would suffice, I guess. Lol.
