The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Read online

  Foua’s own date of birth was recorded on Lia’s Delivery Room Record as October 6, 1944. In fact, she has no idea when she was born, and on various other occasions during the next several years she would inform MCMC personnel, through English-speaking relatives such as the nephew’s wife who had helped her check into the hospital for Lia’s delivery, that her date of birth was October 6, 1942, or, more frequently, October 6, 1926. Not a single admitting clerk ever appears to have questioned the latter date, though it would imply that Foua gave birth to Lia at the age of 55. Foua is quite sure, however, that October is correct, since she was told by her parents that she was born during the season in which the opium fields are weeded for the second time and the harvested rice stalks are stacked. She invented the precise day of the month, like the year, in order to satisfy the many Americans who have evinced an abhorrence of unfilled blanks on the innumerable forms the Lees have encountered since their admission to the United States in 1980. Most Hmong refugees are familiar with this American trait and have accommodated it in the same way. Nao Kao Lee has a first cousin who told the immigration officials that all nine of his children were born on July 15, in nine consecutive years, and this information was duly recorded on their resident alien documents.

  When Lia Lee was released from MCMC, at the age of three days, her mother was asked to sign a piece of paper that read:

  I CERTIFY that during the discharge procedure I received my baby, examined it and determined that it was mine. I checked the Ident-A-Band® parts sealed on the baby and on me and found that they were identically numbered 5043 and contained correct identifying information.

  Since Foua cannot read and has never learned to recognize Arabic numerals, it is unlikely that she followed these instructions. However, she had been asked for her signature so often in the United States that she had mastered the capital forms of the seven different letters contained in her name, Foua Yang. (The Yangs and the Lees are among the largest of the Hmong clans; the other major ones are the Chas, the Chengs, the Hangs, the Hers, the Kues, the Los, the Mouas, the Thaos, the Vues, the Xiongs, and the Vangs. In Laos, the clan name came first, but most Hmong refugees in the United States use it as a surname. Children belong to their father’s clan; women traditionally retain their clan name after marriage. Marrying a member of one’s own clan is strictly taboo.) Foua’s signature is no less legible than the signatures of most of MCMC’s resident physicians-in-training, which, particularly if they are written toward the end of a twenty-four-hour shift, tend to resemble EEGs. However, it has the unique distinction of looking different each time it appears on a hospital document. On this occasion, FOUAYANG was written as a single word. One A is canted to the left and one to the right, the Y looks like an X, and the legs of the N undulate gracefully, like a child’s drawing of a wave.

  It is a credit to Foua’s general equanimity, as well as her characteristic desire not to think ill of anyone, that although she found Lia’s birth a peculiar experience, she has few criticisms of the way the hospital handled it. Her doubts about MCMC in particular, and American medicine in general, would not begin to gather force until Lia had visited the hospital many times. On this occasion, she thought the doctor was gentle and kind, she was impressed that so many people were there to help her, and although she felt that the nurses who bathed Lia with Safeguard did not get her quite as clean as she had gotten her newborns with Laotian stream water, her only major complaint concerned the hospital food. She was surprised to be offered ice water after the birth, since many Hmong believe that cold foods during the postpartum period make the blood congeal in the womb instead of cleansing it by flowing freely, and that a woman who does not observe the taboo against them will develop itchy skin or diarrhea in her old age. Foua did accept several cups of what she remembers as hot black water. This was probably either tea or beef broth; Foua is sure it wasn’t coffee, which she had seen before and would have recognized. The black water was the only MCMC-provided food that passed her lips during her stay in the maternity ward. Each day, Nao Kao cooked and brought her the diet that is strictly prescribed for Hmong women during the thirty days following childbirth: steamed rice, and chicken boiled in water with five special postpartum herbs (which the Lees had grown for this purpose on the edge of the parking lot behind their apartment building). This diet was familiar to the doctors on the Labor and Delivery floor at MCMC, whose assessments of it were fairly accurate gauges of their general opinion of the Hmong. One obstetrician, Raquel Arias, recalled, “The Hmong men carried these nice little silver cans to the hospital that always had some kind of chicken soup in them and always smelled great.” Another obstetrician, Robert Small, said, “They always brought some horrible stinking concoction that smelled like the chicken had been dead for a week.” Foua never shared her meals with anyone, because there is a postpartum taboo against spilling grains of rice accidentally into the chicken pot. If that occurs, the newborn is likely to break out across the nose and cheeks with little white pimples whose name in the Hmong language is the same as the word for “rice.”

