Tag: Hmong culture

This is the biography of a Hmong woman — Ai — born in Laos in 1964. It covers her life journey from Laotian hill dweller through years of war to a Thai refugee camp to a (more or less) successful rice farmer in Fresno. Told in a memoir style, Hamilton does a decent job of telling the story the way she hears it from Ai (through an interpreter as Ai cannot read or write in any language, or speak any English). There is no novel-like narrative arc that makes sense of the various pieces, and the reader is left with many questions about basic aspects of her life — like what happened to her eleven children?? But this is what makes it more interesting — this really is Ai’s story the way she thinks about it — not the way Hamilton might have framed it. Therefore there is no agenda, no political commentary, and no call to action. On the one hand, I was left with the question of “What am I supposed to do with this information?” But, on the other hand, I realized I’m not supposed to do anything with it: It’s a recollection of a specific woman’s life as she told it. Specifically, the memoir of an illiterate woman who would not be penning one of her own. It’s rare to be able to encounter that kind of verisimilitu

I learned a lot about the huge impact of the Vietnam War on Laos, quite a bit about the Hmong — their culture, sense of identity and belonging and utter disassociation with the countries they live in — and quite a bit about rice farming. In Ai’s personal story is plenty of matter-of-fact detail about what it is like for a girl to grow up in what I would call a primitive and truly patriarchal society as well as the personal and confusing experience of immigration bureaucracy. I have no idea how similar Ai’s story is to stories from other Hmong refugees, but Ai was driven and the various ways she seized opportunities when others did not was very telling. I was fascinated by the way she viewed the different people in her life. Both alien and intriguing.

I found it surprisingly easy to read, even though it didn’t appear at first to be something that would hold my interest. The style was a bit dry, but utterly authentic.