The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

  * About 150,000 Hmong—some of whom resettled in countries other than the United States, and some of whom are still in Thailand—fled Laos. The Hmong now living in the United States exceed that number because of their high birthrate.

  * The idea that a qeej, whether bamboo or plastic, can “speak” to its audience—for example, by giving travel directions to a dead soul—is not a metaphor. Four of its six pipes represent the tones of the Hmong language, and Hmong who have learned to understand the qeej can decode actual words “sung” by the resonating pipes. Just as they do not make the conventional Western distinctions between body and mind or between medicine and religion, the Hmong do not distinguish, as we do, between language and music: their language is musical, and their music is linguistic. All Hmong poetry is sung. Several other musical instruments, called “talking reeds,” similarly blur the boundary between words and melody. A nplooj, or leaf—usually a small piece of a banana leaf—can be curled and placed in the mouth so that it vibrates when blown, its varying pitch representing the tones of words. The most poetic of all Hmong instruments is the ncas, a brass Jew’s harp that is placed between the lips and twanged with a finger. It is traditionally reserved for lovers. In Laos, a boy would play his ncas, which was no louder than a whisper and could not be overheard by eavesdropping parents, just outside the wall of his lover’s house. He might begin to court her by speaking softly, but as soon as he reached the most intimate part of his entreaty, he would, out of a combination of shyness and sentiment, switch to his ncas. If the girl loved him, she would answer with her own ncas; if she did not respond, the sting of the rejection was lessened by the boy’s knowledge that it was not he but his instrument who had wooed her. There are many qeej players in Merced today, but the use of the ncas as a courting instrument is dying out.

  * Merced’s Hmong students are typical of their counterparts nationwide. According to one Minnesota study, Hmong high school students spent more than twice as much time on homework and had better academic records than non-Hmong students. In San Diego, Hmong students achieved higher grade-point averages than whites, blacks, Hispanics, Cambodians, Filipinos, and lowland Lao—though they were notably less successful than Vietnamese. (The superior performance of the Vietnamese is hardly surprising, given the difference, particularly during the early waves of immigration, between the educational backgrounds of the students’ parents. In 1980, adult Vietnamese refugees had completed an average of 12.4 years of education; Hmong surveyed a few years later had completed an average of 1.6.) Although Hmong students do comparatively well in math, they score lower in reading comprehension than other Southeast Asians, including Cambodians and lowland Lao. In some states, they have relatively high secondary-school dropout rates—girls especially, since, even if they are promising students, they often conform to the cultural expectation to marry young and start bearing children. Female dropout rates, however, have improved in recent years. In her book The Other Side of the Asian American Success Story, Wendy Walker-Moffat points out that the Hmong students’ high grades may be misleading, because so many of them are placed in low academic tracks. She posits that the group ethic militates against individualized competition, and that the oral tradition, while it aids in memorization, can lead to problems in standardized test-taking. Walker-Moffat concludes that by being stereotypically lumped with the Asian American “model minority”—a group perceived as having no academic problems—Hmong children have been deprived of such needed services as bilingual classes and bicultural counselors. Wholesale assimilation appears to hinder rather than help. A recent study of Hmong college students found that those who had a strong sense of ethnic identity performed better than those who did not.

  * According to an article about a Fresno case in the Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Journal, zij poj niam, or marriage by capture, is

  a legitimate form of matrimony practiced by Hmong tribesmen and begins with the man engaging in ritualized flirtation. The woman responds by giving the man a token signifying acceptance of the courtship. The man is then required to take the woman to his family’s house in order to consummate the union. According to Hmong tradition, the woman is required to protest: “No, no, no, I’m not ready.” If she doesn’t make overt protestations, such as weeping and moaning, she is regarded as insufficiently virtuous and undesirable. The Hmong man is required to ignore her mock objections, and firmly lead her into the bedroom and consummate the marriage. If the suitor is not assertive enough to take the initiative, he is regarded as too weak to be her husband.

  As Blia Yao Moua put it, “If you ask people of my generation how they got married, ninety percent would be a qualified kidnapper. Including me.” However, among the younger generation of Hmong in this country, there have been cases in which the man believed the woman’s protestations were pro forma, but the woman was truly objecting. Some of these misunderstandings have led to charges of rape and kidnapping, especially when the woman was underage. Most cases have been resolved by local clan leaders or in juvenile courts. The case cited above reached the Fresno Superior Court, which took the defendant’s “cultural defense” into consideration and allowed him to plead to a lesser charge.

  * I have noted elsewhere that several branches of Lao Family Community were investigated in the early nineties for allegedly extorting donations to General Vang Pao’s resistance group, Neo Hom. Merced’s branch was among those investigated, but no improprieties were found.

  * Sensitive bicultural interpreting, while it makes life easier for the doctor and the patient, can be extraordinarily stressful for the interpreter. John Xiong, a Hmong leader in Merced who often did informal medical interpreting, told me, “If the patient do not do like the doctor want, doctor get mad at interpreter. If the doctor do not do like the patient want, patient get mad at interpreter. I am in the middle, and I say, I try to help you both, but you both get mad at me.” It is rare for doctors to defer to their interpreters, as Francesca Farr did, or to acknowledge the degree of painful identification the interpreters may feel with patients from their own ethnic groups. Thai Fang, an interpreter at Valley Medical Center in Fresno who compiled Tuabneeg Lubcev Hab Kev Mobnkeeg Rua Cov Haslug Hmoob: Basic Human Body and Medical Information for Hmong Speaking People, a Hmong-English glossary of anatomical and medical terms, wrote, “I decided to develop this book in response to my feeling of sympathy. Seeing my fellow Hmongs going through panic and worry so they have no energy left wounds my spirit as if bringing a disease to my soul.”

  * When Dwight Conquergood was living at Ban Vinai, he intuitively took advantage of the no-fault dynamic when he designed his performance-art program for improving camp hygiene. Mother Clean, the eight-foot dancing puppet who led the sanitation campaign, informed the camp inhabitants:

  When you lived in the mountains

  The wind and the rain cleaned the garbage.

  Now with so many people in Ban Vinai

  We all must be careful to clean up the garbage.

  As Conquergood pointed out, “She exhorted a change in behavior without degrading the people whom she was trying to persuade, locating responsibility in the environmental circumstances.”

  * Txiv neebs had previously visited some of MCMC’s Hmong patients, including Lia, but they had never been officially sanctioned. Bill Selvidge, however, had occasionally suggested that his Hmong patients, especially depressed ones, consult txiv neebs, and at Merced Community Outreach Services, Sukey Waller had made numerous txiv neeb referrals for her mental health clients.

  † Since 1995, Marilyn Mochel, the coordinator of the health department’s refugee program, has served as a cultural broker whom MCMC can summon to mediate between Hmong patients and the hospital staff. (Mochel was also responsible for the health department’s cross-cultural innovations.) While the man with the perforated bowel was hospitalized, she was on call twenty-four hours a day to consult with relatives, clan members, community leaders, doctors, nurses, and dieticians, as well as with secur
ity guards who objected to the crowds of visitors, sometimes sixty at a time, who filled MCMC’s hallways. Mochel says that her Hmong staff’s “strong deference to professionals” disqualifies them from assuming the assertive role of broker themselves, though she hopes that will change.

  * Unlike most Hmong in this country, Yang Dao, the leading Hmong scholar, has retained his name’s traditional form by placing his clan name before his given name. Yang is his surname.