Scenes Lost from Gran Torino: Hauntings of Hmong of Laos, by Bee Vang and Louisa Schein
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Originally published in (Re)Collecting the Vietnam War, special issue of Asian American Literary Review 6.2 (Fall 2015): 293-304.
Scenes Lost from Gran Torino: Hauntings of Hmong of Laos
text by Bee Vang & Louisa Schein
visuals by Koua Mai Yang
This collection of vignettes and reflections emerges out of a six-year collaboration between actor-scholar Bee Vang and media activist-scholar Louisa Schein. Having traveled to multiple venues in the U.S. and China for screenings and workshops, and co-authored several works in scholarly publications, we embark here upon a recuperation of what about Hmong and the war in Laos was effaced from the Hollywood film Gran Torino, engaging a medley of other media along the journey. We speak both in a melded voice and from our respective positionalities, dialoguing also with other Hmong artists’ reflections in word and image.
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Remembering Thao’s Father
Bee Vang: “I remember the French were still there. They were filthy,” my uncle recounted when I enjoined him to recall his birth year in Laos, as well as my grandmother’s and grandfather’s. Time and forgetting had clouded that early period when he was too young to record his grandfather’s face after his family was swept up by colonial forays. He could only estimate my grandparents’ birth to circa the 1920s. Birth dates were a luxury reserved for those who had been tutored in the measurement of time. My grandmother lives on to this day, presumably in her late eighties.
In Louisa Schein’s “Beijing, 2012: Haunted By Empire,” Schein describes a sentiment very similar to Nguyen in his essay “True War Stories.” She describes how there is an inevitable disregarding of the downsides of the immigrant war story when films, documentaries and other forms of media portray the success of groups like the Hmong in the United States. However, beyond the sin of omission, Schein suggests that these filmmakers are further guilty of another sin: making the immigrant groups who have survived and succeeded, such as the Hmong, appear to be a positive outcome of the war.
This is what bothers Schein, and should bother the reader. Schein communicates her own discomfort by saying “I became mute,” her silence here symbolizing the sheer level that this bothers her.
I also found a similar sentiment in Bee Vang’s “Remembering Thao’s Father.” While playing the role of Thao, Bee felt that he was inaccurately depicting the Hmong male experience, and that more importantly he was perpetuating a mythical necessity of the Hmong for a father, in particular a “white savior.”
He feels that the true Hmong experience, especially of Hmong veterans, has gone unnoticed by Hollywood and that the false substitute that has taken its place is merely perpetuating a false representation of the Hmong experience that omits the reality.
The statistics in this portion of the article astounded me- “2.1 million tons of bombs unleashed destruction every eight minutes round the clock for nine years.” I cannot fathom inflicting such pain upon anyone or anything, let alone being on the receiving end of such. I enjoyed the poem by Khaty Xiong, and found his point of the audience’s tears being “white” tears to be very interesting. This insularity is something that plagues our country, a disease nourished by the American government. There are so many aspects of war that people turn a blind eye to, intentional or not. However, through his presentations, this author is slowly ripping off the bandaids from our fragile ignorance. The pain and remorse felt by his audiences is nothing compared to the pain felt by the Hmong’s, and I think such a fact makes him, in a sense, quite bitter towards their remorse.
The American media portrays Americans as righteous saviors of the world when in reality, sometimes, they themselves would be the cause of such misery. They paint others as helpless to fulfill its complex, when in reality, Hmong men are strong. Thus the depiction degrades Hmong men and their dignity.
I’ve never seen the movie Gran Torino, and after reading this article if I ever do it will be with a very skeptical eye. It bothers me that so much (and by so much I mean almost all) mainstream media and film is white-washed to the point where any culture that is not like America is seen as inferior and barbaric. Why must we always cast the white man as the savior? Why does changing a different culture to mimic America’s make that culture better? Bee Vang, one of the Hmong actors in the film puts it best when he explains that Hollywood told him to “mak[e] credible a boy adrift, waiting for a white savior to show him the ways of manhood.” (294) This completely takes away the voice of the Hmong people. In a later part of the article media activist-scholar Louisa Schein speaks of a documentary about Hmong immigrants she created. These subjects in the film were not “stereotypical welfare-dependent, non-English-speaking new arrivals daunted by U.S. residence and burdening the American economy” which caused a lot of the scholars viewing it to question why they chose to showcase successful immigrants. The scholars said the film did not show the Hmong’s struggle to acclimate into American life, and wondered if this was an effective immigrant tale. Schein was floored. She went on to say that had the documentary portrayed the Hmong as “maladjusted” (300) and “destitute” (300), then the Hmong would be “viewed through the hostile filter of American anti-immigrant racism” (300). White America has created this idea that immigrants need to assimilate into American culture in order to be successful here. American has been referred to as a melting pot of a plethora of countries and nationalities. In many cases new immigrants need to melt away any sense of a past cultural identity in order to fit in and assimilate into this “land of the free”. In order for the voices of these immigrants to be heard, and for their stories to effectively be told, we need to be okay with white men not always being cast as the savior.
This line really stuck with me,“birth dates were a luxury reserved for those who had been tutored in the measurement of time”. The uncertainty of when you are born because political unrest was so profound, takes me out of my privileged American life, to realize the severity of the Hmong situation.
America only defends its freedom- it doesn’t fight for it. We create words like “relocation camp”, instead of concentration camps for Asian Americans after WWII. In short, we distort reality so that we can maintain our illusion of global powerhouse. Gran Torino only reinforces this topic.
Reading this piece, I was able to realize the complexity of freedom. This conflict of the Hmong population has been glamorized in Gran Torino, so that we don’t see the actual devastation and effect that the war had. How typically American that is. We are never shown in Gran Torino the actual account of the Hmong struggles, like never knowing your actual age because you are too busy trying to survive. We are instead mostly shown that the white american is here to rescue you.
I agree with what Tucker is saying here that more times than not the US depicts it’s self as the good guy and fails to acknowledge the war crimes that we are committing. One of these was like Tucker said the re-location of Japanese Americans to concentration camps essentially the same thing that Hitler was doing to the Jewish community except we weren’t systematically killing the Japanese. I also think this notion that we fail more times than not to acknowledge the hardships of immigrating here and always glorify the refugee story as the next great american dream. One line in the essay that exemplified this was on page 300 when it says “Why, though, they countered, were refugees portrayed as so successful? Why hadn’t we shown how they struggled? Their sufferings? Their ill fit with American society, perhaps even their dislocation and unbelonging wrought by American racial thinking.” This passage just exemplifies this glorification of refugees in America and the notion that America has saved you but at what expense?
My uncle’s language was acutely self-aware, breathed with an air of assurance. His authority derived not only from his age, but from a past that was to garner deference. He, like so many other young men of his generation, had fought in the secret, CIA-backed militia against the burgeoning Communist insurgency. The more we spoke, the more I chided myself that I had come so close to letting the chance slip through my fingers to listen to him. I urged him on...
