The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (31 page)

When you looked at the Merced school system, what you saw again depended on your point of view. From one perspective, the Hmong children—who multiplied at a rate that made Dr. Small just shake his head and keep muttering the word “contraception”—were a disaster. In order to relieve overcrowding and to desegregate schools that would otherwise be almost entirely Asian, Merced has had to bus nearly 2,000 of its elementary and middle-school students; build three new elementary schools, a new middle school, and a new high school; teach classes in more than seventy trailers and, while waiting for them to arrive, in cafeterias, on auditorium stages, and in the exhibition hall of the County Fairgrounds; and switch seven schools to a staggered all-year calendar.

On the other hand, Hmong children rarely caused disciplinary problems and regularly crowded the honor rolls.
^*
Four of the Lee children received their classes’ Student-of-the-Month awards. Rick Uebner, who taught May Lee’s eighth-grade Language Arts class, once wrote me a letter that described May as “a leader among her peers and a clear-thinking, confident person.” He continued:

At a conference I attended on college and career planning for Hmong teenagers, Jonas Vangay, standing under a sign that said
EDUCATION: THE KEY TO YOUR FUTURE
, told his almost preternaturally quiet audience, “In America, even when the child is in the stomach, the mother thinks about books and pencils.
Your
parents grew with knife or hammer or tool. They cannot help you. Let your book be your best friend. For if you cannot learn in school, whose fault is it? Who is to blame?”

No one said a word.

“Answer me!” thundered Jonas.

Finally, in a small voice, a boy said, “Yourself.”

“Right!” said Jonas. “Do not be afraid! If you are a chicken boy or chicken girl, and you keep quiet, the examination will come and
you will fail
! Those who cannot learn cannot be successful! We want you to be successful in the year 2000!”

There was silence in the room. Then the students burst, or crept, into muted applause.

Although many Hmong teenagers in Merced are as wholesome and deferential as those in Jonas’s audience, a few have joined the Men of Destruction, the Blood Asian Crips, the Oriental Locs, or one of the other gangs which, in a perverse distortion of the group ethic, started spreading through the Central Valley in the mid-eighties. Merced has black and Hispanic gangs as well, but local police officers agree that the Hmong gangs are the most likely to carry guns and the most likely to use them.

I occasionally heard mutterings about Hmong gangs, but local residents who disliked the Hmong seemed to be far more obsessed with smaller, stranger crimes. I was told countless times that the Hmong kidnapped underage brides. I also heard that they smuggled drugs. The local police department confirmed that opium had been found inside ax handles, picture frames, bamboo chairs, teabags, and packages of noodles. There were also many tales about Fish and Game violations. The
Merced Sun-Star
ran an article about Hmong who poached bass from the San Luis Reservoir with 1,550-foot setlines, drove deer into ambushes by banging on pots and pans, and served stewed pied-bill grebe for dinner. None of these stories was false, but they were all partial. Left out of the telling were all the extenuating circumstances: that Hmong marriage customs had a cultural context unfamiliar to Americans;
^*
that opium smuggling was uncommon, and most of the contraband was intended for medicinal use by the elderly; that in Laos, all the hilltribes had hunted and fished without rules, seasons, or limits; and that once they reached adulthood, the Hmong here, as in other parts of the country, had a low overall crime rate compared with other people below the poverty line.

The most frequent accusation I heard was that the Hmong were terrible drivers. They seemed fine to me, so I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and asked John McDoniel, the manager, what he thought. He said, “In many respects I am happy to have these people as neighbors, but as far as driving ability goes—well, that’s another matter. Violations of pedestrian right-of-way. Going through stop signs. Not realizing their speed. All errors of judgment. Also, when they come to get their licenses, some of them cheat on the written test.”

“How do they cheat?” I asked.

“They sew,” said Mr. McDoniel.

“They
sew?
”

Mr. McDoniel, who wore trifocals and looked a little like Ed Wynn, opened the top left drawer of his desk. “Well, the ones who don’t know English can’t read the questions, and they answer at random and take the corrected answer sheets home and share them with their friends. Some of them just memorize the dots on the page. Five different tests, forty-six questions, three answers—let me see, 46 times 15 is 690 dots. They’re very good at memorization, but that’s an awful lot of dots, so quite a few of them bring in these little cribs.”

