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Acknowledgments

Ib tug pas ua tsis tau ib pluag mov los yog ua tsis tau ib tug laj kab.
One stick cannot cook a meal or build a fence.

I would like to thank some of the people who enabled me to write this book:

Bill Selvidge, who started it all by telling me stories about his Hmong patients, and who became my host, intermediary, teacher, and sounding board.

Robert Gottlieb, who assigned the germinal story. Robert Lescher, my literary agent, who always knew I had a book in me somewhere. Jonathan Galassi and Elisheva Urbas, extraordinary editors who at every stage were able to see both the forest and the trees.

The John S. Knight Fellowship program at Stanford University, which, among many other boons, allowed me to study at Stanford Medical School. The classes I audited deepened both my medical knowledge and my understanding of what it means to be a doctor.

Michele Salcedo, who helped gather written sources during the embryonic phases. Michael Cassell, Nancy Cohen, Jennifer Pitts, and Jennifer Veech, who checked facts with skill and enterprise. Tony Kaye, researcher nonpareil, who tracked down answers to hundreds of questions that had stumped me for years.

The dozens of people, cited under individual chapter headings in my Notes on Sources, who were willing to pass on their knowledge.

The doctors and nurses at Merced Community Medical Center who helped and educated me, with especial thanks to Dan Murphy.

Sukey Waller, who introduced me to Merced’s Hmong leaders. They trusted me because they trusted her.

The Hmong community of Merced, whose members were willing to share their sophisticated culture with me and who earned my passionate respect.

Jeanine Hilt, whose death was a terrible loss.

Raquel Arias, Andrea Baker, John Bethell, Dwight Conquergood, Jim Fadiman, Abby Kagan, Martin Kilgore, Pheng Ly, Susan Mitchell, Chong Moua, Dang Moua, Karla Reganold, Dave Schneider, Steve Smith, Rhonda Walton, Carol Whitmore, Natasha Wimmer, and Mayko Xiong, for help of many kinds.

Bill Abrams, Jon Blackman, Lisa Colt, Sandy Colt, Byron Dobell, Adam Goodheart, Peter Gradjansky, Julie Holding, Kathy Holub, Charlie Monheim, Julie Salamon, Kathy Schuler, and Al Silverman, who read part or all of the manuscript and offered criticism and enthusiasm, both equally useful. Jane Condon, Maud Gleason, and Lou Ann Walker, priceless friends who not only read the book but let me talk about it incessantly for years.

Harry Colt, Elizabeth Engle, and Fred Holley, who meticulously vetted the manuscript for medical accuracy. Annie Jaisser, who clarified many aspects of the Hmong language and corrected my Hmong spelling. Gary Stone, who set me straight on some important details of the wars in Laos and Vietnam. Any errors that remain are my fault, not theirs.

May Ying Xiong Ly, my interpreter, cultural broker, and friend, who built a bridge over waters that would otherwise have been uncrossable.

Blia Yao Moua and Jonas Vangay, two wise and generous men who taught me what it means to be Hmong. Nearly a decade after we first met, they were still answering my questions. Would that everyone could have such teachers.

My brother, Kim Fadiman, who in dozens of late-night telephone calls responded to faxed chapters and weighed nuances of phrasing so minute that only another Fadiman could possibly appreciate them. Kim also read aloud the entire manuscript into a tape recorder so our father, who lost his sight four years ago, could listen to it.

My mother, Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, and my father, Clifton Fadiman, who through love and example taught me most of what I know about good reporting and good writing.

My children, Susannah and Henry, for the joy they have brought.

Monica Gregory, Dianna Guevara, and Brigitta Kohli, who allowed me to write by caring for my children with imagination and tenderness.

There are three debts that are unpayable.

I owe the first to Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, physicians and human beings of rare quality, who spent hours beyond count helping me understand a case that most doctors might prefer to forget. Their courage and honesty have been an inspiration.

I owe the second to the Lee family, who changed my whole way of looking at the world when they welcomed me into their home, their daily lives, and their rich culture. Nao Kao Lee was a patient and eloquent educator. Foua Yang was a loving guide and at times a surrogate parent. I thank all the Lee children, but especially True, who helped me immeasurably during the final stages of my research and also became my friend. And to Lia, the gravitational center around which this book revolves, I can only say that of the many sadnesses in the world that I wish could be righted, your life is the one I think of most often in the small hours of the night.

I owe the greatest debt to my husband, George Howe Colt, to whom this book is dedicated. In both a metaphorical sense and a literal one, George has been everything to me. Over the years, he has made fact-checking calls, helped me file thousands of particles of research, taken care of our children while I worked, and talked over every twist and turn of character, style, structure, and emphasis. He read every word—except these—at least twice, and his editing was brilliant. When I got discouraged, knowing that George cared about Lia Lee made me believe others would as well. Were it not for him, my book would never have been written, and my life would be unimaginably dimmer.

17

The Eight Questions

Lia did not die, nor did she recover. Foua often dreamed that her daughter could walk and talk, but when she awoke, Lia lay curled next to her in bed, a slight, silent husk who hardly seemed big enough to contain her family’s load of memory, anger, confusion, and grief. She lay suspended in time, growing only a few inches, gaining little weight, always looking far younger than her age, while the Lee siblings who still lived at home—six athletic, bilingual children who moved with ease between the Hmong and the American worlds—grew up around her. Cheng joined the Marine Reserves and was called to serve in the Gulf War, but to Foua’s nearly hysterical relief, the war ended two days before his scheduled flight to Saudi Arabia. May went to Fresno State University, majoring in health science, a choice influenced by her childhood experiences, both positive and negative, as the ad hoc arbitrator between her parents and the medical establishment. Yer, a volleyball star who had won the award for Best Girl Athlete at Merced High School, joined May at Fresno State two years later, majoring in physical education. True became Merced High’s student body treasurer and president of its Youth Culture Club, a Hmong social and service organization with more than 200 members. Mai became a stand-out soccer player and was known as one of the most beautiful teenagers in Merced, a reputation that caused boys to fight over her and girls all too frequently to resent her. Pang grew from a harum-scarum toddler into a self-possessed schoolgirl with a flair for traditional Hmong dance. There were a few tremors as the Lee children passed through adolescence, but never the rifts that American families accept almost as a matter of course. “My parents are the coolest parents in the world,” True once wrote me. “We don’t have everything in the world, but we do have the closeness of us eight sisters, one brother, and our parents. This is the coolest family ever and I would never trade it for anything else in this world.”

Nao Kao gained weight and was troubled by high blood pressure. Foua felt tired much of the time. Seeing that their energies were waning, Jeanine Hilt urged the Lees to let Lia return to the Schelby Center for Special Education each day, not to educate her—that was a thing of the past—but to give her parents a few hours’ respite each day. Because of their persistent fear that Lia might be stolen from them again by the government, the Lees were reluctant at first, but because they trusted Jeanine, they eventually agreed.

Dee Korda, one of whose foster children was severely retarded and also attended Schelby, frequently saw Lia there, lying on her back with her hands strapped to blocks in order to prevent her fingers from stiffening into claws. She could hardly bear to look. The Kordas had all taken Lia’s neurological catastrophe hard. The entire family had gone through therapy at the Merced County Mental Health Department in order to deal with what Dee called “Lia being dead but alive.” At their counselor’s suggestion, the children—biological, foster, and adopted—drew pictures on butcher paper. “Wendy drew a mom and a baby, because Lia was with her mom,” said Dee. “Julie drew a rainbow with clouds and birds, because Lia didn’t have to cry anymore. Maria is real withdrawn, but when we told her about Lia she cried. Lia got through to her! She drew a broken heart with a jagged fence and an eye looking in from the outside. The heart was the sadness. The fence was the wall that Lia had gotten over by touching our lives. The eye was my eye, watching the sadness, with a tear that cried.”

