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Hmong seeking life in Merced, Ca |
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Written by Admin
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 02:16 |
By CAROL REITER
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In the Hmong language, there's a saying that the first people who come to a place always get the fish. The people who come last get the snake.
But for the first Hmong who came to Merced in the late 1970s and 1980s, there were no fish. There were prejudice, hate and misunderstanding. There were no jobs, no friends and no agencies to help.
But the Hmong persevered. They helped change the way that Merced looked at immigrants, and for 30 years they have raised their children, farmed the fields and lived their lives quietly and peacefully.
But now the Hmong are leaving Merced the same way they have lived here. Silently and unseen by the larger population, the Hmong population in Merced has been cut in half from what it was 20 years ago.
Those first Hmong 30 years ago came to Merced with the desperate hope that their lives would be better.
But it took 30 years for many of those people to finally find the fish -- and a better life. With the growing problem of gang violence among the younger generation, it could be argued that some have also found the snake as well.
Regardless of what they found, there are indications that many Hmong are leaving Merced behind -- seeking greater economic opportunities in states as far away as Alaska and North Carolina.
These are some of their stories.
Why the Hmong are in Merced
By the 1980s, the Hmong had become refugees after hundreds of years living as farmers in the mountains of Laos. The wars in Indochina saw the Hmong helping the CIA fight the communist Pathet Lao, but when the war was over and the communists took over, the Hmong were singled out for retribution.
Fearful, they left their homes and fled to Thailand, to refugee camps with no food, no running water, no hope.
Chang Vang Her, an interpreter for Healthy House Within a MATCH Coalition, a translating organization in Merced, was one of the people who lived through both the fighting during the war and the escape to Thailand.
Her is a quiet man, with neatly combed hair and a quick smile. But talking about his family, and leaving Laos, is hard for Her. He said he gets too emotional thinking of what happened.
Her's father and three brothers were killed in the war. His mother was blind, and when the communists came, the Hers left Laos. "We walked to Thailand, taking only rice on our back to eat," Her remembered.
Her's mother had no shoes and couldn't see where to walk. After two days, her feet were bleeding and torn to pieces. She told her family she couldn't go on, and that she wanted to die.
So the family gave her opium and waited for her to die. But she didn't die. She went into a coma, but was still alive. The family couldn't wait. The communists were searching for stragglers, and they had to get out of Laos.
"We had to dig a hole, and leave her covered with brush," said Her, wiping his eyes. "I wish that we could have bought her shoes -- maybe she could have made it."
Prejudice on both sides
From the refugee camps, the Hmong began to come to the United States. They made their way to the East Coast, and then heard about California, where it was warm and there was a lot of land to farm.
Merced was still a small town, surrounded by acres of open fields. After the first Hmong came here, more came because they knew they had family or friends in the Central Valley town. Merced became home to one of the biggest populations of Hmong, especially given the city's size.
But Merced wasn't ready for the Hmong. Instead of welcoming arms, Mercedians greeted the Hmong with suspicion, hatred and misconceptions.
Ann Klinger, a Merced County supervisor for District 2 from 1977 to 1995, was one of the people who distrusted these strangers in her land. She stood up at a supervisors meeting and told Merced that the Hmong were here to steal land and jobs.
Palee Moua's family was the very first one to come to Merced County. She and her husband and three daughters came to Planada in 1977. After spending time in a refugee camp in Thailand, the family came first to Los Angeles, then to Planada.
"We heard that Merced was a small town, a farming town and we could get a big piece of land and farm," Moua recalled. "We drove four days and four nights, thinking that we were going to a better place."
Instead, the Mouas found themselves at a Planada labor camp, working alongside other immigrants and sleeping on the floor. When winter came, they had no home.
And that open land -- that land that the Hmong thought they could farm -- was all owned by other people. And the Hmong couldn't touch it. "Back home, the land was owned by the government and we could go wherever we wanted and farm. But not here," Moua said.
With no jobs and no English-language skills, the Hmong were forced to go on welfare. Some Merced residents viewed the Hmong as "welfare leeches," and both sides distrusted the other.
Despite the problems that the Hmong faced in Merced, they kept coming here. "We had no choice. We had nowhere to go, nothing," said Moua. "We were like 2-year-olds, wanting to tell people what we thought, but unable to communicate."
Becoming Americans
The Hmong persevered. They sent their children to schools, and bit by bit, started to buy and farm the land around Merced.
Slowly, the Hmong became a common sight for people in Merced, as the population of the Laotian people swelled to 15,000.
Dr. Long Thao, a Merced Hmong physician who was the first Hmong doctor in the U.S., came to Merced in 1988 to help his countrymen. Like the Hmong in Merced, Thao had spent time in a refugee camp then immigrated to Illinois, where he went to college and medical school. He came to Merced because it hosted the largest population of his people at the time. "When I came here, there was still a lot of prejudice (against the Hmong). A lot of people thought they were welfare leeches," Thao said.
But the Hmong, like other poor, uneducated people in Merced, found it hard to find jobs. Other than farming, they had no skills, and no language skills to even apply for a job.
That's when Merced Lao Family Community stepped in.
The organization was founded in the 1980s to help the Hmong assimilate to life in America. The people who worked for Lao Family had faced the same problems as their compatriots and wanted to help.