He reached in the drawer and took out an eyeglass case. In flawless cross-stitch—a different color for each of the test’s five versions—a
paj ntaub
artist had sewn microscopic X’s to indicate whether, for each question, the correct answer was the first, second, or third option.

Next he took out a checked coat. On each lapel, certain squares had been blocked in with thread.

Next he took out a striped pullover with almost invisible white stitches down the front and along each sleeve.

Next he took out a white shirt with minute blue stitches on the cuffs.

“Real neat work, isn’t it?” he said admiringly.

I concurred. Then I asked, “What do you do when you catch someone using one of these?”

“He fails the test, and we confiscate the crib.”

It occurred to me that an awful lot of Hmong must exit from the Department of Motor Vehicles wearing fewer clothes than when they walked in.

Late that night, I lay on the floor in Bill Selvidge’s study, where I was staying. Next to my sleeping bag I had taped photographs of Hmong: Hmong children from the
National Geographic
wearing
paj ntaub
; Hmong teenagers from the
Merced Sun-Star
wearing jeans; the Lee family, wearing slightly off-kilter American clothes, in pictures I had taken myself. I found them all very beautiful, and I often stared at them for hours when I couldn’t sleep. That night, for some reason, the phrase “differently abled”—a substitute for “disabled” that had enjoyed a brief vogue among progressive journalists—kept buzzing around my head. I had always disliked the term, which struck me as euphemistic and patronizing. Suddenly, I realized why it was keeping me awake. I had been trying all day to decide whether I thought the Hmong were ethical or unethical, and now I saw it: they were—in this case, it was a supremely accurate phrase
—differently ethical
.

The Hmong, it seemed to me, were abiding, in spades, by E. M. Forster’s famous dictum that it is better to betray one’s country than one’s friend. Since they had never had a nation of their own, and had been persecuted by every nation they had inhabited, they could hardly be expected to harbor an extravagant respect for national jurisprudence. Rules and regulations were particularly breakable if they conflicted with the group ethic—which, after all, is an
ethic
, not just an excuse to flout someone else’s ethic. Hmong folktales are heavily populated with characters, clearly meant to be perceived as virtuous, who lie to kings, dragons,
dabs
, and other authority figures in order to protect their families or friends. I had heard innumerable modern versions in which some synecdochical representative of the U.S. government had played the role of righteously deceived
dab
. In the Thai camps, Hmong had claimed their children were older than they really were, so they could receive larger food allotments; claimed their parents were younger than they really were, because it was rumored that the United States considered old people undesirable; and told immigration officials that collateral relatives were members of their immediate families. In the United States, they had claimed their children were younger than they really were, so they could stay in school longer; lied to doctors in order to get disability benefits; claimed they had separated from a spouse in order to increase the family’s welfare allowance; and, among the younger generation, let friends copy their schoolwork. Not all the Hmong I knew had done these things. Most had not. But those who had were unashamed. In fact, the ones who had lied to immigration officials had been amazed, when they reached the United States and discussed their experiences with their American sponsors, to find that their behavior was regarded as unethical. What would have seemed unethical—in fact, unpardonable—to them was leaving their relatives behind.

Nao Kao Lee, who couldn’t read a word of English, had passed his driving test, in precisely the manner John McDoniel had described, by memorizing where to place the X’s on his answer sheet. He had been asked to make a set of prescribed pencil marks; he had done so. In fact, his success on the test—which seemed to him a purely technical challenge, not an assessment of his ability to drive safely—was a triumph of intelligence over bureaucracy. However, it never would have occurred to him to go to so much trouble if he had been able to pass by conventional methods. (Not long after my conversation with John McDoniel, the California Department of Motor Vehicles instituted oral and written tests in Hmong, and the rate of cheating among Hmong applicants declined to a level comparable with that of Merced’s other ethnic groups.) Nao Kao viewed his driver’s license as a matter of patent necessity: how else was he to visit his relatives? The family came first, then the clan, then the Hmong people, and everything and everybody else ranked so far below those three that it would have been blasphemy to mention them in the same breath. I believe that Nao Kao, like most Hmong, would rather die than deceive a member of his family or clan.