In 1993, while she was vacationing at Disneyland, Jeanine Hilt had an acute asthma attack, went into respiratory failure, and suffered oxygen deprivation so severe that she lost all brain function: in other words, she developed hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, exactly the same fate that had befallen Lia. She died three days later with her partner of eighteen years, Karen Marino, at her side. “When I heard Jenny was dead, my heart broke,” Foua told me. “I cried because Jenny had told me she wasn’t going to get married and she would never have any children of her own, so she would help me raise my children. But she died, so she couldn’t do that, and I felt I had lost my American daughter.”

Neil Ernst won the MCMC residency program’s first Faculty Teacher of the Year award. Peggy Philp became Merced’s County Health Officer, a post her father had held more than forty years earlier. They continued to share their pediatric practice as well as housework and child care, scrupulously negotiating what one of their Christmas letters described as “a blur of laundry, lunches, cleaning, patient care, newborn resuscitation, and resident teaching.” Their understanding of the Lees, and the Lees’ understanding of them, deepened significantly when they, too, experienced a child’s grave illness. During his last month of third grade, their elder son, Toby, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. When Neil tried to tell Dan Murphy about the diagnosis, he cried so hard he couldn’t talk. After one of Lia’s checkups, Neil wrote me:

Mrs. Lee had heard that our son had leukemia. It was truly amazing how quickly she heard of this. When Peggy saw Lia in our clinic, Mrs. Lee was very concerned about Toby’s health, how he was doing etc. There was very genuine concern expressed by her questions and facial expression. At the end of the visit Mrs. Lee was hugging Peggy and they were both shedding a few tears. Sorrows of motherhood cut through all cultural barriers.

Toby underwent three years of chemotherapy and achieved what seems to be a permanent remission. “Lia’s mother continues to occupy a special place in our thoughts,” wrote Neil in a later letter. “She always asks about Toby. Our contacts with her are very infrequent because her family provides excellent care for Lia, but they are special nonetheless.”

Since Lia’s brain death, whatever scant trust Foua and Nao Kao had once had in American medicine had shrunk almost to zero. (I say “almost” because Foua exempted Neil and Peggy.) When their daughter May broke her arm, and the doctors in the MCMC emergency room told them it needed a cast, Nao Kao marched her straight home, bathed her arm in herbs, and wrapped it in a poultice for a week. May’s arm regained its full strength. When a pot of boiling oil fell from the electric stove onto Foua’s skirt, setting it on fire and burning her right hip and leg, she sacrificed two chickens and a pig. When Foua got pregnant with her sixteenth child, and had an early miscarriage, she did nothing. When she got pregnant with her seventeenth child and had a complicated miscarriage in her fourth month, Nao Kao waited for three days, until she started to hemorrhage and fell unconscious to the living room floor, before he called an ambulance. He consented to her dilation and curettage only after strenuous—in fact, desperate—persuasion by the MCMC resident on obstetric rotation. Nao Kao also sacrificed a pig while Foua was in the hospital and a second pig after she returned home.

Before she was readmitted to Schelby, Lia was routinely vaccinated against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. At about the same time, she started to develop occasional seizurelike twitches. Because they were brief, infrequent, and benign—and also, perhaps, because he had learned from bitter experience—Neil decided not to prescribe anticonvulsants. Foua and Nao Kao were certain that the shots had caused the twitches, and they told Neil that they did not want Lia to be immunized ever again, for anything.

Dan Murphy, who became the director of MCMC’s Family Practice Residency Program, once told me that when you fail one Hmong patient, you fail the whole community. I could see that this was true. Who knew how many Hmong families were giving the hospital a wide berth because they didn’t want their children to end up like the second-youngest Lee daughter? Everyone in Merced’s Lee and Yang clans knew what had happened to Lia (those bad doctors!), just as everyone on the pediatric floor at MCMC knew what had happened to Lia (those bad parents!). Lia’s case had confirmed the Hmong community’s worst prejudices about the medical profession and the medical community’s worst prejudices about the Hmong.

At the family practice clinic, the staff continued to marvel at the quality of care the Lees provided to their clean, sweet-smelling, well-groomed child. But at the hospital next door, where the nurses had had no contact with Lia since 1986, the case metastasized into a mass of complaints that grew angrier with each passing year. Why had the Lees been so ungrateful for their daughter’s free medical care? (Neil—who did not share the nurses’ resentment—once calculated that, over the years, Lia had cost the United States government about $250,000, not counting the salaries of her doctors, nurses, and social workers.) Why had the Lees always insisted on doing everything their way? Why—this was still the worst sin—had the Lees been noncompliant? As Sharon Yates, a nurse’s aide, told me, “If only the parents had given Lia the medicine, she wouldn’t be like this. I bet when she came back from that foster home, they just didn’t give her any medicine.”

But I knew that when she returned from foster care, Foua and Nao Kao had given Lia her medicine—4 ccs of Depakene, three times a day—exactly as prescribed. Hoping to clear up some questions about Lia’s anticonvulsants, I went to Fresno to talk with Terry Hutchison, the pediatric neurologist who had overseen her care at Valley Children’s Hospital. I had noticed that in one of his discharge notes, written nine months before her neurological crisis, he had described Lia as “a very pretty Hmong child” and her parents as “very interested and very good with Lia.” I had never seen phrases like that in her MCMC chart.

Bill Selvidge had told me that Dr. Hutchison was “a known eccentric,” beloved by his residents for his empathy but dreaded for his insistence on doing rounds at 4:00 a.m. He had an exiguous crewcut and on the day I met him was wearing a necktie decorated with a large bright-yellow giraffe. A sign in the hall outside his office, hung at toddler eye level, read:

KIDS ZONE

ENTER WITH CARE AND LOVE

When I asked him about the relationship between Lia’s medications and her final seizure, he said, “Medications probably had nothing to do with it.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Lia’s brain was destroyed by septic shock, which was caused by the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacillus in her blood. I don’t know how Lia got it and I will never know. What I do know is that the septic shock caused the seizures, not the other way around. The fact that she had a preexisting seizure disorder probably made the status epilepticus worse or easier to start or whatever, but the seizures were incidental and not important. If Lia had not had seizures, she would have presented in a coma and shock, and the outcome would probably have been the same, except that her problem might have been more easily recognized. It was too late by the time she got to Valley Children’s. It was probably too late by the time she got to MCMC.”

“Did her parents’ past noncompliance have anything to do with it?”

“Absolutely nothing. The only influence that medications could have had is that the Depakene we prescribed might have compromised her immune system and made her more susceptible to the Pseudomonas.” (Depakene occasionally causes a drop in white blood cells that can hamper the body’s ability to fight infection.) “I still believe Depakene was the drug of choice, and I would prescribe it again. But, in fact, if the family was giving her the Depakene as instructed, it is conceivable that by following our instructions, they set her up for septic shock.”

“Lia’s parents think that the problem was caused by too much medicine.”

“Well,” said Dr. Hutchison, “that may not be too far from the truth.”

I stared at him.

“Go back to Merced,” he said, “and tell all those people at MCMC that the family didn’t do this to the kid. We did.”

Driving back to Merced, I was in a state of shock myself. I had known about Lia’s sepsis, but I had always assumed that her seizure disorder had been the root of the problem. The Lees were right after all, I thought. Lia’s medicine did make her sick!

That night I told Neil and Peggy what Dr. Hutchison had said. As usual, their desire to ferret out the truth outweighed their desire—if indeed they had one—to defend their reputation for infallibility. They immediately asked for my photocopy of Lia’s medical chart, and they sat together on Bill Selvidge’s sofa, combing Volume 5 for evidence, overlooked during the crisis, that Lia might already have been septic at MCMC. Murmuring to each other in their shared secret language (“calcium 3.2,” “platelets 29,000,” “hemoglobin 8.4”), they might have been—in fact, were—a pair of lovers exchanging a set of emotionally charged intimacies.

