Haunting and inhabitation in yang's: Latehomecomer: A hmong family memoir

Author(s):

Chiu, Monica

Format:

Book section

Citation:

Diversity In Diaspora: Hmong Americans In The Twenty-first Century, (2013). pp. 247-268.

Publisher:

University of Hawaii Press, 2013.

Language:

English

Abstract:

According to Teri Shaffer Yamada, Cambodian American autobiography is a "painful testimony of cultural genocide and dislocation" that shifts the traditional understanding of American autobiography away from a reflection on individualism to a powerful form of "testimonial discourse" in the theater of "global human rights" (2004, 144). Cambodian American autobiographies were well received in the 1980s by a public whose horror at Pol Pot's genocide paved the way for the genre's enthusiastic reception, argues Yamada. Equally numerous have been autobiographies by victims of so-called Third World antidemocratic political regimes: Those who survived the Vietnam War, including accounts of perilous sea journeys taken by Vietnamese boat people, as well as narratives of starvation, humiliation, and hard labor experienced by Chinese subjects during Mao's Cultural Revolution.1 These autobiographies increasingly inhabited the American consciousness for the incredible stories they offered about the ability to survive Cambodia's sanctioned genocide, for example, or the challenge of rising above communist oppression and violence. More appealing, however, were their anticipated conclusions, wrapped up in American dream narratives in which hard work and the painful process of reacculturation were well worth the yearned-for freedom and abundance of democratic America. While Yamada delineates how Cambodian American autobiography follows such a dream trajectory, she does so to promote a more important point: Cambodian American writing is a witnessing and a subsequent testimony that indicts. That is, documented Cambodian American suffering may galvanize public sympathy, but its logical, necessary conclusion is the necessary legal recognition within international courts of its Cambodian American victims. To be acknowledged as witnesses to a nation's horrors is key to Cambodian American visibility, acceptance, and succor. Hmong Americans, by contrast, have not received similar publicity, even though their narratives document untold executions and deaths, while others recount narratives of survival and U.S. arrival involving perilous flights from war, torture, Communism, and violent reeducation. While edited collections of Hmong narratives outlining the Hmong escape from Laos and arrival in the United States have been in existence since 1994, a kind of textual and historical invisibility, which I will explain later in detail, shrouds not only their validation as subjects who witness but also obscures their recognition as war refugees and as Americans, affecting their literary acceptance. I argue that Hmong are haunted by literary and political invisibility. Kao Kalia Yang's The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (2008) exposes Hmong invisibility. But it does so without mimicking the standard form and function of recorded and translated ethnographic autobiographies of the 1990s. Certainly like these others, hers offers a historical and materialist approach to undocumented lives; but unlike its predecessors, Yang's prioritizes the spiritual as an intellectually useful structure in which to ground her family's refugee experiences. Amid the impermanence and mobility of a refugee life, Yang builds a foundation, ironically, on the ethereal and the abstract. The spirituality infused in shamanism and animism, in the cultural influence of folk stories, and in a collective family memory based on experiences about which Yang has only heard is more solid than the material, concrete domiciles among which she constantly moves in Thailand and America. Yang succeeds in rendering Hmong visible through what most would deem the invisible. Yang's is not the cultural haunting described by Kathleen Brogan, who investigates "contemporary writers who turn to the supernatural to examine the troubled transmission of immigrant, slave, or native cultures" (1998, 4). The fear, conflict, and hallucinatory self-projections of haunted characters are absent here. Instead, a Hmong history of forced acquiescence to national or invading powers finds definition within Ann Laura Stoler's notion of the haunting of empire, in which "tactile powers and their intangibilities" possessed postcolonial subjects (2006, 1). Intangibilities are "ambiguous zones of empire that effused or refuted colonial appellation," most often those experiences in the intimate spaces of "beds, kitchens, nurseries, and schoolrooms" (1, 3). They are ambiguous, Stoler suggests, because they have eluded historical attention; their lack of official acknowledgement and appellation render them seemingly