My trip to Laos was not a vacation.
I went there with this expectation that I was going to find the missing parts to my identity as a Hmong American. I thought I would find a deep connection to my parent’s homeland that I had only heard about in stories. I thought that I would arrive back in the United States no longer feeling in limbo between my Hmong identity and my American identity.
I was wrong.
Ever since arriving back into the United States, I’ve been slowly unraveling the strange clash of feelings that have made the divide between my two identities even stronger. As I come closer to fully comprehending the significance of Laos, I encounter a darker truth to how the United States strangles nations around the world and what that means to myself, not just as a Hmong person but also as an American citizen.
I remember something changing inside of me as I walked out of Tham Piu Cave in Xieng Khouang. Our tour guide told us about how 340 innocent Lao civilians died in that cave, at the hands of an American bomber pilot who dropped a bomb into it thinking it might’ve been filled with Vietcong Soldiers.
Isn’t that funny? That to an American fighter pilot sitting high in the sky, a cave full of Lao children, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents is no different than Vietcong Soldiers? Isn’t it funny that there isn’t a moment of consideration that maybe there are innocent lives in that cave?
Just a press of a button and the obliteration of bombs. Some of them were so unlucky that they didn’t even die immediately. They just remain trapped in the cave, slowly dying by the fumes of the bomb, feeling the excruciating pain coursing through their whole body until they took their last breath.
As Americans, isn’t our most immediate responsibility to hold this country accountable to the atrocities that it continues to commit to this very day? But instead of Lao, Vietnamese, and Hmong bodies being seen as disposable by the American government, it’s now just a different group of brown skinned people in different parts of the world being wasted away in the name of democracy. As though our country wasn’t built through Native American genocide and the enslavement of peaceful people in Africa who deserved none of what they went through? Or do we just not care, as though these American atrocities were a work of fiction and that the the wars and the ways we continue to destabilize countries isn’t an actual thing?
Isn’t it our main responsibility to take the tools, resources, and opportunities given to us by this country and turn it around so we can empower people who have been historically beaten down mentally, spiritually, and physically by this very country? And not just our own people, but all people who have ever been seen as “less than” by the colonizing mentality?
Isn’t it our responsibility to make this country a better place? Not the “check-out-this-state-of-the-art-apartment-building-that-no-one-can-afford” kind of better, but the “mental- spiritual-and-physical-wellbeing-of-all-people” kind of better. Isn’t it our responsibility to look in the mirror everyday and remind ourselves that we need to do good within our lives and in return ask this country the same?
My experience in Laos was a slap in the face to the realities of our history as Hmong people and the facade that is constructed around us as we live in America.
We’ve convinced ourselves that it is a fortunate thing to live in American without acknowledging that the American government used Hmong men and boys to die in place of American soldiers in a war that was not ours to fight. Hmong brothers, fathers, uncles, and grandfathers died because the American government saw our mind, bodies, and spirits as less valuable than an American’s.
“- President Eisenhower was looking for ways to stabilize the situation in Laos without having to introduce American troops into the conflict. He therefore viewed with favor a CIA proposal to arm and train Hmong tribesmen.” (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html)
And after the American military lost the war, they decide to desert us? Then we had to knock on their door and remind them that they came to us, the Hmong people, for help and that we are now enemies of the Lao country because of them and that the very least they can do is maybe open the door for us into this god forsaken country where freedom is taught as something earned by working a 9–5 for 50 years and then given to us when we can barely walk anymore?
The Hmong people KNEW what freedom was, because when the Han Dynasty thought they could subjugate us to their control by trying to take us over, we said NO THANKS. And we fought back, and when victory over the colonizing and terrorizing force was no longer possible, we told ourselves and our people that we still at least have our freedom, a freedom that we are BORN WITH. So we made our way south to the mountains where they wouldn’t be able to control us and tell us how to live our lives.
And when the Lao government attempted to do the same, we did the same thing we did against the Han Dynasty, we fought back and said NO THANKS. We don’t want whatever you have to offer us, we just want to be able to dictate our own lives and be the masters of our own lives.
And it wasn’t even as though we were living within eye sight of highly populated Lao cities, taking away their resources. We lived in the mountain ranges which expanded for thousands and thousands of miles which took days or weeks to get to. We supported ourselves off of what the land was able to provide for us. And even though there were Hmong officials in high places in the Lao government, the very essence of our communities and households was that we were free and in control of our own lives.
The Hmong people understood that we were BORN with this freedom. And as Hmong Americans, maybe this is something we no longer see in the midst of our Westernized perspectives, but our parents understood that we were born with this freedom. Our grandparents understood that we were born with this freedom. Our ancestors understood that we were born with this freedom.
They knew what freedom was before we even learned the English term “freedom”. The Hmong people didn’t care whether we had fancy words that encapsulated what we felt, we just immediately KNEW what we felt. We felt it in our hearts, our minds, and our spirit, and it was that innate feeling of freedom that allowed us to persevere.
We felt what freedom was in the mountains that we carved our homes into. We felt what freedom was in the love we felt for our children, our spouses, our relatives, our kin, and our ancestors. That was freedom, true freedom. The ability to dictate our own lives, to have control over our own lives in the midst of all of the hardships, the struggles, the failures, the suffering. The constant suffering, the endless suffering. And through that endless suffering was so much beauty and wonder and amazement at the smallest scale that we now overlook every single day.
We spend our lives in America playing this game of catch up without realizing how beautiful and powerful our Hmong history and values are.
So much of us spend our lives articulating our white washed judgements on our own people without realizing that so many Hmong people died for us to get here. Hmong brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. So many died because we were pulled into a war we had no real stake in. So many died because the Lao countryside became a playground of endless bombings for American bomber pilots. So many died because America took advantage of a group of peaceful, non-colonizing, and FREE Hmong people and used us as pawns to fight its war.
I don’t want any of the things that America is trying to sell to me. I don’t want any of these ideas that this country is selling off as “freedom”, “liberty”, “democracy”, or whatever english words are being used in order to erase the reality of what the FEELING actually is.
I know what freedom is. I was born with freedom. My siblings and my parents and my grandparents and my ancestors were born with freedom of mind, body, and spirit. We knew that land wasn’t something we had ownership over. We knew that this planet was not something we could own. We knew that this planet, that this UNIVERSE, owned us and that it would be here long after we were gone. We knew that no government or other group of people could own us and tell us what to do with our lives.
but then America came to us and convinced us that we were undeveloped and behind on the times and that we need American Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy that is earned through service?
Freedom is not something you earn. Freedom is something you are born with. No body owns your mind, your body, or your spirit but yourself.
When this country rips your mental, spiritual, and physical freedom away from you, a freedom that you are born with, then freedom must become a feeling that you fight tooth and nail for. It’s not enough to know the definition of what freedom means. You have to really feel it. You have to feel it in your bones, your mind, your body, and your spirit. And to really feel it, you have to fight for it every day.