“I always thought Lia got septic down at Children’s when they put all those invasive lines in,” said Peggy. “But maybe not. There are some signs here.”

“I did too,” said Neil. “If I’d thought she was septic here at MCMC, I would have done a lumbar puncture. I didn’t start her on antibiotics because every single time Lia had come in before that, she was not septic. Every other time, the problem was her seizure disorder, and this was obviously the worst seizure of her life. I stabilized her, I arranged for her transport, and then I went home before all the lab results were back.” He didn’t sound defensive. He sounded curious.

After Neil and Peggy went home, I asked Bill Selvidge whether he thought Neil had made a mistake in not recognizing and treating Lia’s sepsis, even though Dr. Hutchison believed that her fate was probably sealed before she arrived in the MCMC emergency room—and even though the increasing severity of her epilepsy might eventually have led to serious brain damage if sepsis had never entered the picture.

“Neil leaves no stone unturned,” said Bill. “If Neil made a mistake, it’s because every physician makes mistakes. If it had been a brand-new kid walking off the street, I guarantee you Neil would have done a septic workup and he would have caught it. But this was Lia. No one at MCMC would have noticed anything but her seizures. Lia was her seizures.”

To MCMC’s residents, Lia continued to be her seizures—the memory of those terrifying nights in the emergency room that had taught them how to intubate or start IVs or perform venous cutdowns. They always spoke of Lia in the past tense. In fact, Neil and Peggy themselves frequently referred to “Lia’s demise,” or “what may have killed Lia” or “the reason Lia died.” Dr. Hutchison did the same thing. He had asked me, “Was Lia with the foster parents when she died?” And although I reminded him that Lia was alive, five minutes later he said, “Noncompliance had nothing to do with her death.” It wasn’t just absentmindedness. It was an admission of defeat. Lia was dead to her physicians (in a way, for example, that she was never dead to her social workers) because medicine had once made extravagant claims on her behalf and had had to renounce them.

Once I asked Neil if he wished he had done anything differently. He answered as I expected, focusing not on his relationship with the Lees but on his choice of medication. “I wish we’d used Depakene sooner,” he said. “I wish I’d accepted that it would be easier for the family to comply with one medicine instead of three, even if three seemed medically optimal.”

Then I asked, “Do you wish you had never met Lia?”

“Oh, no, no, no!” His vehemence surprised me. “Once I might have said yes, but not in retrospect. Lia taught me that when there is a very dense cultural barrier, you do the best you can, and if something happens despite that, you have to be satisfied with little successes instead of total successes. You have to give up total control. That is very hard for me, but I do try. I think Lia made me into a less rigid person.”

The next time I saw Foua, I asked her whether she had learned anything from what had happened. “No,” she said. “I haven’t learned. I just feel confused.” She was feeding Lia at the time, making baby noises as she spooned puréed zaub, the spinachlike green she grew in the parking lot, into the slack mouth. “I don’t understand how the doctors can say she is going to be like this for the rest of her life, and yet they can’t fix her. How can they know the future but not know how to change it? I don’t understand that.”

“Well, what do you think Lia’s future will hold?” I asked.

“I don’t know these things,” said Foua. “I am not a doctor. I am not a txiv neeb. But maybe Lia will stay hurt like this, and that makes me cry about what will happen. I gave birth to Lia, so I will always take care of her with all my heart. But when her father and I pass away, who will take care of Lia? Lia’s sisters do love her, but even though they love her, maybe they will not be able to take care of her. Maybe they will need to study too hard and work too hard. I am crying to think that they are just going to give Lia away to the Americans.” Foua wept soundlessly. May Ying embraced her and stroked her hair.

“I know where the Americans put children like Lia,” she continued. “I saw a place like that in Fresno where they took Lia once, a long time ago.” (Foua was recalling a chronic care facility for retarded and disabled children where Lia had been temporarily placed, before her year in foster care, while her medications were monitored and stabilized.) “It was like a house for the dead. The children were so poor and so sad that they just cried. They cried all over. One child had a big head and a really small body. Other children had legs that were all dried up and they just fell on the floor. I have seen this. If the Americans take Lia there she will want to die, but instead she will suffer.”

Foua brushed her tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, in a quick, brusque gesture. Then she wiped Lia’s mouth, far more gently, and slowly started to rock her. “I am very sad,” she said, “and I think a lot that if we were still in Laos and not in the United States, maybe Lia would never be like this. The doctors are very very knowledgeable, your high doctors, your best doctors, but maybe they made a mistake by giving her the wrong medicine and they made her hurt like this. If it was a dab that made Lia sick like this in Laos, we would know how to go to the forest and get herbs to fix her and maybe she could be able to speak. But this happened here in the United States, and Americans have done this to her, and our medicine cannot fix that.”

It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of her infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more.

* * *

Since that night with Foua, I have replayed the story over and over again, wondering if anything could have made it turn out differently. Despite Dr. Hutchison’s revisionist emendation of the final chapter, no one could deny that if the Lees had given Lia her anticonvulsants from the beginning, she might have had—might still be having—something approaching a normal life. What was not clear was who, if anyone, should be held accountable. What if Neil had prescribed Depakene earlier? What if, instead of placing Lia in foster care, he had arranged for a visiting nurse to administer her medications? What if he had sought out Blia Yao Moua or Jonas Vangay or another Hmong leader who straddled both cultures, and had asked him to intervene with the Lees, thus transferring the issue of compliance to a less suspect source? What if MCMC had had better interpreters?

When I presented my “what if” list to Dan Murphy one day in the MCMC cafeteria, he was less interested in the Depakene than in the interpreters. However, he believed that the gulf between the Lees and their doctors was unbridgeable, and that nothing could have been done to change the outcome. “Until I met Lia,” he said, “I thought if you had a problem you could always settle it if you just sat and talked long enough. But we could have talked to the Lees until we were blue in the face—we could have sent the Lees to medical school with the world’s greatest translator—and they would still think their way was right and ours was wrong.” Dan slowly stirred his lukewarm cocoa; he had been on all-night call. “Lia’s case ended my idealistic way of looking at the world.”

Was the gulf unbridgeable? I kept returning, obsessively, to the Lees’ earliest encounters with MCMC during Lia’s infancy, when no interpreters were present and her epilepsy was misdiagnosed as pneumonia. Instead of practicing “veterinary medicine,” what if the residents in the emergency room had managed to elicit the Lees’ trust at the outset—or at least managed not to crush it—by finding out what they believed, feared, and hoped? Jeanine Hilt had asked them for their version of the story, but no doctor ever had. Martin Kilgore had tried, but by then it was years too late.

Of course, the Lees’ perspective might have been as unfathomable to the doctors as the doctors’ perspective was to the Lees. Hmong culture, as Blia Yao Moua observed to me, is not Cartesian. Nothing could be more Cartesian than Western medicine. Trying to understand Lia and her family by reading her medical chart (something I spent hundreds of hours doing) was like deconstructing a love sonnet by reducing it to a series of syllogisms. Yet to the residents and pediatricians who had cared for her since she was three months old, there was no guide to Lia’s world except her chart. As each of them struggled to make sense of a set of problems that were not expressible in the language they knew, the chart simply grew longer and longer, until it contained more than 400,000 words. Every one of those words reflected its author’s intelligence, training, and good intentions, but not a single one dealt with the Lees’ perception of their daughter’s illness.

Almost every discussion of cross-cultural medicine that I had ever read quoted a set of eight questions, designed to elicit a patient’s “explanatory model,” which were developed by Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist who chairs the department of social medicine at Harvard Medical School. The first few times I read these questions they seemed so obvious I hardly noticed them; around the fiftieth time, I began to think that, like many obvious things, they might actually be a work of genius. I recently decided to call Kleinman to tell him how I thought the Lees might have answered his questions after Lia’s earliest seizures, before any medications had been administered, resisted, or blamed, if they had had a good interpreter and had felt sufficiently at ease to tell the truth. To wit:

1. What do you call the problem?

Qaug dab peg. That means the spirit catches you and you fall down.

