The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (23 page)

This was not the first time in the last two weeks that the Lees had been told Lia would die, but for some reason—perhaps because Nao Kao believed it contained such a time-specific prediction—it was the most offensive. In the Hmong moral code, foretelling a death is strongly taboo. It is an unpardonable insult to say to one’s aged grandparent, “After you are dead….” Instead, one says, “When your children are 120 years old….” I asked several Hmong people I knew how they would feel if a doctor told them their child was going to die. “A doctor should never never say that!” exclaimed Chong Moua, a mother of three. “It makes the
dab
come closer to the child. It is like saying okay, okay, take her.” Koua Her, an interpreter for the health department, said, “In Laos, that means you’re going to kill a person. Maybe poison him. Because how do you know for certain he’s going to die unless you’re going to kill him?”

One night I told Bill Selvidge that the Lees had perceived the doctors’ comments not as candid prognoses but as threats. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “All those verb tenses! Lia will die, Lia might die, Lia has a ninety-five percent chance of dying. Those nuances would be very confusing through an interpreter. And if the parents thought that people at MCMC were saying Lia
should
die, maybe they were right. I imagine there were a lot of people here who thought that if Lia was comatose and couldn’t communicate and the only sensation she could feel was pain, it would be better for her if she did die.”

When Nao Kao thought he was being forced to sign a piece of paper that said his daughter was going to die in two hours, he did what any Hmong in an impossible corner, starting with the legendary Shee Yee, might consider doing: he fled. He grabbed Lia, who was dressed in her funeral clothes, from her bed in the third-floor pediatric unit and started running down the stairs. One of the nurses called a Code X. (Every hospital has a set of emergency codes that are blared over the public address system: Code Blue for dying patients in need of resuscitation; Code Red for fire; Code X for security breaches.) Nao Kao recalled, “They were chasing after me. They called two policemen”—hospital security guards—“and they wanted me to go back to the hospital. When they called the police, the lady that told me that Lia was going to die came to scold me and said, What are you doing? At that time I was so angry I pushed that nurse and her head went blah.”

Dave Schneider was paged,
stat—
that is, urgently and immediately. It was late Friday afternoon at the end of what had already been a bad week for him, and it was about to get worse. Exhausted by the stresses of being a resident—the thirty-three-hour shifts, the constant hectoring of resentful patients, the fear of making a fatal mistake—Dave had requested a three-month leave of absence from MCMC, and had only a few days, which he had hoped would be calm, before he left. “I was about as low as I had ever been in my entire life,” he told me, “and I was in no state to put up with any bullshit from a father, whether he was a caring, concerned father who had customs that were different from mine or not. I mean, I really was not particularly feeling like having a discussion with him about cultural differences.”

When Dave arrived, at a run, on the pediatric floor, the security guards had already escorted Nao Kao and Lia back to her room. “They’d found this Laotian guy carrying out this basically motionless child, and when I got there, they and the nurses were all yelling at him in a language he didn’t understand. I didn’t yell at him, but I was very angry. What really pissed me off is that he had pulled out her NG tube. He denied it, but it had been thrown onto the stairs. Obviously they wanted to take Lia home and let her die, and we were willing to do that, but it had to be in a medically acceptable manner, not by starving her to death, which is what would happen if she didn’t have an NG tube. So we’d instructed them as to how to use it and everything. Then the father rips her off, runs down the stairs, and takes out the tube. I mean, they had
minutes
to go, or at most an hour or two, before we were going to let them take her home anyway, but they
just couldn’t fucking wait
.”

In a sharp voice, Dave told Nao Kao over and over again that if he’d been patient, Lia could have left soon, but now she couldn’t, because the nasogastric tube had to be reinserted and then X-rayed to confirm its position. In fact, the new tube was inserted incorrectly, and it had to be repositioned and X-rayed a second time. This, plus the paperwork, took nearly four hours. The hospital staff, including the nurse Nao Kao had pushed against the wall—she hadn’t been hurt—went about their business as if the incident, which they later referred to as “the abduction,” were an everyday event. Though they were all furious, no one considered reporting Nao Kao for assault or preventing him, at what they decided was the appropriate time, from taking his daughter home.