Paul Ge Yang, president of Lao Family, came to Merced in 1980. "I thought I could farm here, but everything belonged to someone else. I had nine kids, and we starved for a couple of years," he recalled.
As Lao Family became a familiar organization in the Hmong community, more and more Hmong were able to learn the English language, apply for citizenship and learn to drive.
But they still couldn't find jobs: Prejudice and lack of skills still held them back.
Community changes over the years
When the Hmong first came to Merced, there were no programs in the schools to help their children. Fong Her came to Merced as a third-grader in 1980. He was put into a class at John Muir School, and despite the fact that he was warmly welcomed, the school and teachers were not prepared to help a little boy who spoke no English.
"My teacher would tell me, 'Say pencil,' and I would answer, 'Say pencil.' It was so hard for me," Her said.
Her's family rallied behind its nine children, and Her said his father told him that school was the most important thing to him. "It worked. Eight of my siblings have a bachelor's degree, and the last one is working on it," Her said.
And Her himself has devoted his life to helping Hmong schoolchildren. He is the community outreach specialist for the Hmong at the Merced City School District.
"A lot has changed since I was a kid. Now there are Hmong teachers, and the materials help the kids learn faster. They are learning to speak both languages. I call it Hmonglish," said Her.
But not all kids make it to their bachelor's degrees. For the past two decades, Southeast Asian gangs have become a severe problem in the area. Officer Joe Deliman, a member of the Merced Police Department's gang violence suppression unit, said that when he first came to town, the Southeast Asian gangs weren't bad.
"They culturized, and things have gotten worse," Deliman said. Dealing with poverty and no language skills, some Hmong youth chose the gang life. And their gangs are hard to deal with.
"The Southeast Asians will go to another town and commit crimes and then come back here," Deliman said. "It's hard to find them, because they don't live here."
The gang life can be a powerful draw for Hmong youth, because gang members have money and power. The Southeast Asian gangs have gone from almost invisible 20 years ago to the second-worst gang, after the Nortenos, in Merced, police said. "We are seeing second generation Hmong gang members now," Deliman said. "It's a huge problem."
The quiet exodus
When welfare reform came in the mid-1990s, the Hmong panicked. They were facing no money, no jobs and no way to live. So they started to leave Merced.
"They went where there were jobs," said Houa Vang, executive director of Lao Family. "We weren't lazy -- we wanted to work -- but there were no jobs here."
At that time, a lot of the Hmong went to Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Carolina, where other large Hmong populations already lived.
For the Hmong who stayed in Merced, things slowly started to get better. The town began to accept them, and as the children became better at English, a societal shift occurred.
In 1990, the average Hmong woman in Merced had 8.5 children. By 2000, that figure had dropped to only three. Young women, instead of getting married at 14 or 15, began to go to college and get an education. Hmong men got jobs, and the children lost their native language.
But as the Hmong became more acclimated, one area of their lives continued to be hard. Western health care and the Hmong beliefs butted heads, and too many times, the victims were innocent sick people.
During this time, the book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" was published, chronicling the horrifying story of one Hmong family in Merced and their efforts to save their child from epilepsy. The local doctors didn't understand the Hmong ways, and the Hmong resisted the testing, treatment and medicine of the Western doctors.
Dr. Jim McDiarmid, a psychologist who teaches at UC Merced, was in Merced during that time and saw the problems that erupted because of the collision of cultures.
"The Hmong had heard horror stories in the refugee camps of how Americans ate Hmong children," McDiarmid said. Because of that, they refused to let doctors take blood or do surgery.
In 2000, Healthy House Within a Match Coalition was created to help non-English-speakers deal with their health care. The organization also brought together the Hmong healers known as shaman and Western doctors.
In the past, no shaman were allowed with patients in the hospital. But now the shaman can come and do their healing right alongside the hospital staff.
"Things have gotten so much better, for both sides," said McDiarmid.
North to Alaska
More than 30 years since the first Hmong family came here, there are still many Hmong in the county. They hold jobs, pay taxes and own their own homes. But for a lot of Hmong, living in Merced forces them to face what others in Merced deal with: high unemployment.
Because of that, during the past two years, many Hmong have left. But it's not to Minnesota and North Carolina this time. Now it's Alaska.
The northernmost state has jobs in the fishing and crabbing industries that don't require skills or even a good grasp of the English language. Some companies are even paying families to relocate. But for the Hmong, it's a tough life to adjust to. They have left their families, and the town they have known, for an unknown area that is vastly different from Merced.
"Some come back to visit and tell me, 'Oh my God, it's cold there,'" said Vang.
Thao believes that in the next census, the number of Hmong will only be about half of what it was in the 1990s. "There were 15,000 here when I got here (in 1988). Since then, my patients have left, and there are only about 8,000 Hmong left."
In the future, the Hmong, like other immigrant groups that have come to America during the past 300 years, will more than likely assimilate. Already, McDiarmid said, the changes are evident. The young are becoming leaders: physicians, attorneys, city council members, pharmacists.
Thao is happy to see the changes the Hmong have made, but he hopes that they remember their past.
"I hope the Hmong keep their culture, that the children keep remembering their past," Thao said. "I see them forgetting that. My own 18-year-old son, he doesn't speak Hmong. He is Americanized."
He's chasing the fish -- not the snake.
Reporter Carol Reiter can be reached at 209 385-2486 or
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