2. What do you think has caused the problem?

Soul loss.

3. Why do you think it started when it did?

Lia’s sister Yer slammed the door and Lia’s soul was frightened out of her body.

4. What do you think the sickness does? How does it work?

It makes Lia shake and fall down. It works because a spirit called a dab is catching her.

5. How severe is the sickness? Will it have a short or long course?

Why are you asking us those questions? If you are a good doctor, you should know the answers yourself.

6. What kind of treatment do you think the patient should receive? What are the most important results you hope she receives from this treatment?

You should give Lia medicine to take for a week but no longer. After she is well, she should stop taking the medicine. You should not treat her by taking her blood or the fluid from her backbone. Lia should also be treated at home with our Hmong medicines and by sacrificing pigs and chickens. We hope Lia will be healthy, but we are not sure we want her to stop shaking forever because it makes her noble in our culture, and when she grows up she might become a shaman.

7. What are the chief problems the sickness has caused?

It has made us sad to see Lia hurt, and it has made us angry at Yer.

8. What do you fear most about the sickness?

That Lia’s soul will never return.

I thought Kleinman would consider these responses so bizarre that he would be at a loss for words. (When I had presented this same material, more or less, to Neil and Peggy, they had said, “Mr. and Mrs. Lee thought what?”) But after each answer, he said, with great enthusiasm, “Right!” Nothing surprised him; everything delighted him. From his vantage point, a physician could encounter no more captivating a patient than Lia, no finer a set of parents than the Lees.

Then I told him what had happened later—the Lees’ noncompliance with Lia’s anticonvulsant regimen, the foster home, the neurological catastrophe—and asked him if he had any retroactive suggestions for her pediatricians.

“I have three,” he said briskly. “First, get rid of the term ‘compliance.’ It’s a lousy term. It implies moral hegemony. You don’t want a command from a general, you want a colloquy. Second, instead of looking at a model of coercion, look at a model of mediation. Go find a member of the Hmong community, or go find a medical anthropologist, who can help you negotiate. Remember that a stance of mediation, like a divorce proceeding, requires compromise on both sides. Decide what’s critical and be willing to compromise on everything else. Third, you need to understand that as powerful an influence as the culture of the Hmong patient and her family is on this case, the culture of biomedicine is equally powerful. If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?”

12

Flight

“At the age of three and a half, my family including all the other relatives decided it to move to Thailand,” wrote Lia’s sister May in an autobiography she was assigned in her eighth-grade Language Arts class at Merced’s Hoover Junior High School.

On our way to Thailand was something my parent will never forget. It was one of the scariest time of my life, and maybe my parents. We had to walked by feet. Some of family, however, leave their kids behind, kill, or beat them. For example, one of the relative has tried to kill one of his kid, but luckily he didn’t died. And manage to come along with the group. Today, he’s in America carrying a scar on his forehead.

My parents had to carried me and two of my younger sisters, True and Yer. My mom could only carried me, and my dad could only my sister, True with many other things which they have to carry such as, rices (food), clothing, and blankets for overnight. My parents pay one of the relative to carry Yer. One of my sister who died in Thailand was so tire of walking saying that she can’t go on any longer. But she dragged along and made it to Thailand.

There was gun shot going on and soldier were close to every where. If there was a gun shot, we were to look for a place to hide. On our trip to Thailand, there were many gun shots and instead of looking for a place to hide, my parents would dragged our hands or put us on their back and run for their lifes. When it gets too heavy, my parents would tossed some of their stuff away. Some of the things they had throw away are valuable to them, but our lives were more important to them than the stuffs.

“You have had an exciting life!” wrote her teacher at the end of the essay. “Please watch verbs in the past tense.”

The Lees’ “trip to Thailand,” which took place in 1979, was their second attempt to escape from Laos after the war. On their first attempt, in 1976, they and about forty other families from Houaysouy, with whom they were fleeing, were captured by Vietnamese soldiers on the third day of their journey, while they were hiding in an abandoned rice field. They were herded back to their village at gunpoint. “Even when our children had to go to the bathroom in the forest, they still held a gun at them, and the guns were as big as the children,” recalled Nao Kao. Phua, one of the Lee daughters, fell ill and died soon after their return. “At that time a lot of people were decaying and there wasn’t medicine, and so we didn’t have eight children anymore. We had seven.”

The Lees spent three more years in Houaysouy, under intermittent guard. Like most Hmong villages in Sayaboury, Houaysouy had seen no fighting during the war, and none of its men had been recruited by Vang Pao. Sayaboury is the only province in Laos that lies west of the Mekong, and this natural barrier had isolated it from the prolonged warfare that destroyed hundreds of villages on the other side of the river. After the war, however, Houaysouy was tossed into the political melee along with the rest of the country. Because they were Hmong, the village’s residents were regarded as traitors and were systematically abused by the occupying forces from the former North Vietnam.

“If you did anything,” said Nao Kao, “the Vietnamese would kill you. If you stole a knife or food, they would call the citizens to come and watch and they would just shoot you right there. If you harvested three hundred buckets of rice in a year, the Vietnamese would take two hundred. If you had five chickens, they would take away four and leave you one. The Vietnamese would give you only two yards of material”—here Foua interrupted, saying, “and it wasn’t good material!”—“to make clothes for the whole family. I ask you, if it is like this, how do you divide that cloth between ten people?”

In the spring of 1979, the Lees’ infant son, Yee, died of starvation. “My little baby was cold and hungry and I was hungry too,” said Foua. “I didn’t have anything to eat, and the baby just ate my milk, and I didn’t have any more milk. I just held him like this and he died in my arms.”

One month later, the Lees, along with about four hundred other members of the Lee, Yang, Vang, and Xiong clans, decided to try to escape again. This was the journey May described in her essay.

“The saddest thing was that I had a couple of really beautiful horses,” said Nao Kao, “and I had to just take the rope off and let them go in the forest and I never knew whether they were alive or not. Then we just left. We had bought a lot of guns and hidden them, and the young men would walk in the front and the side, and they would hold the guns. The Vietnamese found out that we were running away. They started to burn all around us so we couldn’t walk. The flames were as high as our house here in Merced. Some fires were in the front and some fires were in the back, and the children were really scared. But some people were really brave and they just jumped through the flames and somehow we survived. After we crossed the fire, the Vietnamese thought we were taking the usual route where most Hmong go, and they planted some mines in the ground. But we went a different way, and the Vietnamese walked into their own trap and they got hurt. We carried the babies and when we came to steep mountains we tied ropes to the children and the old people and we pulled them up. It was cold and the children were hungry. I was very scared because we had a lot of children and it would be easy for the soldiers to kill them. Some other people who came from our village just before us, two of their little children started running across a rice field, and the Vietnamese shot them, I don’t know how many times they shot them, but their heads were all squashed.” After twenty-six days on foot, the Lees crossed the border into Thailand, where they spent a year in two refugee camps before being cleared to emigrate to the United States. Their daughter Ge, whom May described in her essay as being “so tire of walking saying that she can’t go on any longer,” died in the first camp.