With pride, he popped in a videotape of a ceremony in Wisconsin at which Hmong veterans like himself were honored. The reunion memorialized the efforts of a special brigade. There they were, some fifty years later…The room became hushed with the slow eddying of bittersweet feelings. My uncle ruminated aloud, not directed at me, nor at anyone else present, “How time has gone by.” Observing his comrades diminishing, their debilitated bodies battered by age and illness, he mused: “It seems like only yesterday that we were in our youth, so strong and capable.” Then he qualified his lament with “kho-siab,” a word—no, a barely whispered sigh—heavy with all the world-historical shifts of his time, and with regret over his years squandered as a child-soldier struggling for a country that never belonged to him or his people.
It’s interesting that it says that the Hmong veterans received their awards with pride and that they are happy represent both the Hmong people and the US military. Particularly because it was a bittersweet war for so many of them –they gave up their way of life in order to fight for the United States, and then left their homelands afterwards to escape persecution. It’s also bittersweet because many of them were child soldiers or forced into the war, and, so many years later, many of them had begun to die of old age and illness. The war lacked in glory or a sense of patriotism because there was no Hmong nation to begin with, and they’re still kind of placeless. So there was less attachment to the idea of the glory of war or nationalism.
- Sareana Kimia & Nisha Desai
Kho-siab. That word reverberated throughout me. Its forlorn mood had no English equivalent. My uncle’s utterance taunted me: I could not fully grasp the gravity of what he meant. Kho-siab, in English, would roughly and inadequately translate to “loneliness,” “nostalgia,” “yearning,” “melancholia,” “desolation,” or the more literal “bereft heart.” But bereft of what? I think back to my mother’s and uncle’s youth, to their family deprived of their father, to what was sanctioned by geopolitics and culminated in the near-decimation of the Hmong population in Southeast Asia.
Just like the term kho-siab, there are certain aspects of the Hmong culture that others, specifically Americans in this situation, can’t naturally understand. With other cultures as well, language reflects this reality. Translating this to the production of Gran Torino and the basis of the passage, the loss of meaning and “scenes lost” from the Hmong and Laos is an inevitable occurrence that requires activists like Bee Vang and Louisa Schein to clarify misconceptions and misrepresentations. Gran Torino may have given the Hmong publicity and a voice, but not the voice they necessarily need or want. (Aseem Derek)
Kho-siab, in indirectly translating to the English version of loneliness, mimics the inability to grasp and understand the American’s negative influence on this state. During this state, Hmong veterans were child soldiers, barely unable to grasp and understand the enormity of the world around them, yet they were to fight for a country they may never see. This in turn creates this deep “yearning” or “nostalgia” to relate to Americans and understand why the war was fought, creating this idea of a bereft heart.
This is furthered by the idea that these child soldiers had their own children at home, and although they did not know who they themselves were, they were fighting for a cause that they did not understand, and were detrimentally effecting those they left behind. This loneliness felt by family members is symbolized through the inability to directly translate this word, as the understanding of the war and the politics in South Asia were lost in translation, and there was no accurate way to understand the time period and what was happening for the families involved.
Your completely right about ‘Kho-Siab’, Samantha. When stories from the Vietnam war are passed down, many other sacrifices are overlooked. No one knows about the Cambodian child that risked everything to protect his home, because to the American Mindset, it’s all about what American veterans did in Vietnam. There is no thought given to the conflict in Cambodia, Laos or the many South Eastern Asian states that underwent similar communist insurrections like in Vietnam. It’s not just in the fact that major sacrifices were made by these Cambodian and Laotian soldiers, but it’s how many people have forgotten what they did.
Intervening history has sealed the disappearance of these men, so much so that in the Warner Brothers version of Hmong—Gran Torino (2008)—the father of teens Sue and Thao Vang Lor is never seen or even spoken of. Hmong men should have been given space to make themselves visible on screen. Because they could not, Sue and Thao’s task fell hard upon their shoulders. They appeared alone, implicitly abandoned. With their father unshown, the teens themselves bore the burden of evincing what prior generations had dubbed kho-siab.
Bee Vang shows how the war in Vietnam overshadowed the conflicts that Hmong men faced. Yes, at first they were greeted in America with pride and honor, but all of that seemed to be forgotten. The American film industry’s seeming attempt to educate the masses about this part of history was through Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” but instead leaves out some important issues that are clear in Hmong-American life, such as the lack of a father. As Vang’s uncle uses the term “Kho-siab,” which is synonymous to “loneliness” or “bereft heart,” we can see that not only does it represent America’s view of Hmong affairs, but the way its represented in the media too. Bee’s character in the film, “Thao,” is fatherless and looks up to Eastwood’s “Walt” as a father figure and someone that can help him out of being pressured by the Hmong gang culture of the U.S. Though this is something that many Hmong people went through, the fact that the film doesn’t draw attention to Thao’s lack of a father perpetuates the role of Hmong men that isn’t recognized in American history. Since Kho-siab sums up Vang’s uncle’s understanding of Hmong remembrance, it too represents the role of Hmong soldiers in the history of America.
Bee Vang in this paragraph sums up through language one of the most prevalent problems of the war: too many things were lost in translation. There were too many things that “had no English equivalent.” The Hmong witnessed themselves rewritten from human beings into nonexistence – simply because there was no room for them in the American lexicon. Although perhaps “Gran Torino” had the best interests of the Hmong people at heart, it does not speak of all the untranslatable parts of being Hmong. In creating Hollywood-appropriate characters, it erases many of the issues that the Hmong people faced. Perhaps because the struggle of the Hmong people is so beyond the language of the American layperson – perhaps because it challenges majority ideas of minority cultures – history has been written in such a way that the people have become invisible. “Gran Torino,” despite including the culture, does not seek to translate all elements of it: only those that are familiar and comfortable for the average person to digest. There is no translation for suffering, nor should there be. The Hmong shoulder a burden entirely unknowable to the American people.
Its remarkable how one phrase “Kho-siab” can iterate so many melancholy feelings. It truly replicates the discomfort of war for these veterans. The story of the Hmong and Laos people is often never told in history books. The French came colonize parts of their country like much of Southeast Asia. Colonization and imperialism – it is incredible how such practices in the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries created such a violent atmosphere ultimately. By not representing a father in Gran Torino reinforced a stereotype that Southeast Asians in poorer communites have fathers who are nonexistent. I felt this was a misrepresentation of Hmong culture.
Bee Vang, one of the main characters of Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino”, talks about his role in the movie, as he was forced to grow up without a father. This was similar to many of the people of his heritage. Due to war, many Hmong men had to leave their families to fight. Vang mentions how his mother and uncle had to grow up in a similar situation. When he sees his Uncle watching a videotape of Hmong veterans being honored, his uncle says “Kho-siab”, a term that Vang says cannot be directly translated in English, but can be used to mean a number of things, such as “loneliness”, which I believe is the term Vang wants to use. Many of the people of his heritage, the Hmong people, felt this way in regards to their growing up in families torn apart by war.
