Displacements and Hmong Transnational Politics, 1975-2010
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Dreaming of Home, Dreaming of Land: Displacements and Hmong Transnational Politics, 1975-2010 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Her Vang IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Erika Lee, Advisor July 2010 © Her Vang 2010 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In 1933, the Lakota author Luther Standing Bear suggested that written history was second best to oral tradition because “a people enrich their minds who keep their history on the leaves of memory.”1 For much of their history, the Hmong also stored their past not in books but on “the leaves of their memory,” and they passed down their history orally from one generation to the next. Parents in Euro-America read to their children to put them to sleep, but Hmong children traditionally fell asleep listening to their parents tell Hmong folklores and their own family history. Storytelling and history- telling were important parts of traditional Hmong culture and livelihood. A Hmong child who learned the most Hmong folklores and knew the most about the family’s history often grew up to become the leader of the family and the clan. Today, the keeper of the family’s past is still the leader of the family and the clan. A Hmong leader knows all the secrets of his family and clan, and he is responsible for resolving all disputes involving his family and clan. Despite this significance, history, I admit, has not always been my chosen field of academic inquiry. First, I previously had no strong motivation to do written history because written history, for the Hmong, was secondary to their oral tradition. In fact, most Hmong today still record their history not in books and on paper but in audiocassettes, videos and DVDs. Most Hmong also get their Hmong history lessons not from books but from Hmong-made documentary videos and radio programs throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and California. Only a smaller percent of the Hmong populations, namely college-educated Hmong students and professionals, ever pick up and read a book on Hmong history. Secondly, I initially did not pursue history because the history—indeed, the only history—that I had after coming to America in 1988 was United States history, and it was taught largely as a celebratory history of American progress that excluded the experiences of women, people of color, and the working class. It was about peoples and experiences foreign to my world and me; therefore, I felt it was not for me. Most of all, I felt that it was irrelevant and unnecessary 1 Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933), 27, quoted in Peter Nakobov, Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ix. i for me to delve deep into the American experience because the United States was only a temporary refuge for me and my family and not a permanent home. We did not feel welcomed and accepted in America, and we thought of going back to our homeland in Laos when it was safe and possible to do so. Nevertheless, my desire to understand global conflicts and peacemaking soon led me back to U.S. history. Before coming to the University of Minnesota, I spent two years studying the religious expression of peace and justice at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado and a year studying international conflicts, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame. While I was in the International Peace Studies program at the University of Notre Dame, I realized that I needed a good understanding of U.S. and world history to better understand the different and often complex conflicts that engulfed societies throughout the world. In the end, I came to the University of Minnesota to deepen my understanding of U.S. and world history and prepare myself for work in conflict transformation and peacebuilding in the United States and overseas. After I arrived in Minnesota in the fall of 2003, I met a Hmong person in the community who had been actively promoting what he called “Hmong nationalism.” When he told me about the ongoing fighting between the Hmong and government forces in the Lao jungle and what he and other Hmong people had done to change the political climate back in Laos, I was naturally drawn to the issue. I knew then that this was something I wanted to explore and understand more. I wanted to understand what the conflict was about, and I wanted to understand why so many Hmong people in the United States continued to engage in the conflict in Laos. I also wanted to know why so many of them, especially the elder and middle generations, still wanted to go home even after several decades of life in America and what they had done to end the conflict at home and to try to go home. In a real sense, the dissertation was the product of my own desire to understand the root of that conflict in Laos and begin a discussion about ways to end the fighting and bring peace to the people in that country. It was a work inspired by my study of Black history/theology, Native American history/theology, Asian American history, and third-world liberation theologies, including Minjung theology out of Korea and homeland theology of Taiwan. It was also a work grounded in my study of Mahatma ii Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and their principles of nonviolence at the Iliff School of Theology and in my training on human rights, conflict transformation and peacebuilding at Notre Dame. As I explored the history of the conflict in Laos, I realized that my inevitable attraction to this history and this conflict was also shaped by my own life history. More specifically, I realized that this history was also my history. Our personal biography, C. Wright Mills pointed out, is inseparable from the public history, or the history of the community or society in which we live.2 Like many of the Hmong involved in transnational politics who I chronicled in this dissertation, I was born in the immediate aftermath of the Secret War in Laos or in the immediate year following the Communist takeover of Laos. I spent the first four years of my life in the jungle of Laos living as “Chao Fa.” Here I use the term “Chao Fa” in the broad sense of the word, which refers to all the people living in the Lao jungle after the Communists came to power in 1975. I then spent the next eight years of my life in two refugee camps in Thailand before coming to the United States. In hindsight, we could have come to the United States before 1988. However, like thousand of Hmong men in Ban Vinai refugee camp, my father adamantly refused to accept resettlement in a faraway land. He held firmly to the thought that life in Thailand was temporary and the hope that our safe return to the homeland was imminent. He agreed to resettle in the United States only after all our relatives had left the camp. In December 1987, we moved to Phanat Nikhom processing center near Bangkok, where we underwent physical exams to ensure that we were healthy and “clean” (that is, drug and disease free) before we could come to the United States. After nine months in Phanat Nikhom, we finally resettled in Marysville, California in September 1988. In Thailand, I experienced what it was like to live as aliens in a foreign land and to be deprived of freedom. In both Ban Vinai and Phanat Nikhom, we were restricted to a limited geographical space. People caught outside the imaginary border in Ban Vinai and the barbwire in Phanat Nikhom were beaten, jailed, and forced to pay a fine. I had personally seen Thai security officers club Hmong men caught playing cards for leisure in Ban Vinai while I was on my way to a movie theatre in Center 3 one afternoon. As 2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). iii children, we used to frighten each other when playing cards to kill time with “Thaib tuaj lawm!” (The Thais are coming!). I heard that Thai officers gang-raped a mute woman in Center 1 while she was collecting firewood outside the border. Thai officers arrested and jailed my brother, Xe Vang, and his friend for coming home from their girlfriends’ houses after curfew. I witnessed Thai officers whip a neighbor, Kaoyia Xiong, in Phanat Nikhom for buying candies outside the barb-wired fence for his little girl. I saw the pain of this man on his face and the agony of his daughter in her eyes. I understood what it was like to be a stateless people. In the United States, in spite of the seemingly endless educational and economic opportunities in this country, life for my parent, many parents, elders and people in the community, including myself, had not been easy. As a teen growing up in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I saw how my parent and many parents and elders in the community struggled with life in the United States and how many of them dreamed of the day when they could return to Laos and reclaim their mountain homeland. I saw how, because of this dream and this desire to go home, many of them voluntarily contributed money to Hmong General Vang Pao’s organization, the United Lao National Liberation Front, even if they did not know how the money was spent or what the organization was about.