The Lees never considered staying in Laos. They and the 150,000 other Hmong who fled to Thailand after the war were exercising the immemorial Hmong preference for flight, resistance, or death over persecution and assimilation. The Hmong rapidly learned that because most of them had either supported the United States or attempted to remain neutral, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic viewed them as enemies of the state. (The twenty percent who had supported the communist cause were rewarded with soft treatment and, in some cases, government positions. To teach a lesson on the importance of subordinating ethnicity to party principles, some were selected to execute pro-American Hmong prisoners.) Three weeks after General Vang Pao was airlifted to Thailand, nearly 40,000 Hmong men, women, and children marched toward Vientiane. Some say they hoped to cross the Mekong River and rejoin their leader; others say they planned to ask the Vientiane government for guarantees of security. Outside the town of Hin Heup, Pathet Lao troops opened fire on several hundred of these Hmong while they were crossing a narrow bridge over the Nam Lik River. At least four were killed by gunfire or drowning. Dozens were wounded. When he heard about the Hin Heup Massacre, former Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, a neutralist who was kept on as an “adviser” to the new government, is said to have remarked to a foreign diplomat, “The Meo [Hmong] have served me well. It is unfortunate that the price of peace in Laos is their liquidation.”

One afternoon in Merced, I was invited to tea at the small, spartan apartment of Blia Yao Moua, the Hmong leader who had arranged my first meeting with the Lees. Blia’s father was the chao muong, or administrative leader, of the city of Xieng Khouang. He was assassinated, presumably by the Pathet Lao, when Blia was nine. Two of Blia’s brothers died during the war. I asked Blia what had happened to the Hmong after the war was lost. In polished but idiosyncratic English—like Jonas Vangay, he had learned it after he was fluent in Hmong, Lao, Thai, and French—he replied, “People from the Western sphere cannot understand what it was like. In the new vision of the country of Laos, there is no reason to let the Hmong live. If you don’t agree with the Pathet Lao, they can kill you just like a pig or a chicken. They try to force you down to the lowlands. If you don’t go, they would kill the animals and burn everything in your village: your house, your rice, your cornstalk. They separate Hmong families and send the kids far away from the parents. They make you change your name so there would be no more clan names. They tell you to stop speaking Hmong. You are not supposed to practice Hmong rituals. When I was a boy, my mother would call in the txiv neeb whenever we were sick, even if it was just a headache, but after the war, anybody that would do that, security would hear about it, and a few days later they would come to take you to a kind of meeting, and ask you the reason, and if your explanations are too rightist, they would take you away. They wanted Hmong culture to disappear. But the Hmong cannot be assimilated. The Chinese cannot assimilate the Hmong. The Pathet Lao cannot assimilate the Hmong. After two thousand years we can still say we are Hmong.”

The Lees consider themselves fortunate to have been permitted to return to their village after their capture in 1976, even if living conditions were miserable. Many highland Hmong were forcibly relocated to lowland or plateau areas, where they were assigned to state-owned collective farms. The traditional Hmong fear of the lowlands proved justified. Resettled families frequently contracted tropical diseases to which they had not previously been exposed—particularly malaria, which is borne by mosquitoes that cannot survive at high elevations. In highland villages that were left intact, any Hmong who was found practicing slash-and-burn agriculture was arrested. Most villages were infiltrated by Pathet Lao soldiers. “Very politely, one who seemed to be the leader would ask each Hmong family to shelter, by turns, two of their comrades who ‘only want to serve you,’” wrote the Hmong scholar Yang Dao.

But the Hmong soon realized that the two Pathet Lao placed in their family had as their sole mission to watch them day and night.… Soon the husband did not dare talk to his wife, nor the parents to their children. The two Pathet Lao were listening to every word and spying on every move. Nobody could trust anybody. From time to time, the people would be awakened in the middle of the night and the houses searched under the pretense that a “reactionary” was hiding there. Then the husband or the son was led away, a gun against his back, to an unknown destination.

The unknown destination was often a “seminar camp” near the Lao-Vietnamese border. Seminar camps, which combined forced labor and political indoctrination, were not reserved for the Hmong, although many Hmong who had held government positions or worked for American agencies were sent there, some for years. More than 10,000 Lao intellectuals, civil servants, teachers, businessmen, military and police officers, and other suspected royalist sympathizers were also interned in camps, as well as the king, the queen, and the crown prince, all three of whom died there. The prisoners cleared land, tilled fields, felled trees, built roads, and were hitched like animals to plows. Some of them were also forced, at gunpoint, to search for and remove unexploded cluster-bombs.

“I know two people who were sent to seminar camps,” Blia Yao Moua told me. “One of them my wife and I asked him to lunch here in Merced. He don’t want to eat. It is very strange because he was hungry for many years. One day when he’s working in the camp he sees a lizard. He picks it up very fast because if a guard sees you do that he would hit you to death. He puts it in his pocket and when no one is watching he gets it out and eats it immediately. He’s very happy. That lizard is fresh meat! He told me that story. That man, every day he had to sign a confession accepting you are wrong by collaborating with the Americans. Every day his confession became better. After two years, three years, five years, that speech became part of himself. Before he was in the camp he had a very strong personality. After ten years it changed him. The camp has completely broken his personality.”

While two or three thousand Hmong were being “reeducated” in Pathet Lao camps—an exercise in coerced submission that violated the core of the Hmong temper—tens of thousands were able to respond to the new regime in more characteristic Hmong fashion, through armed rebellion. After Vang Pao’s departure, former members of the Armée Clandestine organized a resistance movement based in the Phou Bia massif, the highest mountain range in Laos, south of the Plain of Jars. In late 1975, after Pathet Lao forces attacked a group of Hmong, mostly women and children, who were working in a Phou Bia field, Hmong rebels began a campaign of furious retaliation. Using weapons they had concealed in caves, they shot Pathet Lao soldiers, dynamited bridges, blocked roads, blew up food convoys, and—just as Hmong warriors in 1772 had rolled boulders on the heads of the Chinese army in eastern Kweichow—pushed rocks off cliffs while enemy troops were walking below. Although nearly 50,000 Hmong died, Phou Bia did not fall until 1978. Afterwards, Hmong guerrillas continued to live in the jungles along both sides of the Lao-Thai border, crossing back and forth between the two countries, launching irregular raids on the Lao People’s Army. Most of the rebels belonged to a messianic group called Chao Fa (Lords of the Sky), led by Pa Kao Her, a former Vang Pao lieutenant who had broken ranks; some belonged to Neo Horn (the United Laotian National Liberation Front), a group founded in the United States and headed by Vang Pao.* Sporadic resistance by both groups—each of which has dwindled from thousands of guerrillas to three or four hundred—continues to this day, more than two decades after the war’s official conclusion.

The most widespread Hmong response to the terrors of postwar Laos, however, was migration: the same problem-solving strategy that had moved them around China for more than three millennia and then, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had brought them to Laos. Most feared retribution, though some were motivated more immediately by famine, the consequence both of nationwide resource scarcity and of the increasing Hmong dependence, toward the end of the war, on American rice drops, handouts in resettlement sites, and soldiers’ wages. For nearly 10,000 Hmong, there were no crops to harvest. (Some of the Hmong who left because they were starving were later stigmatized as undeserving “economic migrants” rather than legitimate political refugees.) In June of 1975, the Vientiane Domestic Service, the capital’s official radio station, broadcast the government’s interpretation of the mass Hmong decampment: “With the collusion of the Thai reactionary clique, the U.S. imperialists have now forced the Meo tribesmen to flee from Laos into Thailand. The aim of such an evacuation is not based on the so-called humanitarian basis, but is to exploit their labor at cheap prices and to foster them as their henchmen so that they can be sent back to Laos to sabotage peace in this country in the future.”

Every Hmong refugee has an exodus story. In the hierarchy of good fortune, my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, and her family, along with the families of other military officers airlifted from Long Tieng, ranked at the top. All they had to do was leave behind every relative who did not belong to their immediate family as well as virtually everything they owned, and, overnight, trade the high status they had enjoyed in Laos for a communal dormitory in a Thai refugee camp, where one bed was provided for their family of eight, and they stood in long lines for every meal, holding bowls for their rations of rice. “You were so lucky!” I heard Nao Kao tell May Ying one night, when they were comparing their postwar experiences. A notch further down—an option for only a few privileged families—was escaping from Vientiane or another urban area by “taxi,” which meant forking over one’s life savings to a Lao driver who, along with his passengers, might or might not be arrested before reaching the Thai border.