For me as actor, too, Thao’s character seemed unmoored, in ways that could not have been assuaged by the white surrogate-father, Walt Kowalski, played by Clint Eastwood. As Bee, who grew up around my father, my uncle, and many other veterans, I could never quite intuit the hapless Thao who, by the design of the script, was needy in his fatherlessness. I could not recognize or interpret him. My artisan selfhood seemed a specter as I was directed to “just be natural” while making credible a boy adrift, waiting for a white savior to show him the ways of manhood.1 Playing the role felt more like an assault on Hmong dignity than the thespian fashioning of a rich and troubled character.2 So to conjure Thao’s imputed loss, I drew upon my uncle’s kho-siab. I wonder if this feeling is akin to the spectrality suffered by the living Hmong veterans who hover in the long shadows of an as-yet barely told conflict…
I understand that a common idea held is that America often gets itself involved in international affairs where American intervention is not wanted. Their intervention is also often romanticized by American media, in a way that matches the story told in Gran Torino of a white surrogate-father coming to the “rescue” of a Hmong-American family — a story that was written and directed by Eastwood, a white, American man. Eastwood’s character is even written as being a war veteran, which only makes the similarities stronger.
As unintentional as this effect may or may not have been, if definitely mirrors the lack of attention given to the stories of Hmong soldiers that remain untold. We do not hear about these soldiers in the same way we do not hear much about the family’s lives before they meet Eastwood’s character, and the story focuses on how their lives change through the introduction and intervention of his character to support them during their struggle.
Once again, America plays the role of a knight attempting to save and protect people from their own doing. American media continues to express that America is great and can protect everyone. There was no need for a white man to show up and save Thao. Despite growing up fatherless, there was no need for this father figure to show up in his life.
Though so many of the Hmong men disappeared, this act is an insult to those veterans.
Imaginary Land, by Koua Mai Yang.
60 inches x 48 inches, oil on drop cloth,
The Hmong American Experience 2010.3
Veterans Undead
Louisa Schein & Bee Vang: The void of the unknown Hmong soldiers, gaping wider in Gran Torino’s fiction, has been defiantly refused by Hmong pursuing civic American lives. On a steamy day in May of 1997, for instance, former soldiers and families congregated in Washington, DC, to cast their shadow across American forgetting. Delegates of veterans’ organizations from Hmong communities across the U.S. traveled, as they had for years, on chartered buses to an annual commemoration on the National Mall. There, dignified by military uniforms, they orated their pasts, saluted their General, Vang Pao,4 and invited their former CIA allies to commend them. Along the way, they briefly revivified their ranks, their commandership, their contribution. They ritually paid tribute at the Vietnam War Memorial, and then transferred to Arlington cemetery where, nestled in the grass, a laptop-sized headstone unobtrusively acknowledges Hmong and Lao martial endeavors. Photos and videos were captured for their comrades at home. Then, beleaguered, they traipsed the halls of Congress, pleading for a Hmong Veterans bill, which was finally passed only in 2000…two and a half decades after the diaspora began.5
Hmong men that fought and were killed have largely been forgotten by the american public, if they were ever known at all. These are never addressed in things such as American movies, and are taken as given. Behind all of this the Hmong teens are dealing with the issue of no father. This is not a problem unique to them, but the circumstances are definitely concealed at best.
Nowadays Hmong veterans still gather all over the country multiple times every year. Dwindling numbers of elderly men assemble, honor themselves, retrieve the glory of their erstwhile efforts. They still hold bitter vigil for the too many who were sacrificed on battlefields, on rescue missions for downed Americans, or under carpets of bombs. With the passing of the decades, they convene ever more quietly, but perdure in their campaign against the enemy that is amnesia.6
There aren’t very many Hmong veterans left. The physical war may be over for the soldiers, however they are fighting yet another “campaign.” As more years pass, the war is becoming a more and more distant memory. Those that lived through it are slowly passing away. If the sacrifices and honor disappear alongside the memory, who is to say history won’t repeat itself? Who will remember the Hmong contribution to the war? -Joseph, Amanda, Sarah, Danxia
I feel like these forgotten campaigns are mostly disregarded because those who have their home and lives destroyed by them are often either too damaged to have the resources to focus on bringing attention to their status, or because their voice and influence is too small to gain enough notice. Your mention of the entire ordeal becoming a distant memory as veterans grow old and die can draw parallels between the lost stories of comfort women that were taken by Japanese armies. The women are becoming old and slowly dying off, and with them, their stories die as well, all while Japan remains silent about acknowledging their plight. While not the only two cases of such tragedies being suffered and forgotten, I felt that their similarities should be noted because of how abnormal it is for the suffering of an entire population to just be kept in silence.
I believe that this sentence is extremely significant. In modern day America, we feel that we know everything. There is a sense that we know all that we need to know about history. How is it then, that something that happened so recently is close to being forgotten? How is it that people that risked their lives can be forgotten so easily? We, as privileged Americans never think that we have to fight amnesia, simply because we have all of the technology we would ever need to record happenings. This represents just how much we take for granted. America oftentimes writes history, with the other side of the story going unheard. The story of the Hmong veterans is not well known. They do not have the voice they need. It is honorable that these men still assemble, convene, and attempt to preserve history, but in their position it will not be possible for much longer. I feel like this paragraph as a whole is a call to action. If nothing is done now, all that we will have left is the stories that these people passed down, soon to be forgotten.
A Post-Gang Poster Boy?
BV: Gran Torino did not factor in grown Hmong men, but instead offered Hmong boys, flat and fatherless until incarcerated or saved thanks to retired auto worker Walt who flaunts a character deepened by traumas from the Korean War. Meanwhile, Gran Torino fashioned gangsterhood as such an essential driver of American Hmong-ness that, after the film’s release in 2008, it could seem natural for me to be invited—as the exemplar of the good, law-abiding Hmong boy, as Thao—to speak against gangs in a high-profile event in California. The multiply sponsored event was titled “The Real Gran Torino Story: Stockton’s Secret War on the Streets,” its avowed purpose “to leverage the film ‘Gran Torino’ and it’s Star Bee Vang…as the beginning point for bringing awareness to and addressing the key challenges faced by the Southeast Asian American community in Stockton, CA….With a total of approximately 9,000 gang members and associates in Stockton, street terrorism such as shootings and street robberies persist regularly.”
This excerpt addresses not only the issues that the young Hmong face, but also how society enforces those inequalities on them. They were put in a bad situation where they aren’t expected to succeed and in addition to their already bad circumstance, they have serious negative influences. This makes them way more susceptible to outside and negative influences. Showing only the young Hmong men represents the lack of structure in the lack of men or father figures. – Andrew Vincent
This sentence brings up an interesting thought that is a real problem in today’s film industry. Time and time again we see these character made real by brilliant writing and acting before our eyes on screen, but what do so many of those characters have in common? They’re white. There certainly isn’t a lack of talent among Asian American actors, so the issue comes down to the fact that Hollywood will only produce movies with two dimensional caricatures of Asian or Asian American individuals. In Gran Torino we see a young boy made into a man, or an actual character, by this white figure. We must ask, if the boy was saved by someone non-white, would we have seen the movie at all?
In Gran Torino, there were tons Hmong boys left flat and fatherless until incarcerated or saved by Walt, a retired auto worker. The Korean War had a huge impact and social influence in the area of eastern China Vietnam, Japan, and the Koreas.