  Some Hmong parents in Merced have given their children American names. In addition to many standard ones, these have included Kennedy, Nixon, Pajama, Guitar, Main (after Merced’s Main Street), and, until a nurse counseled otherwise, Baby Boy, which one mother, seeing it written on her son’s hospital papers, assumed was the name the doctor had already chosen for him. The Lees chose to give their daughter a Hmong name, Lia. Her name was officially conferred in a ceremony called a hu plig, or soul-calling, which in Laos always took place on the third day after birth. Until this ceremony was performed, a baby was not considered to be fully a member of the human race, and if it died during its first three days it was not accorded the customary funerary rites. (This may have been a cultural adaptation to the fifty-percent infant mortality rate, a way of steeling Hmong mothers against the frequent loss of their babies during or shortly after childbirth by encouraging them to postpone their attachment.) In the United States, the naming is usually celebrated at a later time, since on its third day a baby may still be hospitalized, especially if the birth was complicated. It took the Lee family about a month to save enough money from their welfare checks, and from gifts from their relatives’ welfare checks, to finance a soul-calling party for Lia.

  Although the Hmong believe that illness can be caused by a variety of sources—including eating the wrong food, drinking contaminated water, being affected by a change in the weather, failing to ejaculate completely during sexual intercourse, neglecting to make offerings to one’s ancestors, being punished for one’s ancestors’ transgressions, being cursed, being hit by a whirlwind, having a stone implanted in one’s body by an evil spirit master, having one’s blood sucked by a dab, bumping into a dab who lives in a tree or a stream, digging a well in a dab’s living place, catching sight of a dwarf female dab who eats earthworms, having a dab sit on one’s chest while one is sleeping, doing one’s laundry in a lake inhabited by a dragon, pointing one’s finger at the full moon, touching a newborn mouse, killing a large snake, urinating on a rock that looks like a tiger, urinating on or kicking a benevolent house spirit, or having bird droppings fall on one’s head—by far the most common cause of illness is soul loss. Although the Hmong do not agree on just how many souls people have (estimates range from one to thirty-two; the Lees believe there is only one), there is a general consensus that whatever the number, it is the life-soul, whose presence is necessary for health and happiness, that tends to get lost. A life-soul can become separated from its body through anger, grief, fear, curiosity, or wanderlust. The life-souls of newborn babies are especially prone to disappearance, since they are so small, so vulnerable, and so precariously poised between the realm of the unseen, from which they have just traveled, and the realm of the living. Babies’ souls may wander away, drawn by bright colors, sweet sounds, or fragrant smells; they may leave if a baby is sad, lonely, or insufficiently loved by its parents; they may be frightened away by a sudden loud n
oise; or they may be stolen by a dab. Some Hmong are careful never to say aloud that a baby is pretty, lest a dab be listening. Hmong babies are often dressed in intricately embroidered hats (Foua made several for Lia) which, when seen from a heavenly perspective, might fool a predatory dab into thinking the child was a flower. They spend much of their time swaddled against their mothers’ backs in cloth carriers called nyias (Foua made Lia several of these too) that have been embroidered with soul-retaining motifs, such as the pigpen, which symbolizes enclosure. They may wear silver necklaces fastened with soul-shackling locks. When babies or small children go on an outing, their parents may call loudly to their souls before the family returns home, to make sure that none remain behind. Hmong families in Merced can sometimes be heard doing this when they leave local parks after a picnic. None of these ploys can work, however, unless the soul-calling ritual has already been properly observed.

  Lia’s hu plig took place in the living room of her family’s apartment. There were so many guests, all of them Hmong and most of them members of the Lee and Yang clans, that it was nearly impossible to turn around. Foua and Nao Kao were proud that so many people had come to celebrate their good fortune in being favored with such a healthy and beautiful daughter. That morning Nao Kao had sacrificed a pig in order to invite the soul of one of Lia’s ancestors, which was probably hungry and would appreciate an offering of food, to be reborn in her body. After the guests arrived, an elder of the Yang clan stood at the apartment’s open front door, facing East 12th Street, with two live chickens in a bag on the floor next to him, and chanted a greeting to Lia’s soul. The two chickens were then killed, plucked, eviscerated, partially boiled, retrieved from the cooking pot, and examined to see if their skulls were translucent and their tongues curled upward, both signs that Lia’s new soul was pleased to take up residence in her body and that her name was a good one. (If the signs had been inauspicious, the soul-caller would have recommended that another name be chosen.) After the reading of the auguries, the chickens were put back in the cooking pot. The guests would later eat them and the pig for dinner. Before the meal, the soul-caller brushed Lia’s hands with a bundle of short white strings and said, “I am sweeping away the ways of sickness.” Then Lia’s parents and all of the elders present in the room each tied a string around one of Lia’s wrists in order to bind her soul securely to her body. Foua and Nao Kao promised to love her; the elders blessed her and prayed that she would have a long life and that she would never become sick.

  2

  Fish Soup

  In an intermediate French class at Merced College a few years ago, the students were assigned a five-minute oral report, to be delivered in French. The second student to stand up in front of the class was a young Hmong man. His chosen topic was a recipe for la soupe de poisson: Fish Soup. To prepare Fish Soup, he said, you must have a fish, and in order to have a fish, you have to go fishing. In order to go fishing, you need a hook, and in order to choose the right hook, you need to know whether the fish you are fishing for lives in fresh or salt water, how big it is, and what shape its mouth is. Continuing in this vein for forty-five minutes, the student filled the blackboard with a complexly branching tree of factors and options, a sort of piscatory flowchart, written in French with an overlay of Hmong. He also told several anecdotes about his own fishing experiences. He concluded with a description of how to clean various kinds of fish, how to cut them up, and, finally, how to cook them in broths flavored with various herbs. When the class period ended, he told the other students that he hoped he had provided enough information, and he wished them good luck in preparing Fish Soup in the Hmong manner.