Most Hmong walked. Some traveled in small extended-family bands, others in convoys of up to 8,000 people. I never heard of a Hmong who fled alone. In the first months after the fall of Long Tieng, when Pathet Lao efforts to block the Hmong hegira were still disorganized, it was sometimes possible to drive one’s livestock along major trails. “Those people could just kill their animals along the way, so they didn’t starve,” Nao Kao told me. “They took it really easy.” Later groups followed tiger and elephant trails, or steered clear of established routes altogether, walking the ridgelines whenever they could in order to avoid mines and detection. Most families, like the Lees, took about a month to reach Thailand, though some lived in the forests for two years or more, moving constantly to evade capture, sleeping under bamboo leaves, subsisting on game (though that soon became scarce), fruit, roots, bamboo shoots, the pith of trees, and insects. Desperate to fill their stomachs, some people chopped up their sweat-soaked clothes, mixed them with water and salt, and ate them. They lit fires only at night, so the smoke would not be visible. Sometimes they used fox fire—luminescent rotting wood—to light their way in the dark.

Many people carried children on their backs. The babies presented a potentially fatal problem: they made noise. Silence was so essential that one Hmong woman, now living in Wisconsin, recalled that her son, who was a month old when the family left their home village, didn’t know a single word when they arrived in Thailand two years later, because no one had talked during that entire period except in occasional whispers. Nearly every Hmong family I met in Merced had a story to tell about a baby—a relative’s child, a neighbor’s child, a member of the group they escaped with—who had been drugged with opium. “When the babies would cry,” a young mother named Yia Thao Xiong told me, “we would mix the opium in water in a cup and give it to them so they would be quiet and the soldiers would not hear, because if they heard the babies, they would kill all of us. Usually the baby just went to sleep. But if you give too much by mistake, the baby dies. That happened many many times.” When I heard these stories, I recalled something I had once read about an Israeli child, hiding from Palestinian terrorists, who, when she began to cry, was accidentally smothered to death by her mother. That death, in 1979, was said to have driven the entire Israeli nation into mourning. The horror of the opium overdoses was not only that such things happened to the Hmong, but that they happened so frequently that, far from driving a nation into mourning, they never made headlines, never caught the world’s ear, never reached beyond a community of families that numbly accepted them as a fact of life.

Sometimes worse things happened. When I asked Nao Kao about the boy with the scar on his forehead whom May Lee had mentioned in her eighth-grade essay, he said, “You had to be very quiet. The father of that little baby tried to kill him so he wouldn’t cry and everyone would get killed. He had a slash on his head. Somebody saved him and now he is living in Merced.”

Able-bodied adults usually took turns carrying the elderly, the sick, and the wounded until they were no longer able to do so. At that point, by a process of agonizing triage, the burdensome relatives were left by the side of the trail, usually with a little food and a little opium. People who died en route were left to rot. It was too dangerous to take time to bury them. To understand what these choices were like, it is important to remember that the Hmong revere their elders, and also that the soul of anyone who is not accorded the proper funerary rites—being washed, dressed in special clothes, honored with animal sacrifices, verbally guided back to the place where one’s placenta is buried, lamented with death drum and qeej, and laid to rest in a hand-hewn coffin on the shoulder of a sloping mountain—is doomed to an eternity of restless wandering. Jonas Vangay said, “Not to bury the dead is terrible. Not to carry your relatives is terrible. It is the worst thing in the world to have the responsibility to choose between you and them.”

On their way to Thailand, Hmong families walked through abandoned villages and untended fields. They passed piles of jewelry, silver bars, and embroidered garments—Foua discarded her entire dowry of paj ntaub—which previous refugees had jettisoned. They also passed many decomposing corpses. Dang Moua, a Merced businessman whose family lived during their three-week journey on birds he shot with a homemade crossbow and poison-tipped bamboo arrows, saw dozens of ragged orphaned children in the forest, eating leaves and dirt. He gave them food but walked on past. His wife found a baby, less than a year old, trying to nurse from the breast of its dead mother. They walked past it, too.

Because Houaysouy was west of the Mekong River, the Lees were able to cross the Thai border on foot. Farther south, the Mekong, which is up to a mile wide, forms the Lao-Thai boundary for more than five hundred miles. Most Hmong refugees had to cross it. “The Mekong River is ten times bigger than the Merced River,” said Jonas Vangay. “So how do you cross? Most Hmong people do not swim. If you have money maybe you can pay Lao for a boat. You can hold a tree branch. Bamboo floats better than wood, so you can lash it together, but later on all the bamboo is gone because people have already cut it down, and you have to carry it all the way down from the mountains. Crossing this river, everyone here in the United States continue to dream of that nightmare.”

Some people attempted to float across the Mekong with bamboo stalks placed under their armpits, on banana-wood rafts, or in inner tubes purchased from Lao traders. The inner tubes were hard to find and very expensive, because the Pathet Lao border patrol killed people who sold them. Many babies and small children who had survived the journey this far drowned while crossing the river strapped to their parents’ backs. Their bodies were left in the Mekong. “A few [Hmong refugees] manage to bring empty plastic gallon containers, still others inflate ordinary grocery plastic bags,” wrote Dominica Garcia, a doctor working in a Thai refugee camp, in a 1978 letter to the director of the International Rescue Committee. “It is not unusual to find these survivors clinging to their makeshift ‘life-savers’ even long after they have been in the detention centers. They carry them up to the hospital wards where they finally get proper treatment.”

One resident of Merced was sixteen years old when he and his extended family reached the Mekong. They were able to obtain a boat large enough to hold half their party. He and another adult crossed the river first, bringing all the children. The other man paddled the boat back to the Lao side and picked up the rest of the adults. On the return trip, when the boat was halfway across the river, the border patrol sank the boat and fired on the passengers. From the Thai shore, the teenager and the children watched their parents, uncles, and aunts all die from bullets and drowning.

Dang Moua’s cousin Moua Kee once unsuccessfully tried to procure federal disability benefits for a mentally disturbed Hmong woman in Merced who, a decade earlier, had attempted to cross the Mekong with a party of 170 people. “They wait for the sun to go down and do a night crossing,” he explained, “and then, one group of Pathet Lao open three machine gun. This lady, she saw more than twenty people fall down and die in one place, and one of them was her husband. I think she is sick now because maybe she saw too many trouble.”

One afternoon, when Blia Yao Moua and I were chatting, as we had on many previous occasions, I happened to make a casual remark about the cohesiveness of Hmong society. He said, “Yes, if a person outside the community see a Hmong person, they look that way. But inside they have guilt. Many feelings of guilt. You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before you get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together it is like putting glue on a broken glass.”

An unknowable fraction of the Hmong who attempted to flee Laos—some survivors estimate it was half, some much less—died en route, from Pathet Lao and Vietnamese bullets and mines, as well as from disease, starvation, exposure, snakebite, tiger maulings, poisoning by toxic plants, and drowning. Most of those who reached Thailand ended up, often after being robbed and occasionally after being raped by Thai bandits, in district police stations. From there, they were sent to refugee camps. When they arrived, eighty percent were found to be suffering from malnutrition, malaria, anemia, and infections, especially of the feet.