I thought it was interesting how Thao would speak against gangs in a high-profile event in California. Also I could see how bad of crime there was in all seriousness, like how bad the ghetto or slums were. For there to be over 9,000 gang members in Stockton, that must be one crazy spot to “HANG OUT” at. I feel scared for the kids running up and down the streets over there not really knowing what’s really going on.
Yet even as I and other youth are recruited for the bootstraps role of anti-gang advocate, Teng Yang, twenty-something son of the mean streets of Milwaukee, vigilantly holds fast: “In the vastness of our experiences there must be little rooms, secret pockets that hold the scars of remembrance. Some are impossible to articulate, for whatever reasons. Others stay there, breeding upon the secrecy…they fill our minds enough to become an actual part of us. Memories shape us…
The idea that people’s experiences shape who they are and who they will become holds true throughout time and history. Whether it be from experiencing secrets that are “impossible to articulate” or something that molds and shapes our development. These things develop our existence into something that we can’t control in becoming. You could say that its something like fate or an inevitable road that is taken once committed to. An example of this would be experiencing something so traumatic like killing a person. Taking another person’s life would definetly be a secret to keep for the average person, and is something that would generally be difficult to articulate to another person. If a secret like that were to fester inside of you, something is going to change within you and you would develop into a person that is effected by the experience of killing a person. This is an extreme examples, however, it is an example nonetheless. In short, I do agree with the fact that memories and experiences (both good and bad) are a part of us and shape us into our future self.
“I claim a past: the Secret War of Southeast Asia…”7
In “The Table” by Koua Mai Yang, we can see two separate images of the “Hmong American Experience”. These are both very masculine settings, the top half displaying four older men in business-casual and the lower half showing a larger number of young men in hoodies and jackets. Both are set on a gray landscape with a relatively neutral color scheme. The characters and dividing lines are sketched out in black, the background and certain characters are colored with minimal blues and browns. While there are white highlights to help with shading and give a sense of depth, there are bright yellow highlights as well. These stand out from the rest of the scene and draw the viewer’s eye to prominent places. Many of the yellow lines are in distinctive places where someone would assign traits of race such as around the eyes, nose, lips, chin, cheekbones, and forehead. Other places Yang wants to draw our eye go to the shirt collars, eye-glasses, and receding hairline of the older men as well as the hoods, hands, and numerous bottles of unknown substances in the young men’s half. The yellow highlighting in this piece guides the eye through what outsiders see, what makes them non-white, and what they have or do not have. The most interesting use of the yellow is in outline the absent space between the men in the upper scene. This signifies a missing man, most likely a veteran amongst the others, showing the slowly dwindling numbers. In the lower scene there are many more men, clumped together to the point of indistinction in how many there are exactly. Both are images of the stereotypes Americans force on Hmong peoples, the yellow lines of the ‘yellow people’. But there is more to the image than simply what the white imposed stereotype. There are other shades; faces and bodies beneath the yellow highlights. The men have sad, angry, lovely, and empty expressions, each with their own story behind them that we cannot access. “The Table” encourages the viewer to look beyond the highlights and engage with the texts and stories of these men.
The Table, by Koua Mai Yang. 24 inches x 48 inches, mixed media on fabric, The Hmong American Experience 2011.8
Nong Het, 2007: Legacies of Anger
LS: An enraged wind wraps itself around our little chalet. It’s not howling: no, it’s more like growling. My traveling companion, Ka Ying, and I have turned out dim lights in a government guest house that backs up on the mountain slopes of the Lao-Vietnam borderlands. We had driven from Xieng Khouang that same day, and spent the remaining hours chatting and being warmly fed by friends and relatives of our respective contacts from all over the diaspora. No one in remote Nong Het is disconnected from Hmong in the West…
Tomorrow we will drive a few more kilometers to the lively market town that sits at the border. We will lay eyes upon the multi-storied structures and bright lights of the Vietnam side. In a flash, the geographic elisions by which Laos is so misrecognized, enfolded by Americans into “Vietnam” (and maybe Cambodia), will become starkly visible as a chilling disparity. For here on the far edges of Laos, the troubled ground that drew so many Hmong to lay down their lives as shields against Vietnamese incursions, things are sleepy, low-power, as if knocked flat by the years of battering by bombs. Through the window by my bed, I ponder the stars crowding the sky reminding visitors that there is little light, little vitality, and little development, here in Nong Het…
Just as I sink toward slumber, I feel my consciousness dragged back up to the liminal space just one step short of waking. The sound of the wind shifts, and for a moment I sense a massive flock of birds rushing up over and down the mountainside, flapping and cawing and heading toward our abode. Then the noise sharpens; it’s no longer avian. It has transmuted into a cacophony of human voices. They are cackling raucously—I know this sound. With a start, I recall that I discerned a similar din before sleep in the dark hours after the death of my paternal grandmother. As her soul took flight, she passed over where I slept, and for a few moments, I caught the sound of all the souls of her loved ones on the other side celebrating her in a clamor of elated welcomes.
This paragraph caught my eye virtually immediately. Upon first read, it is typically what an author chooses to say in imagery that sticks out in such a pertinent fashion. There is a certain amount of close reading to be done here, whether one wants to focus on the violence with which the narrator feels jerked into a vision after “[sinking] toward slumber” or the domestic entity of their paternal grandmother surrounded by a gloomy scene.
Perhaps the most personally and historically part of this section is the transformation, however; antithetically reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” the shape-shifting sharp crow caws into a “cacophony of human voices” (beautifully, hesitantly worded) brings life to feral cries. This occurrence is related to the passing-by of a deceased family member’s soul, from the “loved ones on the other side celebrating her in a clamor of elated welcomes.”
Some argue that war and conflict are unavoidable, a part of our “human nature” as creatures who have inevitably evolved from animals. Animals—who we try so desperately to other as lesser than—are typically caged, consumed, or studied at a disadvantage along this echelon of existence. A crow could be read through its darkness, its state as an omen, but in this paragraph, its closeness and relation to the cries of humans brings the chaos of war and displacement together with death as acts of the animal.
But I perceive no elation in the voices of Nong Het. They are livid, and no less determined to register their outrage than in the days after their bodies had fallen in, say, 1969 or 1972. They clatter indignantly. They menace, and are unforgiving about being forsaken. They grudgingly demand remembrance. Even if they fought willingly, they know their deaths were wrongful.
It has become icy cold, the kind that penetrates skin and bone. Just as I begin to sense fear, my eyes fly open, and I shiver into wary awakeness, realizing I am now blocked from beholding Nong Het’s ghosts.
Hmong of Laos are often said to be far flung and on the move, to have lost their homeland, to be dismally severed and scattered. By contrast, these Hmong are tethered. A soul that has been taken unjustly, and out of time, cannot be freed to journey back to the originary land where all Hmong souls reunite. In Nong Het, they are consigned to reproachfully remind.
Surviving, to Remap
Bee Vang shows the weight of the lost that these survivors have to carry. Bee takes on this burden to show Americans the ravages that war had on his ancestors and just how devastating it was. Yet when he shows them these atrocities, the sadness that overcomes them feels empty, what he describes as “unapologetic insularity”. It is reminiscent of the first passage in which the meaning of Kho-siab is lost in translation. We have words that we come close to grasping its meaning but they don’t quite do it justice. And these tear don’t do this loss justice. These people will experience this sorrow for all of a few hours in this seminar and then leave to go on with their lives.