  The professor of French who told me this story said, “Fish Soup. That’s the essence of the Hmong.” The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means “to speak of all kinds of things.” It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are; that no event occurs in isolation; that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point; and that the storyteller is likely to be rather long-winded. I once heard Nao Kao Lee begin a description of his village in Laos by saying, “It was where I was born and where my father was born and died and was buried and where my father’s father died and was buried, but my father’s father was born in China and to tell you about that would take all night.” If a Hmong tells a fable, for example, about Why Animals Cannot Talk or Why Doodle Bugs Roll Balls of Dung, he is likely to begin with the beginning of the world. (Actually, according to Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, a bilingual collection edited by Charles Johnson, those two fables go back only to the second beginning of the world, the time after the universe turned upside down and the earth was flooded with water and everyone drowned except a brother and sister who married each other and had a child who looked like an egg, whom they hacked into small pieces.) If I were Hmong, I might feel that what happened when Lia Lee and her family encountered the American medical system could be understood fully only by beginning with the first beginning of the world. But since I am not Hmong, I will go back only a few hundred generations, to the time when the Hmong were living in the river plains of north-central China.

  For as long as it has been recorded, the history of the Hmong has been a marathon series of bloody scrimmages, punctuated by occasional periods of peace, though hardly any of plenty. Over and over again, the Hmong have responded to persecution and to pressures to assimilate by either fighting or migrating—a pattern that has been repeated so many times, in so many different eras and places, that it begins to seem almost a genetic trait, as inevitable in its recurrence as their straight hair or their short, sturdy stature. Most of the conflicts took place in China, to which the prehistoric ancestors of the Hmong are thought to have migrated from Eurasia, with a stopover of a few millennia in Siberia. These northerly roots would explain the references in Hmong rituals, including some that are still practiced during the New Year celebrations and at funerals, to a Hmong homeland called Ntuj Khaib Huab, which (according to a 1924 account by François Marie Savina, a French apostolic missionary who served in Laos and Tonkin) “was perpetually covered with snow and ice; where the days and the nights each lasted for six months; the trees were scarce and very small; and the people were also very small, and dressed entirely in furs.” European ancestry would also explain why the Hmong have fairer skin than other Asian peoples, no epicanthic folds beneath their eyelids, and sometimes big noses. It would not explain why Ssu-ma Ch’ien, a Chinese scholar of the Han dynasty in the second century B.C., described the Hmong as a race “whose face, eyes, feet, and hands resembled those of other people, but under their armpits they had wings, with which, however, they were unable to fly.” It would also fail to explain why, as late as the nineteenth century, many Chinese claimed that the Hmong had small tails.

  The Chinese called the Hmong the Miao or Meo, which means, depending on which linguistic historian you read, “barbarians,” “bumpkins,” “people who sound like cats,” or “wild uncultivated grasses.” In any case, it was an insult. (“Hmong,” the name they prefer themselves, is usually said to mean “free men,” but some scholars say that, like “Inuit,” “Dine,” and many other tribal names the world over, it simply means “the people.”) The Hmong called the Chinese sons of dogs. The Chinese viewed the Hmong as fearless, uncouth, and recalcitrant. It was a continuing slap in the face that they never evinced any interest in adopting the civilized customs of Chinese culture, preferring to keep to themselves, marry each other, speak their own language, wear their own tribal dress, play their own musical instruments, and practice their own religion. They never even ate with chopsticks. The Hmong viewed the Chinese as meddlesome and oppressive, and rebelled against their sovereignty in hundreds of small and large revolts. Though both sides were equally violent, it was not a symmetrical relationship. The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; t
hey wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.

  The earliest account of Hmong-Chinese relations concerns a probably mythical, but emotionally resonant, emperor named Hoang-ti, who was said to have lived around 2700 B.C. Hoang-ti decided that the Hmong were too barbaric to be governed by the same laws as everyone else, and that they would henceforth be subject to a special criminal code. Instead of being imprisoned like other offenders, the Hmong who were not executed outright were to have their noses, ears, or testicles sliced off. The Hmong rebelled; the Chinese cracked down; the Hmong rebelled again; the Chinese cracked down again; and after a few centuries of this the Hmong gradually retreated from their rice fields in the valleys of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, moving to more and more southerly latitudes and higher and higher altitudes. “That is how the Miao* became mountain people,” wrote Father Savina. “That is also how they were able to preserve their independence in the midst of other peoples, maintaining intact, along with their language and their customs, the ethnic spirit of their race.”