At first, the Hmong were placed in a string of makeshift camps near the Lao border. Officially speaking, because Thailand had not signed the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, they were illegal immigrants, but the Thai government was willing to grant them temporary residency as long as other nations paid the bills and promised them permanent asylum. Eventually most of the Hmong—who kept streaming across the Lao border until the early 1990s—were consolidated into one large camp in northeast Thailand, fifteen miles south of the Mekong River. At its peak, in 1986, the Ban Vinai camp had 42,858 inhabitants, of which about ninety percent were Hmong. It was the largest Hmong settlement in history, larger even than Long Tieng, General Vang Pao’s former military base. Ban Vinai was, in effect, a large-scale charitable institution that continued the job, effectively begun by wartime rice drops, of eroding Hmong self-sufficiency. Depending on how you looked at it, life there was either a catastrophic deracination or a useful dress rehearsal for life in the American inner cities to which many of its inhabitants would ultimately relocate. Though it lacked electricity, running water, and sewage disposal, the camp was so densely populated that it was, in effect, urban. A 1986 survey by a Catholic relief agency concluded, “Like other poor urban communities, Ban Vinai has problems of inadequate health, overcrowding, welfare dependency, unemployment, substance abuse, prostitution, and anomie (suicide, abandonment, loneliness).” Jonas Vangay told me, “In Ban Vinai, you don’t have the right to do anything except get a ration of rice and beans, and go to your tent, and you do that for five or ten years. People were born and grew up there. The young ones play soccer and volleyball. The elderly person just sleep day and night, they just wait and see and wait and eat and wait and die and wait and die.”

According to Dwight Conquergood, the enthusiastic ethnographer from the International Rescue Committee who organized the Ban Vinai Rabies Parade, the camp officials tended to hold the Hmong responsible for their own dependence, poor health, and lack of cleanliness. “Instead of seeing the Hmong as struggling within a constraining context of historical, political, and economic forces that have reduced them from proud, independent, mountain people to landless refugees, the Hmong are blamed for their miserable condition,” he observed. Conquergood was astonished at how violently most of the other Westerners at the camp disliked the Hmong, whom he liked very much. He wrote:

I began to collect the phrases used regularly to describe the Hmong by agency officials who worked in Ban Vinai. The word I heard most often was “filthy,” followed closely by “dirty,” and often part of a cluster of terms that included “scabies,” “abscesses,” “feces,” and “piles of garbage.” A phrase regularly employed to cover a multitude of perceived sanitation sins was the following, “They’re one step out of the Stone Age, you know.” A meaning-packed word heard about the Hmong almost every day was “difficult,” and its ramified derivatives: “difficult to work with,” “the most difficult group,” “set in their ways,” “rigid,” “stubborn,” “you cannot get through to them,” “backward.” One dedicated humanitarian agency employee who had worked with the Hmong for several years told me that “the hand of God is on this place,” but as for the Hmong living here, “they’re a fearful lot … you cannot work with them.”

Conquergood believed that this focus on “dirtiness” and “difficulty” was actually “an expression of Western expatriates’ uneasiness when confronted with Difference, the Other. A Western aid official’s encounter with the Hmong is a confrontation with radical difference—in cosmology, worldview, ethos, texture of life.… Unfortunately, as [the French critic] Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, ‘The first, spontaneous reaction with regard to the stranger is to imagine him as inferior, since he is different from us.’”

Most of the people who made those disparaging comments about the Hmong came from the United States, to which the majority of the inhabitants of Ban Vinai eventually emigrated. About 10,000 Hmong resettled in France, Canada, Australia, Argentina, French Guiana, and elsewhere; but because of their American military ties and because Vang Pao had already established residence in Montana, they preferred the United States by a huge margin. In 1975, the U.S. was willing to admit fewer than 300 Hmong—mostly army officers and their families—but both the quotas and the eligibility requirements were liberalized over the years, with about 25,000 Hmong admitted in 1980 alone. As with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, the best-educated Hmong and Lao came to America in the first wave of immigration and the least-educated in later waves. Because for several years the U.S. refused to accept extended family groups of more than eight people, but did not limit the size of nuclear families, the Hmong, none of whom had birth certificates, grew accustomed to lying when they were interviewed by immigration officials. Second wives became daughters or sisters; nieces and nephews became daughters and sons.

According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which supervised Ban Vinai, every refugee problem has three possible “durable solutions”: local integration, voluntary repatriation, and resettlement in another country. Thailand, which was buffeted simultaneously by refugees from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, emphatically rejected the first solution. The Hmong emphatically rejected the second solution. In 1981, they also began to reject the third solution, leading Ban Vinai to become a kind of never-ending camp, or, as one U.S. refugee official termed it, “a non-durable non-solution.” In 1984, Eric E. Morris, the U.N. deputy refugee representative in Thailand, said in bewilderment, “This is a unique situation historically. The Hmong are the first refugees we know who were offered resettlement and in large numbers simply turned it down.” Some of them worried that the Hmong resistance movement in Laos, which was fueled by manpower and leadership in Ban Vinai, as well as by money funneled through the camp from refugees in the United States, would collapse if they left Asia. Most of them, however, had heard rumors about life in America from earlier immigrants, and were just plain scared: of tenements, of urban violence, of welfare dependence, of never being able to farm again, of being forbidden to sacrifice animals, of being thrown in jail if their grandfathers smoked opium, of ogres, of dinosaurs, and—as they made clear during the notorious 1982 meeting on the Ban Vinai soccer field—of doctors who ate the livers, kidneys, and brains of Hmong patients.

Ban Vinai started to look pretty good. It may have been dirty, crowded, and disease-ridden, but culturally it was still powerfully Hmong. Women sewed paj ntaub (though some of them forsook the old motifs of elephant’s feet and ram’s horns for embroidered soldiers with bayonets); men made jewelry (though when silver was unavailable some of them melted down discarded aluminum cans); many families raised chickens or tended small vegetable plots. Most compellingly, according to Dwight Conquergood,

no matter where you go in the camp, at almost any hour of the day or night, you can simultaneously hear two or three performances, from simple storytelling and folksinging to elaborate collective ritual performances for the dead … including drumming, stylized lamentation, ritual chanting, manipulation of funerary artifacts, incense, fire, dancing, and animal sacrifice. Nearly every morning I was awakened before dawn by the drumming and ecstatic chanting of performing shamans.

The older a Hmong was, the less willing he or she was to leave. “At the camp, the cultural tradition was still there,” Blia Yao Moua told me. “There was patrilineage. Children still listened to Grandpa. What is the good to go over there to America if all that change? And a lot of elderly people, though they never, never say it openly to strangers, what really haunt them is they are afraid in America they will not have a good funeral ceremony and a good grave, and that is more important than any other thing in the world.”

Thailand closed Ban Vinai in 1992. Its 11,500 inhabitants were told they absolutely, positively had only two choices: to apply for resettlement in another country, or to return to Laos. As an interim measure, the resettlers were to move to one camp, and the repatriators to another. Panic ensued. Hmong who for more than a decade had resisted coming to the United States now decided it was the safer of two abhorrent options—and then were rejected. With the support of the United States, where anti-immigrant sentiment was gathering steam, the Thai government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees instituted a new and more stringent set of eligibility requirements under which nearly 2,000 Hmong applicants were denied refugee status. Since 1991, about 7,000 Hmong have uneasily returned to Laos, persuaded that repressive conditions there have slackened: no more forced collectivization, no more seminar camps. Although those who repatriate in groups are assigned to lowland sites, may not return to their home villages, and may not practice slash-and-burn agriculture, at least their families (or so they have been assured) will no longer be in danger. There have been reports, however—all of them denied by the Laotian, Thai, and U.S. governments and by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—that some Hmong have been forced by Thai authorities to return to Laos against their will, and, once there, have been persecuted or killed.*

More than 10,000 Hmong, most of them inhabitants of Ban Vinai, simply said no to both choices and fled—whether temporarily or permanently, no one knows—to the sanctified grounds of Wat Tham Krabok, a Buddhist monastery north of Bangkok. Surrounded by coercive pressures on all sides, they managed to find a way out, as they had done so many times before during their intransigent history, by moving in a direction none of their keepers could have predicted.