BV: Does surviving task us, as Hmong in the West, to overcome the invisible? Maybe becoming specters through a collective social death forces us to come to terms with having survived, and all that entails. A twenty-three-year-old Fresno-born Hmong American, I peer into our past to glean America’s war. Enshrouded in secrecy, abounding in myriad subtleties, at once hot and cold, propelled by anti-Communist panic…I confront its immensity on a digital map of the secret air war waged over the Lao mountains.9 A white line traces innocently over gray the skeletal outline of landlocked Laos and its provinces. Battling on that very ground were the guerilla foot soldiers of global conflict, conscripted as vanguards of America's domino defense of Laos. This violence was branded on their flesh, as both terror and discipline.
I am struck by the continued reference to ghosts and invisibility. It seems that not only do the Hmong have to hold the hands of ghosts in their day-to-day recollections of surviving the war, they too must work not to become living ghosts as they struggle to survive in Western society. To me, this is the ultimate tragedy of war — it erases its victims. It erases them literally, or as we see here, figuratively, by driving them into lives of suffering and isolation. Our culture’s indifference to the costs of our endless wars also perpetuates the survivors’ invisibility. By refusing to acknowledge what has happened, we are turning our backs on those whose survival depends on us acknowledging and listening to those whom all those things happened to. This for me is why there seems to be a theme also of trying to avoid slipping into silence. The silence and invisibility induced by war is a perpetual continuation of its violence. Having voices out there who can give us the other side of the story are essential to us realizing the full implications of our wars. War thrives when there is no to speak out against it and these Hmong voices are fighting ongoing battles every day to try and not let the silent suffocation of war’s aftermath become their reality. In this way, these people will be living and reliving the war long after the last bombs have dropped.
I was thoroughly mystified by this piece and feel as though I would need at least a week of intensive rereading and note taking to address even half of the complex and numerous concepts and emotions discussed in the piece. Consequently, I will focus on a few particular lines that caught my attention. One line was, “Maybe becoming specters through a collective social death forces us to come to terms with having survived, and all that entails.” What struck me about this line was the way that Bee Vang writes about survivor’s guilt. He presents it in a way that acknowledges not just the feelings that survivors experience, but also the feelings that children and other relatives of survivors have. In this sense, he recognizes the ways in which war and trauma transcend individual experience. Such immense suffering and damage affects lives intergenerationally. This whole section, “Surviving, to Remap,” actually discusses the emotions, trauma, and responsibilities that survivors have simply as a result of surviving or being the “genetic product” of survival. For example, when Vang writes, “It is I who must labor to evoke a war that I inherit as its legatee, its progeny; it is my body bound to all the generations of the dead,” he speaks on the sometimes burdensome task of having the responsibility to represent and know about those who did not survive. Such is the nature of survival; you are expected to be knowledgeable of what was almost responsible for your demise. You are the lone voice to speak on your family because no one will care more than someone who so nearly died. Or, in the case of being a relative of a survivor, no one will care more than someone who so nearly never existed. In these ways, Vang talks about the complexities that arise from survival, and points out that the emotions that come out of survival make trauma and its effects a continual and ever pervading event in people’s lives.
I watch aghast as bright dots begin to appear, multiplying exponentially on the land from which I’ve been irrevocably severed. Red indicates cluster munitions; green signifies bigger bombs. In 1:38 minutes, the years 1965-1973 are marked—to the ironic accompaniment of sentimental piano melodies—by the accretion of dots. 2.1 million tons of bombs unleashing destruction every eight minutes round the clock for nine years. Each point on this map enveloped the living in a macabre dance of mutilation or death. Each point conveyed the disproportionate devastation visited upon the hills and valleys of Laos. Each point renders those whose lives continued on, and their escape, more subject to caprice.
Every life consumed by the encroachment of empire stains a not-so-buried memory, challenging any justification of the means by the ends.
Perversely, just when the extent of the bombings is unmasked, all I see is the survivors and the sacrificed still consigned to the sea of social death.
I resolve never to sink below the waterline of my own pool of silence.
…My father’s wet eyes escape
as far as the Sanger hills,
I often see his ghost
Wading through the drumbeats
As they pound from night to night…
…In a dream, I am unable
to outrun a dangerous man who said
he could take me to see my parents,
that all I had to do was jump
into that pond and beyond it
was all heaven.
Instead, I drown him
and walk back over those Sanger hills,
holding my father’s hand.
—Khaty Xiong10
I found this poem to be quite haunting, and not just because it contains ghosts (I’m sorry for the terrible pun). I think it speaks to a unique place in the minds of immigrant- or war-born children, a daunting choice between submerging oneself in memory and loss, or walking through it, alongside a past and a heritage you cannot hide from the world. I think it says a lot that this apparent child drowns the man instead of just ignoring him, as if walking by would not have been enough to get him to go away. The child must submerge the voice that tells him to submerge himself. The only way to be safe from the “dangerous man” is to attack him, and to continue walking with the ghosts of his family present with him at all times.
This poem artistically amplifies the authors’ argument that the Hmong people are not just a story, or a memory, or just another interchangeable tribe lost to war and history. The child and the father are real and present, returning home and making a mark on the land in a way that should not be misunderstood as the path of any other.
Hmong Americans live on to defy deathly muteness and make visible. We hold hands with ghosts. Like the drowning of the dangerous man, I resist those who would take me to the watery depths of annihilation inhabited by my kin.
This reminds me of the previous attempt at translation for the word kho-siab. There’s a huge difference in the past that Hmong Americans hold with them compared to Americans. It transcends simple description, it transcends facts. The ‘invisible’ that they must overcome after the bombings can only be described visually and with emotion. This whole essay is attempting to get at that I think, again mimicking the ways that Americans will never be able to understand. This devastation is so extreme and yet Americans tend to glaze over it, or be brought to white, guilty tears that are still lenses of their exoticism. No matter how Hmong Americans try to make Americans understand, they just never will because they do not have to hold the hands of ghosts.
So on a wintry day of 2013 in an American metropolis, I agreed to do a briefing in a large workplace with employees of multiple ages and backgrounds, to bear witness to the Hmong in America’s Indochina War. I flicked on the bombing map, and my audience watched, riveted and appalled, kindling remorse as the bright red and green flashes piled up, eclipsing the gray zones of peaceful existence. Stunned tears of guilt welled in eyes abruptly opened wide. These were tears that bespoke a First World unapologetic insularity. Precisely in their newfound proclamation of common humanity, they revealed themselves to be white tears.
I was wondering about Vang’s use of “white tears” in this paragraph because I could not figure out his tone in stating that. Does he mean “white” guild-ridden “tears,” and demonstrates a sort of criticism? Or does he mean just “white tears,” as in tears belonging to white Americans who previously have not felt this kind of sadness?