Lia left MCMC at 10:15 p.m., in her mother’s arms. At the time of her discharge, her temperature was 104°. Her parents carried her back to their apartment, took off her funeral clothes, and laid her on a shower curtain they had spread on the living room floor. “Lia was going to die if she stayed in the hospital,” said Nao Kao, “but we boiled up some herbs and we washed her body. At the hospital she was so sick that when she was sleeping on the bed, she sweated so much her bed got all wet. She had too much medicine and her body just gave way. But then we boiled the herbs and we washed her and her sweat stopped, and she didn’t die.”

The Lee family—Nao Kao, Foua, Chong, Zoua, Cheng, May, Yer, and True—arrived in the United States on December 18, 1980. Their luggage consisted of a few clothes, a blue blanket, and a wooden mortar and pestle that Foua had chiseled from a block of wood in Houaysouy. They flew from Bangkok to Honolulu, and then to Portland, Oregon, where they were to spend two years before moving to Merced. Other refugees told me that their airplane flights—a mode of travel that strained the limits of the familiar Hmong concept of migration—had been fraught with anxiety and shame: they got airsick, they didn’t know how to use the bathroom but were afraid to soil themselves, they thought they had to pay for their food but had no money, they tried to eat the Wash’n Dris. The Lees, though perplexed, took the novelties of the trip in stride. Nao Kao remembers the airplane as being “just like a big house.”

Their first week in Portland, however, was miserably disorienting. Before being placed by a local refugee agency in a small rented house, they spent a week with relatives, sleeping on the floor. “We didn’t know anything so our relatives had to show us everything,” Foua said. “They knew because they had lived in America for three or four months already. Our relatives told us about electricity and said the children shouldn’t touch those plugs in the wall because they could get hurt. They told us that the refrigerator is a cold box where you put meat. They showed us how to open the TV so we could see it. We had never seen a toilet before and we thought maybe the water in it was to drink or cook with. Then our relatives told us what it was, but we didn’t know whether we should sit or whether we should stand on it. Our relatives took us to the store but we didn’t know that the cans and packages had food in them. We could tell what the meat was, but the chickens and cows and pigs were all cut up in little pieces and had plastic on them. Our relatives told us the stove is for cooking the food, but I was afraid to use it because it might explode. Our relatives said in America the food you don’t eat you just throw away. In Laos we always fed it to the animals and it was strange to waste it like that. In this country there were a lot of strange things and even now I don’t know a lot of things and my children have to help me, and it still seems like a strange country.”

Seventeen years later, Foua and Nao Kao use American appliances, but they still speak only Hmong, celebrate only Hmong holidays, practice only the Hmong religion, cook only Hmong dishes, sing only Hmong songs, play only Hmong musical instruments, tell only Hmong stories, and know far more about current political events in Laos and Thailand than about those in the United States. When I first met them, during their eighth year in this country, only one American adult, Jeanine Hilt, had ever been invited to their home as a guest. It would be hard to imagine anything further from the vaunted American ideal of assimilation, in which immigrants are expected to submerge their cultural differences in order to embrace a shared national identity.
E pluribus unum:
from many, one.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.” During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with ten-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of origin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to
resist
assimilation. As the anthropologist Jacques Lemoine has observed, “they did not come to our countries only to save their lives, they rather came to save their selves, that is, their Hmong ethnicity.” If their Hmong ethnicity had been safe in Laos, they would have preferred to remain there, just as their ancestors—for whom migration had always been a problem-solving strategy, not a footloose impulse—would have preferred to remain in China. Unlike the Ford workers who enthusiastically, or at least uncomplainingly, belted out the “The Star-Spangled Banner” (of which Foua and Nao Kao know not a single word), the Hmong are what sociologists call “involuntary migrants.” It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.