Thai authorities were reportedly astonished that 10,000 Hmong had managed to slip through their fingers. They should have known better. For as long as there have been Hmong, there have been ways to get out of tight spots. In the greatest of all Hmong folktales, Shee Yee, a healer and magician who was the forerunner of today’s txiv neebs, was once ambushed by nine evil dab brothers who ate human flesh and drank their blood. In the version collected by Charles Johnson, the brothers lay in wait for Shee Yee at a mountain crossroads where nine paths led to every corner of the earth, and where the rocks looked like tigers and dragons. When the brothers transformed themselves into water buffalos, so did Shee Yee. When they tossed him on their horns, he changed back into a man, and he chopped them into small pieces with his magical saber. When the pieces joined together and came back to life, he turned into a cloud and mounted high in the sky. When the brothers became a strong wind, Shee Yee became a drop of water. When one of the brothers became a leaf that would catch the drop of water, he became a deer, and he ran into the forest. The brothers became wolves, and they chased Shee Yee until the sun was low in the western sky, hanging at the edge of the earth. Eight of the brothers were too tired to go on, but the oldest one kept running. When Shee Yee saw an abandoned rat’s burrow, he changed himself into a rat. The oldest brother turned into a cat, and waited at the edge of the burrow. Shee Yee changed into a caterpillar with stinging fuzz, and the cat spat him back into the hole. As he waited in the hole, Shee Yee got angrier and angrier. When the cat fell asleep, Shee Yee turned himself into a very tiny red ant. Quickly and fiercely, he bit the cat on the testicle. Then he went home to his wife.

1

Birth

If Lia Lee had been born in the highlands of northwest Laos, where her parents and twelve of her brothers and sisters were born, her mother would have squatted on the floor of the house that her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with water to keep the dust down and swept it every morning and evening with a broom she had made of grass and bark. She used a bamboo dustpan, which she had also made herself, to collect the feces of the children who were too young to defecate outside, and emptied its contents in the forest. Even if Foua had been a less fastidious housekeeper, her newborn babies wouldn’t have gotten dirty, since she never let them actually touch the floor. She remains proud to this day that she delivered each of them into her own hands, reaching between her legs to ease out the head and then letting the rest of the body slip out onto her bent forearms. No birth attendant was present, though if her throat became dry during labor, her husband, Nao Kao, was permitted to bring her a cup of hot water, as long as he averted his eyes from her body. Because Foua believed that moaning or screaming would thwart the birth, she labored in silence, with the exception of an occasional prayer to her ancestors. She was so quiet that although most of her babies were born at night, her older children slept undisturbed on a communal bamboo pallet a few feet away, and woke only when they heard the cry of their new brother or sister. After each birth, Nao Kao cut the umbilical cord with heated scissors and tied it with string. Then Foua washed the baby with water she had carried from the stream, usually in the early phases of labor, in a wooden and bamboo pack-barrel strapped to her back.

Foua conceived, carried, and bore all her children with ease, but had there been any problems, she would have had recourse to a variety of remedies that were commonly used by the Hmong, the hilltribe to which her family belonged. If a Hmong couple failed to produce children, they could call in a txiv neeb, a shaman who was believed to have the ability to enter a trance, summon a posse of helpful familiars, ride a winged horse over the twelve mountains between the earth and the sky, cross an ocean inhabited by dragons, and (starting with bribes of food and money and, if necessary, working up to a necromantic sword) negotiate for his patients’ health with the spirits who lived in the realm of the unseen. A txiv neeb might be able to cure infertility by asking the couple to sacrifice a dog, a cat, a chicken, or a sheep. After the animal’s throat was cut, the txiv neeb would string a rope bridge from the doorpost to the marriage bed, over which the soul of the couple’s future baby, which had been detained by a malevolent spirit called a dab, could now freely travel to earth. One could also take certain precautions to avoid becoming infertile in the first place. For example, no Hmong woman of childbearing age would ever think of setting foot inside a cave, because a particularly unpleasant kind of dab sometimes lived there who liked to eat flesh and drink blood and could make his victim sterile by having sexual intercourse with her.

Once a Hmong woman became pregnant, she could ensure the health of her child by paying close attention to her food cravings. If she craved ginger and failed to eat it, her child would be born with an extra finger or toe. If she craved chicken flesh and did not eat it, her child would have a blemish near its ear. If she craved eggs and did not eat them, her child would have a lumpy head. When a Hmong woman felt the first pangs of labor, she would hurry home from the rice or opium fields, where she had continued to work throughout her pregnancy. It was important to reach her own house, or at least the house of one of her husband’s cousins, because if she gave birth anywhere else a dab might injure her. A long or arduous labor could be eased by drinking the water in which a key had been boiled, in order to unlock the birth canal; by having her family array bowls of sacred water around the room and chant prayers over them; or, if the difficulty stemmed from having treated an elder member of the family with insufficient respect, by washing the offended relative’s fingertips and apologizing like crazy until the relative finally said, “I forgive you.”

Soon after the birth, while the mother and baby were still lying together next to the fire pit, the father dug a hole at least two feet deep in the dirt floor and buried the placenta. If it was a girl, her placenta was buried under her parents’ bed; if it was a boy, his placenta was buried in a place of greater honor, near the base of the house’s central wooden pillar, in which a male spirit, a domestic guardian who held up the roof of the house and watched over its residents, made his home. The placenta was always buried with the smooth side, the side that had faced the fetus inside the womb, turned upward, since if it was upside down, the baby might vomit after nursing. If the baby’s face erupted in spots, that meant the placenta was being attacked by ants underground, and boiling water was poured into the burial hole as an insecticide. In the Hmong language, the word for placenta means “jacket.” It is considered one’s first and finest garment. When a Hmong dies, his or her soul must travel back from place to place, retracing the path of its life geography, until it reaches the burial place of its placental jacket, and puts it on. Only after the soul is properly dressed in the clothing in which it was born can it continue its dangerous journey, past murderous dabs and giant poisonous caterpillars, around man-eating rocks and impassable oceans, to the place beyond the sky where it is reunited with its ancestors and from which it will someday be sent to be reborn as the soul of a new baby. If the soul cannot find its jacket, it is condemned to an eternity of wandering, naked and alone.

Because the Lees are among the 150,000 Hmong who have fled Laos since their country fell to communist forces in 1975, they do not know if their house is still standing, or if the five male and seven female placentas that Nao Kao buried under the dirt floor are still there. They believe that half of the placentas have already been put to their final use, since four of their sons and two of their daughters died of various causes before the Lees came to the United States. The Lees believe that someday the souls of most of the rest of their family will have a long way to travel, since they will have to retrace their steps from Merced, California, where the family has spent fifteen of its seventeen years in this country; to Portland, Oregon, where they lived before Merced; to Honolulu, Hawaii, where their airplane from Thailand first landed; to two Thai refugee camps; and finally back to their home village in Laos.

The Lees’ thirteenth child, Mai, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. Her placenta was buried under their hut. Their fourteenth child, Lia, was born in the Merced Community Medical Center, a modern public hospital that serves an agricultural county in California’s Central Valley, where many Hmong refugees have resettled. Lia’s placenta was incinerated. Some Hmong women have asked the doctors at MCMC, as the hospital is commonly called, if they could take their babies’ placentas home. Several of the doctors have acquiesced, packing the placentas in plastic bags or take-out containers from the hospital cafeteria; most have refused, in some cases because they have assumed that the women planned to eat the placentas, and have found that idea disgusting, and in some cases because they have feared the possible spread of hepatitis B, which is carried by at least fifteen percent of the Hmong refugees in the United States. Foua never thought to ask, since she speaks no English, and when she delivered Lia, no one present spoke Hmong. In any case, the Lees’ apartment had a wooden floor covered with wall-to-wall carpeting, so burying the placenta would have been a difficult proposition.