No Place Left to Hide -- Deer-Hunter Case Strips Hmong of Ethnic Anonymity

New America Media, Commentary, Pha Lo, Posted: Oct 03, 2005

Editor's Note: The conviction of a Hmong deer-hunter in Wisconsin for killing six hunters has forced the community to re-evaluate its traditional survival strategy -- to insulate themselves in their communities. Now they are suddenly visible on terms not of their choosing.

SAN FRANCISCO--I was on a mission to make a name for Hmong in America. Then Chai Soua Vang did it first, in national headlines as the convicted slayer in the Wisconsin deer-hunting tragedy.

Vang, a Hmong refugee from Laos, made news last November as the suspect in a dispute over private property that left six hunters dead and two others wounded in Rice Lake, Wis. Since then, some reports have focused on racial overtones of Hmong-white tensions in the hunting community. All of the victims were white, and Vang alleges that he shot only after being threatened with racial epithets. The jury rejected his claim of self-defense.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, the media tapped deeper into the Hmong as a group, stripping us of our long-valued anonymity. The week long trial was captured daily on Court Television. As a Hmong-American, all I could think of was to run and hide.

At the end of Vang's trial, I went back to Sacramento, to the neighborhood where my father's clan -- a band of brothers, cousins, and extended uncles -- have clustered with their families since the 1980s. There I found neither cohesive anger nor resignation. Instead, the families were falling back into the safety of a collective survival strategy: hiding. My mother commented mildly, "If Hmong keep misbehaving, we'll have no place left to hide."

Hiding seemed natural. It was what my parents had done to escape a Communist take over in Laos. It was what they did to sneak into Thailand and protect themselves from persecution from outsiders. It was what we did in America to insulate ourselves from the tremendous shocks of an alien culture. Now in the uncomfortable national spotlight of the Vang trial, we are doing what we know best -- trying to stay invisible.

In Laos, Hmong were the mountain dwellers who lived at the highest elevations, organized tightly into a clan structure that provided goods and services when the national government did not. For many in my father's Laotian-born generation, going to war marked the first time they'd come down from the mountains to interact with a mainstream society.

That was in the 1960s, when the CIA recruited Hmong men to fight against encroaching Communist forces inside Laos. When that war was lost, Hmong evacuated abruptly to escape a government campaign aimed at killing U.S. allies. They moved into Thailand where they "hid" in camps and as squatters until America resettled some.

On my last visit to Thailand I could not find Hmong communities in places like Bangkok. It was only in the northern city Chiang Mai, after we'd taken a truck up the mountainside and hiked through dense forests with a guide that I made my way into a Hmong village. It was early December and people were gearing up for the annual New Year celebration. Women sewed clothing, children went to school in a makeshift building, and men were gone, presumably to the farm. It was a self-sustaining village. I credited the insulation from mainstream Thailand with keeping the lifestyle alive.

Hmong transferred the same survival tactics when we emigrated to the United States in the 1970s and early '80s. We gradually clustered in certain neighborhoods in cities like Fresno, Sacramento and the Twin Cities. Clan leaders provided for the group, settling disputes, distributing goods and making decisions for entire clans.

But "hiding" in America came with a price -- the claim to the Hmong name.

Despite decades in the United States our neighbors know little about the Hmong. Without a Hmong country, it was difficult to explain where we were from. We had no identifier my father's generation could point to and say, "I am Hmong like so and so." They looked instead to my generation -- English-speaking Hmong -- to make the introduction.

At my college graduation party, senior clan leaders told me to "go make a good name for Hmong." The understanding was that I could leave the protective insulation of the clan with their blessings only if I guaranteed not to disgrace the community. Perhaps what neither my elders nor I were prepared for was that a move into public life would slowly dismantle the clan structure that had supported us for so long.

The Vang case coincides with the resettlement of roughly 14,000 Hmong refugees from Thailand. They have trickled in over the past year and are embedding themselves inside established Hmong-American communities. But unlike some in my father's generation who came with the first resettlement, this group has no intention of returning to Laos.

The spotlight on the Chai Soua Vang case forces me to confront the permanency of our place in the United States, and to wonder how long we can keep running and hiding.

My mother still thinks that we are hiding here until negative press pushes us into the spotlight again. But I think we cannot be invisible anymore. The Hmong introduction has been made. It is not the way we hoped, but the name "Vang" is one of our clan names -- a Hmong name. We've been discovered, but if we are to have our own voice in creating the "Hmong" name, as we always planned we would, now is the time to stake our claim.

PNS contributor Pha Lo traveled to Asia in 2003 to research Hmong refugees. She works for New America Media, an association of over 900 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media. Photos by Eduardo Stanley

Also by Pha Lo:

In Wake of Hunting Tragedy, a Young Hmong Writer Anguishes Over Mediator Role

U.S.-Laos Trade Ties Split Hmong



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