As I’m thinking more about this statement, I feel like it actually could be both. The juxtaposition in this paragraph contrasts the Americans’ applause and revelry over the movie with their tears, which suggests both a sense of shock and guilt. However, the shock is not fully justifiable, in my opinion. It brings the question of whether the Americans knew what was occurring in the war and just chose to ignore it, like in Nazi Germany. Their guilt may stem from that knowledge and from their lack of action, but may at first seem to be just guilt for the actions of Americans everywhere.
I was interested in this idea of “white tears” as well, because tears typically imply some kind of empathetic connection to the subject that is being discussed. The speaker seems to instead view the tears as a process of othering, as he suggests by the final line, “the magnitude of destruction… my people underwent was cast out as other in white eyes misty not only with renunciation but also with exoticism.” It can be argued that one cannot truly empathize with a situation until one has had first-hand experience with it. Because the audience presumably has not experienced such large scale destruction, their tears may not be viewed as genuine signifiers of empathy.
I too found this passage to be very interesting. I think I had the same reaction of suprise that this assumed sign of empathy would be taken as a bad thing in a way.
What I think it shows is how different the author feels from his audience. When he writes “Here, as in the ripping of air and the trembling of the earth from the bombs, is the introduction of chaos into the interstices of purported order.” As he teaches his audience about the bombing of Laos, his story rips through their order and normalcy like the bombs did through his own life. What he realizes is that this is the only taste of chaos they have really known and so that while they might feel empathy, this is not something that they have to deal with as their reality (at the end of the day they don’t have to live with the pain). The author on the other hand has to live with that pain every day, it is not merely some “exotic” or different teach-in— it is his whole reality. He knows that this lack of relevancy causes “the magnitude of destruction and immiseration my people underwent [to be] cast out as other in white eyes misty…” For his white audience, the war is not their reality so they do not need to really confront its full magnitude. I also think in this last point, he brings in a critique of Western sympathy to the suffering of the rest of the world. It’s so easy for us to watch a short video about the destruction of an entire people’s livelihood, cry a bit, write a handsome check and move on with our lives. The author is critical of this shallow empathy and points out the moral and experiential deficiencies we may face as people who did not live his and other’s realities (and choose not to confront their full tragedy by remaining blissfully ignorant).
Here, as in the ripping of air and the trembling of the earth from the bombs, is the introduction of chaos into the interstices of purported order. This white weeping, this sudden macabre apprehending and this fading bliss of ignorance, swallowed me whole. It is I who must labor to evoke a war that I inherit as its legatee, its progeny; it is my body bound to all the generations of the dead. And still, even as I stood before them, the magnitude of destruction and immiseration my people underwent was cast out as other in white eyes misty not only with renunciation but also with exoticism.
“It is my body bound to all the generations of the dead” can allude to many different things. For example, Bee could be saying that all his ancestors who were alive to give their authentic, unaltered versions of the Hmongs’ tale. However, the Hmong also worship their dead ancestors, and Bee could also be referring to an enlightenment that has been evoked by “the generations of the dead” that are now with him.
Back Piece #3, by Koua Mai Yang.
20 inches x 21 inches, mono print and xerox transfer,
The Hmong American Experience 2011.11
Beijing, 2012: Haunted by Empire
LS: A small classroom for twenty held an unusual crowd. Junior scholars from across China had assembled at Beijing University for a highly funded training in American ethnography in preparation for going to research the U.S. As an American scholar who had done ethnography in both China and the U.S., I was invited to give a series of workshops. I offered to screen a documentary that I had co-directed.12
We sweltered without air-conditioning in the close, late-July evening as the film rolled. It was a sequel: In The Best Place to Live (1981), we had documented the late-1970s resettlement of Hmong from Laos to Rhode Island. Twenty-five years later we had followed the original characters all over the U.S. to see what their lives had become, cutting together five of their stories to make Better Places (2011). The scholars watched dumbfounded as they viewed Hmong Americans in four-bedroom suburban homes, Hmong owning restaurants and real estate, Hmong journeying to the Lao hills now as pleasure-seeking tourists. Their benchmark was the putatively backward and impoverished Miao of southwest China who still cultivated terraced paddy fields with their hands, marginalized by Chinese modernization. They puzzled over how such people could survive in American cities.
But mountain peasants are not who the scholars encountered in that documentary hour. As the film wound to a close, questions emerged out of their incredulity at the Western lives these diasporics seemed to lead so effortlessly. How were they “adapting”? What cultural challenges did they face? And, in the voice of critique, they asked for more “ethnography,” by which they meant details about migrants’ quotidian experiences.
I attempted to explain that the documentary was made for an American audience nonplussed by daily life, who would be intrigued by the multifarious livelihood strategies and entrepreneurial ventures in which Hmong Americans had engaged since their involuntary arrival. We wanted to show, I continued, that these were not the stereotypical welfare dependent, non-English-speaking new arrivals daunted by U.S. residence and burdening the American economy.
Schein here is trying to explain to the scholars that the movie was made for an American audience, but the scholars aren’t buying it. They would like her to shed more light on some of the failures Hmong Americans had encountered. But this develops a dilemma for Schein. She could either anger the American audience by showing the failure stories of Hmong Americans, making it seem as if she was looking down on them, or she could anger the Chinese scholars, as she has done. If you show success, you inherently fail to bring to light the problematic failures that are occurring. Should you show a story of failure, you imply that Hmong Americans cannot succeed.
-Christopher, Benjamin, Richard
From the perspective of the audience I can see how they would see Schein’s documentary as US propaganda. The way the Hmong people were presented in the documentary made it appear that they were without struggle when it came to assimilating into American culture and their lives were so much better now since they had better jobs and such. The reaction to Schein’s documentary probably would have been more positive if she had shown the prequel, that way it wouldn’t have seemed like she was bias and the audience would have a better understanding of the Hmong migration experience. It would have made more sense if she’d shown both documentaries or at least the first one.
I can see both side of the argument as a documentary usually displays the truth of the general public, but it USUALLY does this some documentaries are aimed towards the wealthy or the prosperous so it should be alright.
Why, though, they countered, were refugees portrayed as so successful? Why hadn’t we shown how they struggled? Their sufferings? Their ill fit with American society, perhaps even their dislocation and unbelonging wrought by American racial thinking?
We found it interesting that there is a disparity between the perspectives of American and Chinese scholars about Hmong Americans. Better Places portrayed Hmong Americans as successful (“owning restaurants and real estate,” living in “four-bedroom suburban homes”). The Chinese scholars questioned why Hmong Americans were portrayed as so successful and not show their struggles. The Chinese Scholars believed that Hmong people were the less productive/successful Asians due to their origin.
-Yong Yang, Andrew Golden, Khanh Nguyen, Thuy Le
I floundered trying to defend our editing and narration choices: our concern was that a documentary that portrayed Hmong refugees as destitute and maladjusted would be viewed through the hostile filter of American anti-immigrant racism…
“The Best Place to Live” and “Better Places” depicted the success of Hmong refugees in creating a life for themselves as middle class entrepreneurs. The makers of the movie neglected to include and compare the hardships that were faced by refugees in establishing a identity and rising in socioeconomic status in fear of being accused of anti-immigration racism. With such fear in mind, how is the media to portray more than just a one-sided view that supports the after-effects of the war? (amanda, joseph, danxia, sarah)
It seems like Louisa Schein meant well with her documentary, and wanted to show Hmong refugees in the best possible light. However, in doing so, she painted an inaccurate portrait of refugee life. She says that their choice of showing successful refugees was to depart from the stereotypical struggling refugee, because they didn’t want Americans to view immigrants as purely a drain on the system, but rather contributing members of society. This raises an interesting question: is it better to be completely factual, even if it means playing into certain negative stereotypes, or is it better to omit certain things to avoid racism but which in the end paint a false picture?
