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13. Hmong Refugee’s Death Fugue
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Hmong Refugee’s Death Fugue Hmong Refugee’s Death Fugue / 217 1 3 Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown We drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night We drink and we drink it —Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” Paul Celan’s Holocaust poem suffocates in the black smoke rising from the crematoriums’ chimneys, shrouding inmates as well as survivors’ consciousness , including daily rituals as simple as drinking milk. A disturbing parallel exists between Celan’s death fugue and the Hmong’s, one which mourns their loss in the Southeast Asian conflict since the 1970s. Similar to Celan’s fugue, the Hmong’s collective story is filled with refrains, thematic variations of demise. “I come to this foreign land,/without young brothers, without old brothers,/and the others eat, while I watch like a dog waiting for scraps” (Vang and Lewis, Grandmother’s Path, Grandfather’s Way 1990, p. 124), thus sings the Hmong woman Lee Txai in a Thai refugee camp in 1980.1 Her self-image plummets as a result of, among other things, the wretched living conditions and the uncertainty in the camp. One would like to believe the myth that adversity comes to a miraculous end once these refugees of the Southeast Asian conflict have arrived in the United States. However, the sense of loneliness , loss, and shame becomes magnified amongst Hmong refugees relocated to the United States, as Lillian Faderman’s informant, Kia Vue, laments in I Begin My Life All Over (1998): “Now we ride on their [the narrator’s children] shoulders, through lands that are of gold, jungles that are of paradise—and yet I feel we’re drowning, like many of our people who did not make it across the Mekong” (p. 174). While praising the United States as golden and paradisal, Kia Vue subconsciously associates it with the Hmong trauma of fleeing the Communists through the Southeast Asian “jungles” and crossing the Mekong River to reach Thai refugee camps in the mid-1970s. More revealingly, life in 218 / Intercut on Asian Deceased the United States is cast as a “protracted drowning.” One wonders whether the refugees have indeed begun a new life—as Faderman’s book title suggests— or whether they are dying a slow death, evidenced by the eerily similar testimonies of Kia Vue and a host of her compatriots. Their tales of survival are simultaneously a litany of deaths they have witnessed and a dirge for themselves . It is this collective affect out of a suspension between life and death to which I wish to lend my ears. To attend to their death fugue, a comprehensive review of the literature on Hmong refugees is in order, from psychology, mental health, education, and journalism to sociology, anthropology, arts and crafts, and oral history. One must be exceptionally vigilant in this review of literature over the past three decades to pick out fragments of Hmong voices. As a preliterate, refugee community, Hmong experience comes to us heavily mediated by the West. Social scientists have tracked the Hmong migration pattern; health providers have researched how to tailor modern medicine to the Hmong’s animistic beliefs; English as a Second Language teachers have prepared primers based on Hmong folklore. Indeed, without such conscientious effort of Western scholars and writers, the Hmong saga would be in danger of vanishing. For instance, Anne Fadiman’s award-winning The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) retrieved what could have become a mere statistic and wove it into a nuanced portrayal of Hmong belief and lifestyle. Fadiman elucidated the Hmong perception of “epilepsy” as qaug dab peg, literally “‘the spirit catches you and you fall down.’ The spirit referred to...is a soul-stealing dab” (p. 20). Charles Johnson laboriously compiled Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos (1985), a bilingual edition of Hmong folktales that serves both as a primer of the English language for the Hmong and an introduction to Hmong culture for English-speakers. Marsha MacDowell and others collected and analyzed the Hmong story cloths on which part of this essay is based. Such works have created the framework for understanding the Hmong experience. In accordance with the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s reluctance to “comprehend” the Nazi genocide, I propose to venture out of the scholarly frame in order to better heed the Hmong death fugue. Levi writes in the Afterword to Shema (1976): “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one...