Occult racism : The masking of race in the hmong hunter ingident
- Author(s):
- Schein, Louisa; Thoj, V.-m.
- Format:
- Book section
- Publisher:
- Rutgers University Press, 2010.
- Language:
- English
- Abstract:
- When the fatal shooting of six hunters by a Hmong man in the woods of Wisconsin received sensationalized national coverage in 2004, Hmong Americans struggled with an intensification of the hostile typing that had haunted their arrival in the United States since 1975. Mainstream accounts all the way through the trial in fall 2005 asserted that the incident, whether from the point of view of the white hunters or that of the Hmong man, could not be interpreted as primarily racial, but more probably centered on misunderstandings of property. The Hmong shooter, Chai Soua Vang, was convicted by an all-white jury of six counts of firstdegree intentional homicide and three other counts of attempted homicide against other hunters present. Prosecuted by Wisconsin's attorney general herself, Vang was sentenced to six consecutive life terms, guaranteeing that he would never be released from prison. In May 2007, Vang's request for a new "minority counsel" on the grounds that he had been the victim of a racially biased court system was rejected by the Third District Court of Appeals in Wisconsin. Vang was framed as a depraved murderer, with emphasis placed on his multiple intentional shots, including four shots to hunters' backs, with the effect that no argument of self-defense under racial threat could even be considered.1 Simultaneously, the Hmong people and their culture were, by many accounts of Hmong in Minnesota and Wisconsin, likewise convicted through one sweeping judicial act. Meanwhile, in eerie anticipation of the gruesome incident, Hmong filmmaker Va-Megn Thoj had in 2001 penned a screenplay, Die By Night, that conjured a contrapuntal image to that of dominant representations regarding the air of racial danger in the northern woods. Written a full three years before the actual shooting incident, the dark script echoes The Blair Witch Project, portraying the terror of a group of Hmong campers who are methodically hunted, maimed, and murdered by what they think is a Hmong demon that has followed them from Laos. Daybreak, however, reveals to the sole survivor that it is white hunters in ski masks who have ruthlessly pursued the party, gored them, and strung them up as prey over the course of the night. Die By Night plays as a macabre thriller that commingles hard-edged racial politics with the fantastical world of Hmong spirit beliefs. Working from the many actual hunting confrontations he already knew of, and evoking the racial tension that had long saturated the everyday lives of Hmong in the Midwest, Thoj infused the script with a political subtext. Unaware at the time of writing of how uncannily the script anticipated the horrific events that were to come, he rendered it a tale of harsh interactions between Hmong and whites, rather than a thriller based on Hmong and the supernatural. The screenplay, yet to be made into a film, represents an intriguing amalgam of Hmong immigrant themes and slasher horror. In the process, Thoj fashioned a work that inadvertently makes the case that Chai Soua Vang, hunting alone and vastly outnumbered by eight hostile white hunters, could not but have perceived grave threat. The story begins with three young men, a young woman, and a middle- Aged uncle- All Hmong-heading out into the Minnesota forest for a camping trip. From the beginning, there is tension in the SUV: Tension among the Hmong young men, two of whom have served prison terms and increasingly reveal their scars from having done time; tension between Hmong and the various whites, including cops, that they encounter on their way; and sexual tension between the young woman, Evie, and Rock, who turns out to be her clan cousin, and therefore subject to a Hmong incest taboo. One of the ex-cons, Snake, has brought a handgun on the excursion, and this quickly becomes a problem when he threatens one of his own and shoots at a gas station because he is threatened by the abusive white hunters he has met inside. Eventually, the party settles around the fire at a campsite deep in the forest. Rock and Evie play at violating incest prohibitions, Snake is getting drunk, and uncle Goodman is becoming edgy because of a demon he remembers from Laos that preys on wayward souls in the forest by tearing their guts out. After one of the men, Clown, disappears, having gone to relieve himself in the woods, Snake and Rock go to look for him and the horror begins. Clown reemerges into the clearing, nearly dead and with his intestines hanging out, but Snake and Rock do not. After a time both Goodman and Snake are drawn screaming from the clearing by "a creature" that makes much rustling in the scrub brush. Rock and Evie are left to attempt escape, dragging injured Clown on a makeshift stretcher through the dark woods. Eventually Rock is also plucked off by the "creature," and Evie, having left Clown dead, faces the dawn with near relief. Within minutes, however, she confronts the strung-up bodies of all her companions, and the "creature" is revealed to be the group of four hunters in ski masks with blood-encrusted scythes. They proceed to methodically rape her one by one, but she ultimately escapes to the vehicle, and wreaks revenge on her attackers by running them all over. Just as we think she is to emerge as a victorious survivor, she swerves the car into a tree to avoid a state trooper on the road and dies on impact. In what follows, we explore the potential for the occult demon feared in Die By Night to illuminate the active and ongoing occulting of race in Hmong-white relations. Keeping artistic vision and social analysis tightly articulated, we draw out the figurative effects of a supernatural being conjuring the palpable but hidden threat of racial hatred that lurks in and beyond the American woods. We proceed through the logics of Die By Night, histories of racial dynamics in the Midwest, the politics of media representation, and notions of turf and property, in order to ask: What accounts for the masking of race in so much discourse on Hmong over the decades, those same decades in which racialized interactions have been so salient to Hmong resettlement in the United States? Our dialogue, abridged and edited for readability, is intercut with portions of Thoj's script and Schein's critical commentary, as well as excerpts from the trial proceedings and the print and broadcast media. © 2010 by Rutgers, The State University.
- ISBN:
- 9780813545745 (ISBN)
- Identifier:
- HmongStudies2846