May 18, 2004
ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY:
Exodus: As a Child, Cy Thao Crossed the Mekong from Laos to a New World. Now His Paintings Are Taking the Hmong People Home. (Peter Ritter, 5/19/04, City Pages)
There are many versions of the folktale about how the Hmong lost their language. One of them goes like this: In ancient times, a Hmong rebel was fleeing through a bamboo forest from soldiers of the Chinese emperor. The rebel carried with him scrolls of Hmong writing. He came to a river, the legend goes, and there saw a water bug dancing across the surface. Thinking that he could do the same, and same, and thus escape his pursuers, the man tied pieces of bamboo to his feet and leapt into the water. As he drowned, he swallowed the scrolls he'd been protecting. So the written words were lost; in time they were forgotten.This is how Cy Thao tells the story, anyway. We're sitting in his office at the state Capitol on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. When the Legislature is in session, the whole building has the becalmed air of power being discreetly exercised. Conversations aggregate into a low thrum that sounds like oiled loafers swooshing over carpet.
Thao continues: "In China, the emperor started encroaching on the Hmong country. The Hmong fought back. But those that did were conquered. And the emperor outlawed the Hmong language, throughout history. Thousands of years.
"So the Hmong found the way to communicate with each other was through pattern and design. They would make designs to sew on their clothes to communicate when and how we're going to attack which garrison. They would walk from village to village and communicate with everyone without the emperor and his soldiers detecting what they were saying. Throughout the ages, many people lost the meanings of those designs. But we still kept the designs on our clothes."
Thao is a sturdily built man, not quite plump, but compact and thick-limbed: a former wrestler's physique. His face is round and unlined, though a neat goatee and scant hair make him look somewhat older than he, in fact, is. Although still in his freshman term as a state representative, Thao has something of a veteran politician's gift for easy rapport, the ability to make stories he's told a hundred times sound improvised. If this eloquence seems slightly practiced, that's only because, at age 32, Thao has already spent years as an emissary of Hmong culture.
As a politician, Thao is the public face of a large Hmong constituency in St. Paul's Frogtown; as an artist, his ambition is even greater. This week at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Thao will unveil The Hmong Migration, an epic cycle of 50 oil paintings that tracks the 5,000-year Hmong journey, from the creation of the universe, to the refugee camps in Thailand where Thao spent his early childhood, to the Hmong diaspora he now represents in the state Legislature.
"People always say, boy, somebody should be doing this," Thao says of the project, which preoccupied him for three years and took him to three countries. "Somebody should tell our story. So one day I just said, 'You know what? I'm not going to wait for that somebody anymore. It's just as much my responsibility-- it's a huge responsibility--to tell that story."
Yet another people whose heritage will one day reside only in America. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2004 5:47 PM
From O.C Register...
Recently, customers using an ATM at a Wells Fargo Bank in El Paso, Texas noticed a strange language among the options offered on the screen. It turned out to be Hmoob, the language of the Hmongs, a primitive people from Southeast Asia. While an inquiry revealed that no Hmongs were to found in the El Paso, as many as 300,000 of them reside in the United States—and at least 15,000 more are on the way. The pretext for the influx is the wide employment of Hmongs as mercenaries by U.S. forces during the Vietnam war, due to the Hmongs’ jungle skills and their dislike of
their more civilized neighbors. Thus in Fresno, California, where over 20,000 Hmongs reside, schools are preparing for the arrival this summer of 900 more Hmong children fresh from Thai refugee camps. In the several decades since they began being imported to America, the Hmongs’ limited education, primitive customs (including child marriage), and backward ways have persisted, while high rates of unemployment, welfare dependency, failure to complete school, and juvenile delinquency have been and remain rampant. In California’s central valley, where Hmongs and their ancestral enemies, the Laotians, have had some success as truck farmers, authorities have caught farmers from both groups cultivating marijuana and opium poppies.
Your defamation aside...
What wholesale govt. plot was there to facilitate
the importation and resettlement of backward
Sicilians? At least our government in the '20's
had the sense to curb immigration from culturally
imcompatible regions.
If this is not a wholesale leftist strategy to
convert America into a Mad Max nightmare of
warring racial tribes I don't know what is.
This is totally insane.
I'd be much happier to take Africaners and
Rhodesian farmers as boat people. They are
opressed and they will be compatible with
traditional American values.
Here from a KCAL T.V. report...
The Fresno district may offer services to entire families, including health services and English classes for adults. Officials are working with the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, which has studied the specific needs of Hmong at the camp and researched the best newcomer programs throughout the nation.
Posted by: J.H. at May 19, 2004 9:26 AMJ.H.:
We didn;t sully our natioonal honor by shafting the Sicilians. We oiwe the Hmong a debt we can never repay. And contrary to far Rioght/racist claptrap they've adapted rather quickly to America, just like prior immigrant groups.
we should take the Rhodesians too and the black Zimbabweans who want out.
Posted by: oj at May 19, 2004 9:36 AMI have a quilted Hmong table-spread that I bought in St Paul. I didn't realize it was a battle plan - cool!
JH, here in Minnesota they are assimilating quite well. I'd be interested to know how many white farmers in California are growing a little pot on the side.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at May 19, 2004 3:20 PMIn urban Orange County, California, a lot of the kids at the top of the class and on the honor roll are Hmong.
Comes from the Asian cultural respect for learning (spillover from the Chinese) and the low-to-nonexistent literacy rate in the Old Country. Once they're here with access to schools, the whole extended family pitches in; literacy means a lot to a mostly-illiterate people, and learning likewise to former tribesmen & peasants. Besides, there's a big kick to pulling ahead of your former overlords the Lao & Vietnamese.
Posted by: Ken at May 19, 2004 4:18 PMHi,
I've encountered many Hmong at our local university here in SE Minnesota, I've found them well-assimilated, fluent in English, and far harder working than most of the "white" students.
At the U. where I work, one of our Hmong students told me about how his father barely got the family out of Laos, and died of gunshot wounds on the riverbank just as he led his family to safety and freedom. The student is now a college grad is a highly regarded police office in the Twin Cities.
J.H., you are right.
O.C. Register, a couple facts for you:
The Hmong suffered 50% battle casualties fighting on our behalf during the Vietnam war.
They went into combat carrying WWII era Garand rifles, rifles almost as large as the 12 (yes, twelve) year-olds carrying them. Their situation was that desperate. And they went in against hardened NVA regulars armed with the latest Soviet-bloc equipment. Year after year, they fought and died on our behalf. I've never read of a single instance where the Hmongs turned on their US counterparts, ever. They were the most faithful allies we had over there. At the time, we promised them that if things ever went to hell, we would look after them. We damn well better hold up our end of the deal.
For more detail on the treatment of the Hmong by the communists who came to power, search the archives of Time magazine for a recent story of a small band of Hmong survivors being hunted down and exterminated by the Laotion government forces.
Kevin M. Kotlarz
Posted by: at May 24, 2004 2:53 PM