Orphans Of History, Hmong Refugees Try To Give Lives New Meaning In The Northwest -- Strangers In A Strange Land

Blia Xiong, a small, soft-spoken woman with a radiant face, says she's been writing a letter in her head for years that goes something like this:

Dear American People,

Some of you know who we are. Most of you don't. We are called the Hmong. We have existed for thousands of years. In the last two centuries, we have lived in the mountains of Laos, in a place called The Plain of Jars.

Your CIA recruited us to fight in your war against the communists in Laos and Vietnam. More than 10,000 of us died in that war. There is no memorial for our dead. When we came to America as refugees, hardly anyone knew of our involvement in your war. Most of you still don't.

Hmong means "Free people." But we are not free. These are the things that bind us: We have no country. We have little money. We have a disintegrating culture. We have an epic story, but few listeners.

We invite you to know our story.

It's an undercurrent in the lives of Hmong young and old, this desire to be known, says Xiong. It's the legacy of having been driven out of China, chased out of Laos, rejected by Thailand and resettled like scatter-shot all over the United States.

Their transformation from hilltribe people in Asia to urban refugees in America is chronicled in a new exhibit at the University of Washington's Burke Museum called "Hmong in America: Refugees From A Secret War."

Xiong, a language interpreter in UW's Medical Center, is co-curator of the exhibit, along with local anthropologist Nancy Donnelly, author of several books on Southeast Asian refugees.

"The Hmong don't like the term `secret war,' " said Donnelly. "It wasn't secret to them."

The Hmong were living in isolated, self-sufficient mountain villages when the Central Intelligence Agency recruited them to fight against communist Lao and Vietnamese forces. For years, the Hmong's involvement was intentionally kept secret from the American people.

For many of the estimated 1,000 Hmong who've settled in Western Washington, the exhibit is an all-important acknowledgement not only of their involvement in the war but of their plight in the United States.

More than 115,000 Hmong now live in this country, with the largest concentration in Fresno, Calif., where Hmong worldwide gather annually to celebrate the Hmong new year.

In Washington, they have settled in clusters in South Seattle, Burien, Kirkland and Carnation.

Most live on public support. The old, worn down by years of war and dislocation, have resigned themselves to living as strangers in a strange land. The young, though, are forging a new identity - part Hmong, part American, with the latter slowly supplanting the former.

It's a struggle to keep the Hmong heritage alive, said Choua Yang, 25, a senior at the University of Washington and one of only a handful of Hmong students at the UW. Yang has volunteered as a tour guide for the Burke exhibit.

"I want to do whatever I can to preserve our history," Yang said. "People know so little about us. We're always mistaken for Vietnamese or Chinese. Growing up, in school, we had to show our teachers on a map where we came from. Even our own people, the young ones, don't know about our past. They're starting to lose our language, our customs."

Part of the reason, said Kia Lee, 20, a sophomore at the UW, is that the Hmong story is almost always left out of history texts. Lee said she herself didn't know about her people's involvement in the Vietnam War until college. "When I found out," she said, "I was so happy. Our people were mentioned. It made me feel proud. It made me want to learn more. Now I want to be a teacher so I can teach about our people. In the future, I'd like to be able to say, `I am Hmong' and not have to explain it every time."

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About the exhibit.

A new exhibit at the University of Washington's Burke Museum, "Hmong in America: Refugees From A Secret War," will run until Sept. 8. A slide show and lecture on the Hmong will be March 22 at the UW, and an all-day symposium will be March 23 at the museum. For details, call (206) 543-5591.