The group ethic enabled Nao Kao not only to pass his driving test but to make unequivocal decisions in every sphere of his life, to assess people’s characters with confidence, and to operate almost entirely within the supportive Hmong community rather than within the larger and harsher world of America. On a larger scale, the exigent pull of ethnic solidarity was what made the Hmong so openhanded, so good at teamwork, and so warm. But it seemed to me that, especially for the community’s educated leaders, the obligation to put the group before the self also had some negative consequences: stress, loss of privacy, a punishing sense of responsibility. Nao Kao’s age and his lack of English insulated him from the conflicts and ambiguities of having one foot in one culture and one in another. His life, if not joyous, was at least
clear
. This was not the case with the Hmong who shared high status in both the Hmong and the American communities.

Dang Moua was an exception. He had so much forward momentum that stresses and doubts simply flowed off him, like water from a torpedo. Also, although Dang spent many hours doing what nearly all literate, English-speaking Hmong of his generation did—deciphering other people’s junk mail, filling out their tax forms, telephoning agencies, translating notes from school—he charged for these tasks. Most Hmong did them for free. I heard about one multilingual woman, once a nursing administrator in Xieng Khouang province, who had worked as a Hmong liaison after settling in Minnesota. She became so exhausted by the incessant demands of the Twin Cities’ Hmong community, both during and after work hours, that she moved to Merced without telling her clan and got a job that allowed her to deal only with Americans. “Don’t call her,” I was told. “She’s trying to lie low.” Family loyalty—the group ethic concentrated to an even more potent form—also had its downside. Pa Vue Thao, the interpreter who had made an herbal compress to heal Jan Harwood’s broken leg, told me he had once been offered a lucrative job at U.C. Davis. He had turned it down, with regret but without hesitation, after his father, angry that Pa Vue would even consider leaving his relatives in Merced, asked him, “Does money mean more or does the family mean more?”

In the early seventies, out of the more than 300,000 Hmong in Laos, there were only thirty-four—all men—who were studying at universities overseas. Two of them had resettled in Merced: Blia Yao Moua and Jonas Vangay. Both had won scholarships to the Lycée Nationale, Vientiane’s most elite secondary school, and had obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from French universities. Jonas left a job as a computer analyst in a Paris suburb to immigrate to the United States in 1983, just after the largest wave of Hmong refugees, most of them illiterate farmers like the Lees, had been admitted. Blia came the same year, leaving an executive position at an international packaging company. “I move here to help because it was my moral responsibility,” he told me. “If my generation stay in France, we would feel guilty.” Blia and Jonas were more intellectually cosmopolitan not only than every Hmong they knew, but also than every American they knew, including myself. Their leadership roles in Merced had earned both of them respect, but little money, and, as far as I could see, little peace of mind.

I knew Blia Yao Moua best. There was a period of a few months when I spent almost every afternoon sitting in his office, a windowless cubicle with fake wood paneling, asking questions about Hmong religion, military history, medical practices, kinship patterns, weddings, funerals, music, clothing, architecture, and gastronomy. It was from Blia that I learned, for example, that if I wronged another person, I might be reborn in my next life as my victim’s buffalo and used for farm work; that what American doctors called the Mongolian spot—a bluish birthmark on the buttocks of many Asian babies—was in fact the place where the babies had been spanked, in utero, by a
dab
; and that the shoes Hmong corpses wore for burial had upturned toes. Blia looked like a frayed aristocrat, with a high domed forehead and finely drawn features. Although he was almost exactly my age—in his mid-thirties when we first met—I always felt like a child in his presence, partly because I sat in a chair with a tiny desk attached, the way I had in sixth grade, and partly because he knew so much more than I did and was so patient with my ignorance. I remember countless occasions, after I had asked him to provide a rational explanation for a nonrational custom, when he just shook his head gently and said, “Anne, may I explain to you again. The Hmong culture is
not Cartesian
.”