But I wasn’t grasping the stakes for this discerning audience, an audience that called this the America-Vietnam War (for they were nationals of a country that had also been at war with Vietnam, and even more recently). This was the clincher for them: if white Americans made a film about the positive outcomes of Hmong immigration to the U.S., it would serve, ideologically, to downplay the havoc wreaked on Southeast Asians, the disruptions, the violence, the tearing away by political exigency of people from their homes. It would slyly exculpate Americans from the avalanche of destruction that our imperial quests had brought about. It would resignify this damage as opportunity, perhaps even as the American dream of resettlement and model minority achievement. It was not at all tenable, they insisted with more vitriol, to efface American bellicosity and empire through this disingenuous retelling…
This resonates with some points made in Nguyen’s essay “True War Stories.” In the essay, Nguyen covered the way Americans lived their lives normally during the Vietnam War and were not majorly concerned with the egregious bombing campaigns and violence that the US was conducting. The creators of this movie were not intent on ignorance. However, they’re attempt to appeal to an American audience led to making the content more positive. The focus on successful refugees rather than the struggle the refugees face is exactly what American would want to hear. Americans do not want to be told that their society is not properly accommodating and that American military actions are having harmful impacts on real people. If people knew the sheer quantity of bombs the US dropped on Cambodia and Laos during those 9 years and saw the impacts, they may be forced to take a stance against militarism. However, the cleaned up tales do not show this dark side and, thus, appeal more to the American audience.
I think this sentence resonates with an idea from Nguyen’s essay more or less. The idea of portraying war as a machine that creates opportunity to a better future and living standards for people, the refugees especially, in the U.S. downgrades the seriousness of war. It also fades away the fact and statistics on causalities, devastating encounters on the battleground, and the life time impacts war has on the veterans in people’s mind in the country that won the war. In Nguyen’s essay, he mentions how his family is a successful immigrants family, working at nice places and earning high salary. But that doesn’t make up or compensate for the enormous amount of lives lost on the battleground. It questions whether people ever feel guilty that someone else paid their lives for the lives that they now live in. It questions whether people ever feel guilty that the exchange comes hand in hand with carpet bombing and maybe even lost of limbs.
I became mute.
I may have come of age opposing “Vietnam.” I may have demonstrated against the war in junior high. I may have been a peace-seeking youth in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. But it has always been my war…And still is.
It rides along, clinging like a stealth demon on my back, suddenly shimmering into visibility in the eyes of Asians who haven’t forgotten.
Back Piece #1, by Koua Mai Yang. 18.75 inches x 19.50 inches, mixed media on muslin. The Hmong American Experience 2011.13
Severed from Memory: Repurposing Secrets
LS & BV: In a trippy, American-directed cinematic fantasy, Captain Willard slides silently into the eerie settlement where Colonel Kurtz rules the tribal peoples. Artifacts of Apocalypse Now, they stand in loincloths, bodies painted in white, afloat on raft-like boats on the river’s surface. Combative, but subdued. Their phalanx parts as they make way for the vessel on which the agent of U.S. intentions arrives to terminate the command of a rogue soldier who is waging his own war now…
Two decades later, accompanied by trippy music and visuals evocative of that foundational American blockbuster that beguilingly re-members the war as America’s story, two Australian journalists, in a docu-thriller titled The Search for Kurtz (1999), excavate a history closer to actual, crafting it for intertextuality like artisan editors. Candles flicker, shadows fall, chords reminiscent of The Doors entertain. Amidst this mise-en-scene, testimony is given in profile, faces darkened in journalistic privacy mode, but also echoing Brando’s enshroudment in dim and flickering light…
There was a CIA operative, interviewees both Hmong and American recount: “Tony Poe.” He was one of the team that persuaded Hmong hill people to fight with the U.S. They had quotas, recalls team member Jack Shirley; he had been asked to recruit a thousand Hmong.
Poe was different: he broke off on his own mission. And it was headquartered not at a swampy river’s head somewhere in a Cambodia made notorious by Pol Pot and the reels of The Killing Fields; instead, his base was in the riverless Lao highlands, in Hmong country.
Apocalypse Now calls them “montagnards” in a disclosure, tucked late in the film’s credits, which goes on to divulge that these tribal people were played by the Ifugao of the Philippines. None of the publicity for the mythical motion picture ever intimated a basis in the real—or surreal—struggles played out in the Lao mountains. Coppola steadfastly disavowed any referentiality to the Hmong or to the history of the Secret War.
What work is done when Kurtz is severed from his progenitor? Especially when the Hmong whose heads he let roll are no longer Hmong, but anytribe, interchangeable with the Ifugao of another country… What makes for a stronger secret—not telling, or telling otherwise? What yields more pleasure in the posterior recuperation?
(The heart squirms and darkens, witnessing America gluttonously consuming these filmic retellings; nameless “montagnards,” Hmong, the CIA and Tony Poe are ingested in a spectral drama for the melancholic nation that eats its lost object…)
Jack Shirley reminisces that Tony Poe stopped giving money for lopped off enemy ears when he heard that locals were cutting off their own children’s ears to collect the bounty. He ceased, then, for “humanitarian reasons,” figuring that if he offered rewards for cut-off heads instead, people would refrain from taking the knife to their loved ones.
Two fingers, we learn, had also been severed from Tony Poe’s own hand. For his interview, the filmmakers light him at an angle, enshrouded in darkness. The gnarly hand repeatedly rubs the bald crown of his head; we cannot forget the iconic Kurtz.
It’s true about the ears, admits Poe. One time he stapled eight to a report sent to Vientiane. They were so putrid by the time they arrived, he boasts, that the girl who opened the pouch vomited and was hospitalized for three weeks.
Was Apocalypse Now riffing on Poe’s perverse logic when Kurtz severed heads capriciously and with impunity? Was Tony Poe’s ethic in the mix? Or the rumor that Poe dropped severed heads onto enemy villages as psy ops? Was Apocalypse Now riffing when it included a monologue by Kurtz praising the courage and resolve of the communists who lopped off the arms of village children who had been inoculated?
Severed, too, were the hacked off head of a sacrificial carabao buffalo, and the head of Willard’s crew member “Chef,” dropping with a terrorizing thud onto bound Willard’s lap. Severed in horror. A horror resignified by Kurtz as genius.
Were the makers of Gran Torino riffing when their staging of an animal sacrifice far exceeded what Hmong on set insisted was accurate for their customary practice, a sacrifice in which a squawking chicken was stretched out for the kill by an assistant so that an ornamentally dressed shaman could prepare to slice through its neck, brandishing a blade not unlike the ones used by Apocalypse Now tribals when they ritually kill the carabao or by Willard when he ritually butchers Kurtz?
