NK Xiong grew up in Green Bay knowing her family’s refugee story. Her parents documented almost every part of it through pictures and the family’s camcorder. But she didn’t know much about her culture’s history: the Hmong culture.
Hmong people helped the United States in the fight against communism during the Vietnam War. After the war ended, many fled Laos due to political persecution, and settled in the U.S. as refugees.
In high school Xiong remembers being taught about the Vietnam War and getting excited to hear about the Hmong contribution and sacrifice.
"I think there was only like a line in the history book,” Xiong says. “The rest of it was all about the U.S.”
So, she did what she knew best, picked up a camera and told her father’s story. She learned about how he fled Laos at the age of 13 after the Vietnam War destabilized the country. And how he crossed the deadly Mekong River by himself into Thailand. After spending a month in a Thailand prison, he was finally released to a refugee camp.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Hmong refugees coming to the U.S. But for Xiong, even with all this history, and producing a documentary on her father’s story, she still feels like this history is hidden.
“I don’t often hear the story of why they needed to leave their home,” Xiong says.
Surviving the Secret War in Laos
Dr. Chong Moua is an assistant professor of Hmong studies at UW-Oshkosh, and she says Hmong people’s journey starts with the Cold War around the mid-20th century.
“It’s called the Cold War because the U.S. never actually directly fights the Soviet Union,” Moua says. “But it gets hot in certain spots … including Asia and Southeast Asia.”
These “hot spots” are basically proxy wars between the two global superpowers. Once communism spread to Korea, the north was supported by the Soviet Union, and the south was backed by the U.S. The war ends in a stalemate of sorts, but the region, including Vietnam and Laos, are strategic players.
“The CIA came into my grandpa’s village when he was 17 and recruited him and his brother to fight,” NK Xiong says.
Her grandpa, Song Xeng Vue, grew up in a small village in Laos. He says he was mild-mannered, always listening to his parents and not too interested in playing sports with the other kids in the village, because he didn't want to get hurt.
When the Vietnam War broke out he was still a teenager. At the time Laos was supposed to stay neutral in the war, according to the Geneva Accords of 1954. But that didn’t stop the U.S. from recruiting boys and young men to fight. Soon, Xiong's grandpa and his brother were fighting in the Hmong Secret Army.
“How did Hmong folks get involved?” Moua asks. “There was a large migration out of southern China into southeast Asia and Laos in the early 1800s to mid-1800s.”
The Hmong people were already stateless, having arrived in Laos around 100 years earlier after facing persecution in China. They were just starting to fight for their own autonomy in Laos when the Vietnam War started. Moua says that they wanted to liberate themselves — they wanted to have self determination, but Laos was already Laos.
The U.S.'s involvement in the Vietnam War ended with the Paris Peace Accord in 1973, but things in Laos were still dangerous — especially for people like Song Xeng Vue, who fought against communism. That’s because, as Moua says, the communists won in Laos.
That’s also when U.S. troops withdrew from the country, taking their weapons with them, leaving those who fought for them defenseless. That is when a lot of Hmong people started to leave.
“They were being hunted,” Moua says. “But not everyone left because it was their land and their home. But some of the folks that got caught got sent to concentration camps … to be reeducated. Everything that you think of what happens at concentration camps, happened here too.”
Both of NK Xiong’s parents, Tsu Lor Xiong and Mai Lee Vue, fled Laos around the late 70s and early 80s. They both ended up in refugee camps in Thailand. There were multiple camps set up to take in the exodus of Hmong people at the time. Some of them were more developed than others, including one that prepared people for life in the U.S. by teaching the English language, how to live day-to-day and how to run a house.
“It was a community of people who were all [there] for a reason,” Xiong’s mom, Mai Lee Vue says. “You go from the first refugee camp and you connect with the people there and make friends. But you only stay there for a short amount of time and then you move to the next refugee camp. You miss the people you’ve become friends with.”
Mai Lee Vue first ended up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin before moving to Green Bay. She often wonders what happened to all of those friends she made during her time at the refugee camps. She’s never heard from any of them since.
“We have to go through this hardship so we can live a better life in the U.S.,” Tsu Lor Xiong says, reflecting back on that time. “Even if I live OK in the U.S., my kids will live better. And looking back now [on our nine kids], I’m happy. I’m content and feel fulfilled watching my kids succeed here in their own ways.”
Making a Home in the U.S.
After leaving the refugee camps in Thailand, many Hmong people were resettled across the United States. Moua calls the process “messy” because there wasn’t a formal refugee resettlement policy before 1980. The country had been resettling people since the 1940s and 50s, when eastern Europeans were escaping communism and authoritarianism, including Polish and Russian refugees.
“Wisconsin looks the way it does because of this, not just because of early immigration of the Irish and Germans,” says Moua. “And in 1976, the first Hmong family settled in Wisconsin.”
Moua says the U.S. had a dispersal policy, since the government didn’t want to overburden any one community with refugees. Hmong people were spread out to rural places like eastern Pennsylvania and eastern New York, as well as more urban spaces like Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle.
Moua also says that the racism Hmong people felt was immediate and rampant.
“There are stories in Wisconsin newspapers that [Hmong] people eat dogs and cats,” Moua says. “People being afraid of their pets being around Hmong people … it’s everywhere.”
Many people also had issues with what was called “secondary migration,” or where Hmong people concentrated in areas at higher numbers. Moua says this was done to reconnect families or share resources. Wisconsin was a state that had a high concentration of secondary migration.
“There's a huge concentration in Milwaukee, Eau Claire, La Crosse, Wausau,” Moua says. “They want to reunite with the family that they've been separated from.”
Today, Wisconsin has the third highest population of Hmong people.
The Legacy of the Hmong Journey
Hmong people made a home in Laos after being persecuted out of China. Some Hmong have now made a home in the U.S. after fleeing violence in Laos. But when talking about the legacy of a double-stateless people, Moua doesn’t see it as a tragedy, but a “superpower.”
“If you look at the history of the world of nation states, of civilizations, people who don’t have territorial homelands, we’re not supposed to have made it through the centuries,” Moua says. “We’ve crossed numerous mountain ranges … a few oceans, who knows how many other bodies of water and we’re still here. We’ve added our story to the story of the United States.”
For Milwaukee filmmaker NK Xiong, while she’s still learning about the history of Hmong people, she knows that she embodies it. She carries on the history of her grandpa and her parents' journey to the U.S. And she learned all about the importance of documenting her own history from her parents.
“I’m really able to tell these stories because of the sacrifices that they made,” Xiong says. “Because they chose to come to a country where they felt their children would be successful and not have to just survive like they did, but to thrive.”
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