What the Hmong wanted here was to be left alone to be Hmong: clustered in all-Hmong enclaves, protected from government interference, self-sufficient, and agrarian. Some brought hoes in their luggage. General Vang Pao has said, “For many years, right from the start, I tell the American government that we need a little bit of land where we can grow vegetables and build homes like in Laos…. I tell them it does not have to be the best land, just a little land where we can live.” This proposal was never seriously considered. “It was just out of the question,” said a spokesman for the State Department’s refugee program. “It would cost too much, it would be impractical, but most of all it would set off wild protests from [other Americans] and from other refugees who weren’t getting land for themselves.” (It would be interesting—though to my knowledge no one has ever done it—to compare the hypothetical costs of Vang Pao’s land scheme with the real costs of the federal and state funds that have been paid out over the last twenty years to welfare-dependent Hmong who were originally settled in urban areas.)
^*

Just as newly arrived immigrants in earlier eras had been called “FOBs”—Fresh Off the Boat—some social workers nicknamed the incoming Hmong, along with the other Southeast Asian refugees who entered the United States after the Vietnamese War, “JOJs”: Just Off the Jet. Unlike the first waves of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, most of whom received several months of vocational and language training at regional “reception centers,” the HmongJOJs, who arrived after the centers had closed, were all sent directly to their new homes. (Later on, some were given “cultural orientation” training in Thailand before flying to the United States. Their classes covered such topics as how to distinguish a one-dollar bill from a ten-dollar bill and how to use a peephole.) The logistical details of their resettlement were contracted by the federal government to private nonprofit groups known as VOLAGs, or national voluntary resettlement agencies, which found local sponsors. Within their first few weeks in this country, newly arrived families were likely to deal with VOLAG officials, immigration officials, public health officials, social service officials, employment officials, and public assistance officials. The Hmong are not known for holding bureaucrats in high esteem. As one proverb puts it, “To see a tiger is to die; to see an official is to become destitute.” In a study of adaptation problems among Indochinese refugees, Hmong respondents rated “Difficulty with American Agencies” as a more serious problem than either “War Memories” or “Separation from Family.” Because many of the VOLAGs had religious affiliations, the JOJs also often found themselves dealing with Christian ministers, who, not surprisingly, took a dim view of shamanistic animism. A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, “It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If anyone thinks that a gospel-preaching church would bring them over and not tell them about the Lord, they’re out of their mind.” The proselytizing backfired. According to a study of Hmong mental health problems, refugees sponsored by this pastor’s religious organization were significantly more likely, when compared to other refugees, to require psychiatric treatment.

The Hmong were accustomed to living in the mountains, and most of them had never seen snow. Almost all their resettlement sites had flat topography and freezing winters. The majority were sent to cities, including Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Hartford, and Providence, because that was where refugee services—health care, language classes, job training, public housing—were concentrated. To encourage assimilation, and to avoid burdening any one community with more than its “fair share” of refugees, the Immigration and Naturalization Service adopted a policy of dispersal rather than clustering. Newly arrived Hmong were assigned to fifty-three cities in twenty-five different states: stirred into the melting pot in tiny, manageable portions, or, as John Finck, who worked with Hmong at the Rhode Island Office of Refugee Resettlement, put it, “spread like a thin layer of butter throughout the country so they’d disappear.” In some places, clans were broken up. In others, members of only one clan were resettled, making it impossible for young people, who were forbidden by cultural taboo from marrying within their own clan, to find local marriage partners. Group solidarity, the cornerstone of Hmong social organization for more than two thousand years, was completely ignored.