“Goddamn barbarians,” mutters Walt Kowalski watching through colonial eyes from his all-American Detroit porch. Is Walt namesake of the legendary Walter E. Kurtz?
After all these films, dense with the artifice of phantasmatic intertextual horror, recede a bit, Hmong actor-memoirist Teng Yang constructs his own pointed counter-script in 2011, re-enacting his still-living father’s child-soldier voice for a packed house in Providence, Rhode Island:
After reading all the vignettes the last one stood out to me, especially paragraphs 71-76. The vignette starts by talking about war movies that then twist to a real life example of what war was like for the veteran. The author of this vignette uses his father’s personal story after reflecting upon the movies that came out about war. The movies were considered artificial and dramatized which is not something war should be associated with. The story about his father seemed to be something that was real because the opening starts with " So I joined the military. At fourteen. Hell yes I was ready. Ask any little boy at fourteen if they would go to war…" this line represents the mind of a child at that time before war and shows the misconception people had about war. It’s like buying the product without reading the ingredients and then realizing you do not like the product overall because of certain ingredients it contains. War is the same kind of thing, one gets into it without knowing what’s really in store for them and once they are enrolled, they realize that its not something they are content with, but by that time its too late and they end up being scared for life.
The line " ….you kill to not be killed." shows that one is killing in order to stay alive instead of killing for revenge it like a survival game one must play and even at the end they are not happy because they have opened wounds that will never be closed. No matter how hard one tries the scars will be shown to the public and its up to one to decided whether they want to share the story behind it or keep it hidden so that others are not pained by their scar. The pictures that were painted in my head as I was reading the ending made me cringe. So imaging how one would feel about actually going through the war so something that I could not put myself going through. Sharing such stories help me realize that I’m grateful for not being a part of a war and makes me sympathizes with the individuals that did. It’s a way to bring light to what people have been through and to not take anything for granted. Its important to share these kinds of stories otherwise people will not be aware of what life has in store for them then history will repeat itself.
“So I joined the military. At fourteen. Hell yes I was ready. Ask any little boy at fourteen if they would go to war…You know what is the difference between those who watch and those who do?…The lingering fear in each raging heartbeat…
“I was leading sixty men. Brothers…cousins…Hmong people. We were up in route thirteen. In the jungles right by Vietnam. The Vietnamese were trying to sneak past us to get into Laos and we were the protectors of that area…
“Did I ever kill anybody?...Let’s get one thing straight. We were at war; at battle with people who too were trying to kill us. The musk of those fucking jungles cannot begin to depict the fear when the smell of gun fumes hits you…you kill to not be killed.
“My kids, they will never need to know war I hope. You never forget…Mounds of blood oozing from the pits of a human body. The flies that cover each gape. The smell of death. The silence that forced you to move on when a Hmong person, of flesh and blood, of kin and family, dies right in front of you…Makes you thankful you’re alive but it never leaves you. Not ever.
“Every day I think about war…”14
1 Later, I partnered with Va-Megn Thoj and Louisa to produce a YouTube parody of this scenario, flipping the script so that Asian characters are to “man up” a white Thao. Our title here riffs on the title of that short “Lost Scenes from Gran Torino: Thao Does Walt” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMaIOFMg64M (accessed 31 Jan. 2015).
2 For more illumination of how on-set experiences and direction impacted the acting and the production of the film, see Louisa Schein and Bee Vang, “The Unbearable Racedness of Being Natural: A Dialogue on the Gran Torino Production between Lead Actor Bee Vang and Louisa Schein,” Cultural Studies 28.4 (2014): 561-73.
3 “Imaginary Land,” Yang writes, “is a painting which symbolizes the Secret War. This painting is not an imagination, but rather a still life of the origins of the Hmong American experience inspired by stories about a land Hmong people once called home. Started in 2010, my series The Hmong American Experience continues to revisit what it means to be Hmong American. This series goes beyond visually representing Hmong; it portrays traditions, history, and culture through the mundane or through everyday experiences. I work to evoke a conversation about how tradition, culture, and textiles that have become symbols of Hmong American history, identity, and the inspiration for many Hmong people today.”
4 For more on General Vang Pao’s leadership and the import of his passing in 2011, see Mai Der Vang, “Death of a General,” in which she suggests, “It seemed that the loss of Laos created the need for a leader, someone who would usher the Hmong into the next migration, the next life.”
5 The Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 2000 was designed “to expedite the naturalization of aliens who served with special guerrilla units in Laos;” its mechanism was to “[waive] the English language requirement and [provide] special consideration for the civics requirement with respect to the naturalization of an alien” (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/106/hr371). A second bill was pursued in 2013, The Hmong Veterans Service Recognition Act, which “authorizes burial in any open national cemetery under the control of the National Cemetery Administration of the remains of any individual: (1) who was naturalized pursuant to the Hmong Veterans' Naturalization Act of 2000 and who resided in the United States at the time of death; or (2) who the Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) determines served with a special guerrilla unit or irregular forces operating from a base in Laos in support of the U.S. Armed Forces between February 28, 1961, and May 7, 1975, and who, at the time of death, resided in the United States and was a U.S. citizen or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence” (https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3369). Note that to date no material benefits have been approved for Hmong veterans.
6 Did they make a difference, these aspiring new Americans questing to have earned belonging? How can that be judged when grumpy white American vets still routinely tell them to go back to where they came from, or slur them as the Viet Cong enemy for the mere color of their skin? How can that be answered when past warriorhood in Southeast Asia morphs, in American eyes, into gun-wielding gangsterhood?
7 This excerpt is part of the preamble of a theatrical script that Teng Yang authored and performed as part of an Ethnic Studies Honors Thesis, “American Hmong: A Memoir Play,” Brown University, May 2011, 9.
8 “The Table,” writes Yang, “is an observation drawing influenced by common Hmong American life after the Vietnam War. Seated at this table are Hmong veterans, elders, fathers, uncles and sons. Missing from The Table and missing from the stories of war are the Hmong women.”
9 “Bombing Missions Over Laos From 1965-1973,” Mother Jones, 26 Mar. 2014. [Video file] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UM2eYLbzXg (accessed 27 Jan. 2015).
10 “A Pond with No Fish,” in How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology, ed. Hmong American Writer’s Circle (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2011), 129-30.
11 According to Yang, “There is a common belief that Hmong people record their history and experiences on their clothing. Back Piece #3 continues this tradition through Hmong women’s textiles. Represented is a ‘dab tshos,’ an adornment that hangs on the back of traditional women’s clothing.”
12 Peter O'Neill and Louisa Schein, co-directors, co-editors, Better Places: Hmong of Rhode Island a Generation Later, 2011 (Sequel to The Best Place to Live, 1981).
13 Yang explains, “Back Piece #1 is a drawing symbolizing the Vietnam War. The images are influenced by paj ntaub and story cloths arranged in a traditional dab tshos shape. This back piece is inspired by the language of the Secret War, a historical event that is still a secret in America, yet recorded in Hmong American memories.”
14 Teng Yang, “American Hmong,” 11-12.
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