Loyalty to U.S. Finally Paying Off for Hmong

The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.

“I can’t believe we’ll be Americans,” said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. “We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere.”

Yang, a soldier in America’s “secret” war in Laos in the 1960s and ‘70s, rolled up his trousers to show scars from deep bullet wounds. He spoke of U.S. choppers that supplied his guerrilla band in the jungles, and of downed U.S. pilots the Hmong rescued. He remembered his shock when the U.S. abandoned Indochina in 1975, and when Laos fell to the communists.

He and his friends fled to Thailand, and for years the Hmong languished here in Tham Krabok camp as the last major group of refugees from the Vietnam War era.

In the mid-1990s, the United Nations closed its refugee office in Laos, and the United States said it had no plans to resettle additional Hmong. Stranded and largely forgotten, they eked out a living making handicrafts and taking dangerous rock quarry jobs that Thais shunned.

Then, in December, the future brightened: U.S. Ambassador Darryl Johnson came to Tham Krabok and announced, “We will take everyone who is eligible and wants to go.” (Drug users and criminals are ineligible.) The airlift is expected to begin in July.

The State Department’s turnabout came after Thailand said it intended to close Tham Krabok, 60 miles north of Bangkok, the capital, and move the refugees to isolated military camps or forcibly repatriate them to still-communist Laos.

Thailand wants improved relations with Laos, which believes that the camp is a source of funding for the low-level resistance war that Hmong fighters continue to wage against the Laotian government.

“I would be killed for sure if I went back to Laos,” Heroula Leng, 60, said. “All us old soldiers would.”

Among the groups influential in persuading the Bush administration to take the Hmong is Refugees International. Its president emeritus, Lionel Rosenblatt, was one of the young Turks at the State Department who helped evacuate 130,000 Vietnamese from Saigon in April 1975, ignoring original U.S. plans to bring along only a handful of Vietnamese with the 6,000 departing Americans.

Rosenblatt flew into Saigon as the city was falling to North Vietnam’s army. He and his colleagues pilfered a consular stamp and, working on their own through the nights in a bowling alley -- the only place they could find that had electricity -- issued thousands of exit visas to Vietnamese who had been allies but were not on the U.S. Embassy’s list of people who might be killed in a communist takeover.

“The Hmong have a unique record in association with the United States,” Rosenblatt said in his Washington office recently. “They fought with us, and they paid the highest price.

“They’re deserving as the last human element in terms of us taking care of our allies. If the Hmong were good enough to fight and die for us, they have to be good enough to resettle.”

When Chue Xiong, 68, learned that the United States had offered to repay an old debt, he called together his two wives and eight children. What should they do? He and his wives were hesitant: How could they survive in a place where they didn’t speak the language and had no skills to offer?

But Xiong’s son Toua, 32, argued, “There is more openness to get knowledge in the U.S.,” and the decision was made.

They would move and become Americans. Because the issue of polygamy has caused some friction with Americans, Xiong would take one wife; the other would go as part of another family.

So now the Xiongs, like thousands of others in Tham Krabok, have given urine samples, undergone X-ray screenings for tuberculosis and been interviewed by a State Department official.

They are studying English from a textbook that offers phrases such as “I want pancakes for breakfast” and “The TV is broken.” And they wonder aloud whether the American people will consider them a burden and make them feel unwelcome.

“No one can get a proper education here,” Yang Chue, principal of Tham Krabok’s elementary school, said through an interpreter. “And that means no one has a future. Children get married at 14 or 15. They have nothing else to do. Then their life is sort of over. The adjustment to the United States may be difficult, but it’s hard to believe our lives won’t be better there than here.”

Nearly 200,000 Hmong Americans live in the United States, mostly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Carolina and California’s Central Valley, as a result of resettlement programs in the 1980s and ‘90s. Many of the Tham Krabok refugees turned down earlier opportunities to migrate but have decided to go this time, apparently understanding that, as one U.S. official put it, “this window of opportunity isn’t going to open again.”

“Some stayed in Thailand in the past because, even in a refugee camp, it kept them a step closer to home, Laos,” said Mee Moua, a Minnesota state senator and a Hmong American. “To this day, my mother-in-law, when she dreams, still only dreams of life back in Laos. She has never dreamed about taking the bus to downtown St. Paul to shop at Marshall Field’s. Many older Hmong like her are here physically, but emotionally and psychologically, they’re still back home in Laos.”

Like most of the Vietnamese who settled in the United States, the Hmong arrived with virtually nothing, their worldly possessions often packed in a single suitcase or cardboard box. They are among the poorest and least educated of the United States’ migrant populations, a distinct ethnic minority that until the early 1950s had no written language and has long used small amounts of opium for ritual and medicinal purposes.

“The community faces challenges in the United States, but I think we’ve accomplished a lot,” said Bo Thao, executive director of Hmong National Development, an advocacy group in Washington. “We’ve moved into many fields, from medicine to the commercial sector. The community’s poverty rate went from 67% in 1990 to 38% in the 2000 census. We still have a long way to go, but the people are very motivated to realize the American dream.”

Unless the Department of Homeland Security rejects her application, Yeng Thao, 60, soon will have the opportunity to test the limits of that dream. From behind her pushcart, from which she sells tapioca and coconut-milk desserts for the equivalent of 5 cents a dish, she glanced across the camp: To her right, a line of shacks with corrugated tin roofs stretched down an unpaved road; to her left, in a large shed, friends were packing herbs and locally made handicrafts for export to the United States.

“I don’t know much about America, except Wisconsin is cold and California is not cold,” she said. “If the communists were gone, my choice would be to go back to Laos and be a farmer again. But for the children, the best thing is to get the education and opportunities in America. So for their future, we will go.”