Laos
Approximately half a million Hmong people live in northern Laos. During the Vietnam War, the Hmong aligned themselves with the United States and to this day they remain fiercely anti-communist and independent. Unfortunately for the Hmong, Laos remains a one-party socialist nation that continues to espouse the philosophies of Marx and Lenin. While most of the Hmong have been subdued by the government, a few thousand—the Hmong ChaoFa—still fight on from their jungle hideouts.
We were introduced to the Hmong culture by Yah (pronounced like the cheer Americans give their sports team) in Luang Prabang, Laos. He took us on winding roads through the mountains to a Hmong village. We brought pencils and paper to the elementary school and then were allowed to watch a shaman undertake a healing ceremony. The shaman wore a hood and balanced on a wooden bench while his assistants sacrificed a pig. Even more interesting was Yah’s personal story.
Yah’s Story
“My grandfather just celebrated his 104th birthday. He worked for the CIA during the Vietnam War and received a letter granting him safe passage to the United States. All he needed to do was make it to the designated refugee camp in Thailand. Unfortunately, communist soldiers identified him at the ferry crossing, and he had to dive into the Mekong River. He swam as fast as he could as bullets splashed all around him. While he managed to escape, his letter and passport were washed away. He made it to the refugee camp, but they turned him away. He had lost his chance to become an American and had no choice but to return to our mountain village. That’s where I grew up.
“Because we Hmong were on the wrong side of the war, the communist government provided us with little support. The nearest elementary school was a two-hour walk through the jungle of a national park. I had no shoes, either. Each morning, I rose at dawn and marched bare-footed through the darkness. I was scared of the animals. There were still tigers then, but fortunately I never saw one. I did step on giant centipedes seven times, though. To this day, I know how many I stepped on because their bites were so painful.
“The worst days, though, were the two times I was bitten on the hand by a tree viper. My parents had to bring the shaman to our hut to save my life. There are certain hawks that eat vipers as part of their diet. The shaman made me drink a tea made of the ground remains of these hawk’s talons—which were believed to hold a kind of anti-venom. It did seem to work, and I eventually recovered.
“Most of the other students in my village gave up on school. I was one of the few that kept walking the four-hour round trip. But when elementary school was over, there was no other school I could walk to. To continue my education, I would have to go away to boarding school, something my family could not afford.
“When I was eleven, they put me to work on their poppy farm. It wasn’t for me, though. I had learned enough from my grandfather’s stories to know that my destiny lay elsewhere. So, I ran away to the village where the school was and stowed away in the back of a truck heading south. When it stopped, I found myself in Luang Prabang.
“I was hungry and scared. Smelling food, I approached a Buddhist monastery. The monks took me in. Even better, they also ran a school. I was able to work in exchange for continuing my education.
“Buddhism was both familiar and strange to me. We Hmong are spirit worshippers and believe that each person has multiple spirits. When we die, one of our souls is reborn as another’s body, similar to Buddhism’s reincarnation, another stays behind to watch over its family, and yet another continues on to live in the spirit world, similar to your heaven.
“After I learned everything they had to teach, the monks thought I should go on to the university in Laos’s capital. They found me a scholarship, and that paid for my first couple of years. Unfortunately, the scholarship ran out, and I had to start paying my own way. I needed to work on the weekend—so that I could go to school during the week. I found a job at a rock quarry that paid $5 per ton of rock hauled up to a barge waiting on the Mekong River. On a good day, I managed four tons over eighteen hours of work. It paid off, though. Those rocks put me through college and law school, where I finished in the top 10 percent on the Laos bar exam. That’s how I became the first Hmong lawyer in Laos.”