Although most Hmong were resettled in cities, some nuclear families, unaccompanied by any of their extended relations, were placed in isolated rural areas. Disconnected from traditional supports, these families exhibited unusually high levels of anxiety, depression, and paranoia. In one such case, the distraught and delusional father of the Yang family—the only Hmong family sponsored by the First Baptist Church of Fairfield, Iowa—attempted to hang himself in the basement of his wooden bungalow along with his wife and four children. His wife changed her mind at the last minute and cut the family down, but she acted too late to save their only son. An Iowa grand jury declined to indict either parent, on the grounds that the father was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the mother, cut off from all sources of information except her husband, had no way to develop an independent version of reality.

Reviewing the initial resettlement of the Hmong with several years’ hindsight, Lionel Rosenblatt, the former United States Refugee Coordinator in Thailand, conceded that it had been catastrophically mishandled. “We knew at the start their situation was different, but we just couldn’t make any special provisions for them,” he said. “I still feel it was no mistake to bring the Hmong here, but you look back now and say, ‘How could we have done it so shoddily?’” Eugene Douglas, President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for refugee affairs, stated flatly, “It was a kind of hell they landed into. Really, it couldn’t have been done much worse.”

The Hmong who sought asylum in the United States were, of course, not a homogeneous lump. A small percentage, mostly the high-ranking military officers who were admitted first, were multilingual and cosmopolitan, and a larger percentage had been exposed in a desultory fashion to some aspects of American culture and technology during the war or while living in Thai refugee camps. But the experience of tens of thousands of Hmong was much like the Lees’. It is possible to get an idea of how monumental the task of adjustment was likely to be by glancing at some of the pamphlets, audiotapes, and videos that refugee agencies produced for Southeast Asian JOJs. For example, “Your New Life in the United States,” a handbook published by the Language and Orientation Resource Center in Washington, D.C., included the following tips:

The customs they were expected to follow seemed so peculiar, the rules and regulations so numerous, the language so hard to learn, and the emphasis on literacy and the decoding of other unfamiliar symbols so strong, that many Hmong were overwhelmed. Jonas Vangay told me, “In America, we are blind because even though we have eyes, we cannot see. We are deaf because even though we have ears, we cannot hear.” Some newcomers wore pajamas as street clothes; poured water on electric stoves to extinguish them; lit charcoal fires in their living rooms; stored blankets in their refrigerators; washed rice in their toilets; washed their clothes in swimming pools; washed their hair with Lestoil; cooked with motor oil and furniture polish; drank Clorox; ate cat food; planted crops in public parks; shot and ate skunks, porcupines, woodpeckers, robins, egrets, sparrows, and a bald eagle; and hunted pigeons with crossbows in the streets of Philadelphia.

If the United States seemed incomprehensible to the Hmong, the Hmong seemed equally incomprehensible to the United States. Journalists seized excitedly on a label that is still trotted out at regular intervals: “the most primitive refugee group in America.” (In an angry letter to the
New York Times
, which had used that phrase in a 1990 news article, a Hmong computer specialist observed, “Evidently, we were not too primitive to fight as proxies for United States troops in the war in Laos.”) Typical phrases from newspaper and magazine stories in the late seventies and eighties included “low-caste hill tribe,” “Stone Age,” “emerging from the mists of time,” “like Alice falling down a rabbit hole.” Inaccuracies were in no short supply. A 1981 article in the
Christian Science Monitor
called the Hmong language “extremely simplistic” declared that the Hmong, who have been sewing
paj ntaub
with organic motifs for centuries, make “no connection between a picture of a tree and a real tree” and noted that “the Hmong have no oral tradition of literature…. Apparently no folk tales exist.” Some journalists seemed to shed all inhibition, and much of their good sense as well, when they were loosed on the Hmong. My favorite passage is a 1981
New York Times
editorial about the large number of Hmong men who had died unexpectedly in their sleep, killed—or so it was widely believed at the time—by their own nightmares.
^*
After explaining that the Hmong “attributed conscious life to natural objects,” the writer asked,