116 Part II: Outsiders
Hmong responded it was because they were not allowed to rule themselves. So
the French gave them control of the region where many Hmong lived” (Fang et
al. 1994).
Jou Yee Xiong was a proud highland cultivator who believed that Hmong
who went to the lowlands got sick from lowland diseases brought on by the
Lao people working black magic against them. They were safe but poor in the
mountains, where people shared tools to prepare their fields for planting,
hunted wild boar for meat, and raised opium poppies for the cash they needed
to pay taxes to the French. Lowland Lao merchants would buy their opium
with cash or with sugarcane. They grew hemp for the fiber to make their own
clothes, which the women embroidered for the big New Years’ celebrations.
Many of them went barefoot to work in the fields and even to hunt.
Then the Americans came. Some of the greatest Hmong leaders, Vang Pao
and Touby Lyfong, allied with the Americans against the Red Laotians—the
Communist Pathet Lao. Vang Pao came to his village to raise fighters to help
the Americans build a base and an airstrip. Jou Yee Xiong joined this effort for
a time but eventually pleaded to be allowed to return to his family to build a
new village on the edge of the jungle. For 10 years they built new fields, learned
how to talk to the buffaloes to induce them to plow the fields, grew rice, sugar-
cane, and pineapples, and prospered. But then in 1975 the war ended and Gen-
eral Vang Pao had to leave the country with the Americans, and Jou Yee Xiong
and his family had to go as well, because there was no one left to protect them.
Vang Pao warned them they had one month to get out; after that, it would be
too late. Jou Yee Xiong was in charge of 60 families who left everything behind
them, walking to Thailand for 28 days. After months in refugee camps, he and
his family finally got papers to come to America. He has grown old in Santa
Barbara, California.
Of all the nonstate people living in the rugged highlands of East and South-
east Asia, the most widely traveled are the Hmong. For several thousand years
they were known to the Chinese as Miao, limited to the upland areas of China
where they had a reputation for being unruly and fierce fighters, resisting and
often enough harassing various Chinese dynasties attempting to pacify their
hinterlands. There were fierce rebellions in southern China in the eighteenth
century in which Jou Yee Xiong’s ancestors fought, following which they
began moving southward into areas controlled by lowland padi states that
became Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. There they adapted to new
forest and highland ecologies with swiddening and, in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, cash crops like opium.
During the Vietnam War the CIA hired thousands of Hmong men to fight
in the covert war in Laos, employing them in tracking, intercepting convoys
along jungle paths, and protecting mountain airstrips. At the end of the war,
these Laotian Hmong fled for their lives to refugee camps in Cambodia, and
eventually thousands resettled in the United States, France, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and Germany.