Last year’s intern at Awoko was a young Japanese man named Yu Nakayama. He warned me that many people I would pass by in the street would call me “China.” He forgot to add the name “Ching Chong,” of which I’ve also been dubbed by many people I pass on the street as well.
Some greet me saying, “Ni hao,” which is Mandarin for hello. Others, normally children, go as far as to make odd sound effects that they think pass as some semblance of a Chinese language.
No one in the States would dare call me something like “Ching Chong,” if only because we have built the reputation of a racially sensitive country that embraces people of all colors and creeds.
But having people assume I’m Chinese in this country doesn’t bother me because many of the people simply don’t know better. So I just brush it off. I often jokingly consider just giving up in exasperation and saying I’m Chinese because it is otherwise difficult to explain exactly what my ethnicity is.
I am Hmong (pronounced Mong, with a silent “H”) a small tribal ethnic minority that predominantly live in the mountains of Laos and the northern part of Thailand in Southeast Asia.
We are analogous to Sierra Leone’s many tribes, such as the Mende, Mandigo and Temne. The difference is we don’t really have a country to call our own.
All the tribal groups of Sierra Leone would consider themselves Sierra Leoneans; the same cannot be said for Hmong people. Although many come from Laos or Thailand, we do not identify with being Laotian or Thai because we have our own culture and language that is distinct from theirs.
My parents grew up not unlike how many of the poorest people in this country particularly upcountry grew up: a life dominated by backbreaking farm labor, poverty and illiteracy.
When they found out I would be coming here, they wanted me to get a sense of how they lived when they were my age. They wanted me to see what poverty is like in a developing nation. They wanted me to be thrown out of my spoiled and comfortable life that they painstakingly built for me so I could get a brief taste of how they used to live.
My parents came to the States as refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a controversial period of time in United States history. It was a war that had little support from the American people. It was a war that many argue we never should have involved ourselves in. All of Southeast Asia was a mess during the 1960s and 70s. The Central Intelligence Agency, an American government organization, went into Laos and trained Hmong men to be guerilla soldiers during the Vietnam War. Communists from North Vietnam were using Laos as a pathway to transport weapons. The Hmong soldiers’ jobs were to prevent that.
Many of these men only knew primitive village life and, all of a sudden, here came these strange white men teaching them how to shoot guns and even fly fighter planes. They fought bravely. Many Vietnam War veterans credit the Hmong soldiers for preventing the number of American casualties from reaching a far higher number than it did. In return for their assistance, the Hmong were promised protection from the Communist government of Laos.
The Americans pulled out of the war in April 1975. They abandoned the Hmong people, who were left to fend for themselves against a vengeful Communist government that wanted to persecute them for assisting the Americans. Many traveled through the jungles of Laos to cross into refugee camps in Thailand, not unlike how many people traveled to Freetown in order to find safety from the rebels during Sierra Leone’s civil war. And just like that war, many never made it to safety.
My parents made it to the refugee camps in Thailand, where they were eventually sponsored to come to the United States in 1979. I was born eight years later, never knowing what Third World poverty was like, never knowing a life of war, never knowing the experience of running for your life.
Seeing an illiterate woman working in a muddy rice swamp with no shoes on to having a poor beggar child hug me are things that make me pity Sierra Leone.
But as I think about my heritage, I realize just how close I was to living that kind of life as well.
And I realize how truly lucky I am.
By Vue’s
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