benign features of colo nial rule. However, subjects who inhabit these intimate spaces must abide by colonial powers that dictate marriage, sexual, family, educational, and health arrangements. These intimacies' absence from official records- Their seeming invisibility-neither reduces their power nor their efficacy but rather empowers their ability to fly beneath official radar. The Hmong were not colonized, in the true sense of the word, but in their relegation to Laos' undesirable locations high in the mountains, technically hidden from view, their territorial confinement can be considered loosely colonial, as can U.S. and communist forces that determined their survival or fate. The former hired them and then abandoned them; the latter attempted to capture them for reeducation or death. Those repatriated to the United States were subjected to refugee management, an institutional system by which Western policies manage and police so-called alien bodies and regulate foreign practices to ease the transition of non-Western newcomers, both for their benefit and that of the dominant host population.2 These Western- centric strictures, created by an imagined threat of alien infiltration, shelter U.S.-based citizens from learning about and appreciating cultural differences. More detrimentally, they restrict Hmong religious and cultural practices by which Hmong weather the duress of acculturation. For example, Hmong were prohibited from slaughtering chickens within city parameters for religious ceremonies, thereby eliminating a crucial procedure in their spiritual practices and, in essence, dampening the ceremonies' psychological effects. Furthermore, families were discouraged from having more than two or three babies, while Hmong desired to replace a population decimated by war through reproduction. Upon arrival in the United States, Hmong were ridiculed as primitive for their ignorance about operating what the dominant society views as simple household amenities- lights, toilets, washing machines, dryers. Stinging under such regulation and criticism, Hmong went "to great efforts to protect their culture from the outside world," argues Jo Ann Koltyk, practicing "collective impression management" (1995, 14). Under the gaze of authorities-soldiers in camp, physicians in U.S. hospitals, teachers in American schools, and under the scrutinizing eyes of surrounding, non-Hmong neighbors-all of whom either disciplined Hmong refugee choices or gaped at their cultural practices, Hmong retreated within themselves, fashioning a protective, self-imposed invisibility no longer crafted for physical survival in the United States but for cultural and psychological preservation. Yang's memoir spends little time rehearsing these humiliations and Hmong strategies to resist them. She mentions briefly refugees' necessity to learn English and to understand the workings of standard household appliances, but Yang never renders initial Hmong technological naïveté humiliatingly visible. By excising such details that were overemphasized, at Hmong expense, in local news reports in cities with large Hmong refugee populations and later exploited in many ethnographic studies dictated by Hmong themselves, she suggests that Hmong refugee education is a universally understood requirement when leaving Thai camps and that cultural adjustment is difficult for both those who must learn English and technology for employment and for elderly refugees who cannot master a new language or new skills. Furthermore, when many other Asian immigrant narratives revere Western technological prowess, Yang does not follow suit. For example, she refuses to anthropomorphize an airplane as a "big bird," a common refugee simile. Rather, while in flight, Yang recalls her father's stories outlining how babies inhabit the skies, and she revels in the awesome notion that she now can fly where babies dwell. According to Yang's imagination, the babies "race along with the clouds and can see everything-the beauty of the mountains, the courses of streams, the dirt of the paths that people take down on earth." When the babies finally desire to be born, Yang explains, they descend from their awesome heights into a family of their choice: "We give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky," Yang writes (56). Clearly, by documenting these narratives that both calmed a nervous child and continue to illuminate Hmong belief in individual choice, she elevates the utility of the stories for herself and her culture. Unlike other immigrant autobiographies, Yang does not practice autoethnography, which weaves explanatory passages about cultural practices into autobiographical texts, nor does she ask for sympathy for war-torn refugees. © 2013 University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

ISBN:

9780824837778 (ISBN); 9780824835972 (ISBN)

Identifier:

HmongStudies0485