12-Apr-1998 Sunday
I BEGIN MY LIFE ALL OVER
The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience
Lillian Faderman
Ballantine, 262 pages, $23
When Shoua Xiong's family arrived in Iowa from a Hmong refugee camp in
Thailand, she remembers, their church sponsor and a Thai interpreter
"taught us how to use the stove, refrigerator, everything they thought we
should know."
Then the sponsor and the interpreter went home.
"After they left," she says, "we tried to turn off the light -- and we
didn't know how to do it!"
With the lights on, no one in the family could sleep that first night. So
Shoua Xiong's parents decided to cook something to eat on their electric
stove. "They turned it on," she recalls, "and then it got hot, and then
they wanted to turn it off. And they turned the other burner on instead ...
and then they got four of them on. We didn't know how to turn them off, and
it was scary."
The family stayed up all night, she says, "watching out the window to see
if the sun will come out. It was lonely."
In "I Begin My Life All Over," Lillian Faderman records the stories of 35
Hmong immigrants to the United States.
Until the late 1950s, the Hmong lived as their ancestors had, going back a
century and a half. Slash-and-burn farmers in the remote mountain villages
of Laos, they plowed with oxen. Families worked side by side in the fields
to raise enough food to feed themselves and to barter with. Women had
little status. Few people could read or write.
But they lived on land that became a battleground when the political forces
of communism and capitalism engaged one another in a long and bloody
contest for Southeast Asia. The Hmong, as a people, were swept up in the
flood tide of war.
By 1959, they were being secretly recruited by the Central Intelligence
Agency to report on the movements of the North Vietnamese in Laos. Later,
they were formed into guerrilla units that sustained terrible losses. Their
casualty rate in proportion to their number was 10 times higher than the
United States' in Vietnam.
"By 1971," Faderman writes, "many Hmong families had no more males, not
even boys as young as ten."
With the Communist victory, the Hmong fled their homes for refugee camps in
Thailand. Eventually, after years of sometimes brutal treatment by Thai
guards and often not enough to eat, some managed to make their ways to the
United States.
As with other immigrant groups, theirs is a story of adjustment, with
varying degrees of success, to a staggeringly different culture and
language. It is also the story of a people who found they had landed in
another century.
In her book, Faderman, who worked through an interpreter, allows her 35
subjects to tell their histories in their own words. She has arranged the
accounts in two parts, "The End of a Way of Life" and "Becoming an
American."
In the first section, the Hmong speak of life in the villages, of death and
destruction and dangerous flights through the jungle to escape, and of the
refugee camps.
The second section addresses the upheaval of traditional Hmong social
structures. The relationships between men and women, children and parents,
the old beliefs and new science are all addressed from the viewpoints of
those born and raised in Laos, of those born in Laos and partly raised in
the United States, and of those who were born here and raised here, never
knowing Laos.
Faderman supplies invaluable historical context, told succinctly and well,
for the narratives. She also weaves brief personal anecdotes throughout the
book and draws parallels between the Hmongs' experiences and those of her
own life as a first-generation American and of her mother's, a Jewish
immigrant.
These, however, are too sketchy to rise to more than "me, too's" tagged
onto the powerful first-person narratives of the Hmong. Too, with 35 voices
-- many of whom appear several times throughout the book -- keeping
straight who is who requires more effort than a reader is likely to
undertake.
In the end, though, it matters little. What holds the reader is less the
specifics of any one account than the truth and humanity found within them
all.