Tou Ger Xiong is America’s greatest Hmong comedian. OK, he’s also America’s only Hmong comedian.
He’s 30 and lives in suburban St. Paul, the country’s largest concentration of former inhabitants of the mountain villages in Laos. He drives a yellow Mustang convertible with vanity plates “TOU GER,” and makes a living in his adopted country by telling of the terrible journey of his people and their stress-filled lives in America.
In carefully orchestrated performances, Xiong finds ways to make the mask of tragedy break into laughter.
He was in Madison recently to appear in a weekend-long examination of his people’s history and culture called “Hmong at Heart.” He and his younger brother Carter (“He’s my driver and bodyguard,” Xiong joked) have come in a Ford Expedition loaded with props, costumes, speakers and shadow puppets.
“Carter was born in a refugee camp in Thailand,” Xiong said. “When he was born, my father asked who is the most important man in America. Jimmy Carter was president. It could have been worse, a few years later and my brother would have been called Bush.”
The Xiong brothers stopped at Kajsiab House, a gathering place for those 5,000 Hmong who have settled in the area around Madison. Some from that community had come in that day to tell stories that made one wonder how Xiong can possibly mine humor from such deep, dark places.
A man newly arrived to the U.S., Wacha Xiong (Xiong is a common clan name), came into the Kajsiab House.
“When the Vietnam War ended in 1975,” he said, “the Americans left Laos. They abandoned the Hmong soldiers who had been scouts for them, who had rescued their downed pilots, who had fought on their behalf.”
Wacha Xiong stayed in Laos, eventually becoming a 12-year-old guerrilla fighter battling the Communist government forces. He’s 37 now. As he told his story through an interpreter, his jaw muscles tensed.
“I am still very, very angry,” he said. “The Americans didn’t tell us they were leaving. They just flew out of Laos like they had wings and left us to be slaughtered.”
The mountain-dwelling, rice, corn and — as a cash crop, opium — farmers known as the Hmong had no wings and few options. The CIA had recruited villagers into what became known as the “Secret War in Laos.” (From 1961 to 1973, fighting on the Laos side of the Vietnam border was unacknowledged by the U.S.) When the war collapsed, the Hmong “Sky Fighters,” so-called because they were based high in the mountains, could stay and fight a guerrilla campaign against the newly installed Communist Pathet Lao government or they could flee.
“My father was a soldier,” said 45-year-old Mai Chou Xiong. “We hid in the jungle and were starving and had to eat roots,” she said. “The elderly people couldn’t chew them and got very weak. We had to move around to avoid capture, and when the grandparents were no longer able to move quickly, they would beg us to leave them. They said, `Go. Save yourselves.’
“Planes would come over and drop something that looked like ash. It was a chemical to kill the forest, to poison the water, to kill us.”
A tear started down from one eye as she spoke. The translator said, “She says she is the only one of her family to survive.”
Difficult escape
Comedian Xiong’s own story of escape is a tortured one.
“Babies would cry,” he said, “and to calm them so the Pathet Lao soldiers wouldn’t hear the cries, the parents would give them opium. Many babies died of accidental overdoses.”
Xiong’s father, a soldier, had gathered his wife and nine children and began a treacherous journey westward to reach the refugee camps in Thailand. Xiong pointed to a Hmong story cloth hanging behind him on a wall of Kajsiab House.
“You often see the [Mekong] river represented in these because it was so important for us,” he said.
The Mekong was for the Hmong what the ocean south of Miami is for Cuban refugees, what the Red Sea was for the ancient Israelites. For those oppressed peoples, the far shore meant a chance at life.
“My family paid fishermen to take us across,” Xiong said. “After we landed, the fishermen went back and picked up a group of 29 Hmong, most of them children. The fishermen robbed the people and threw everyone into the river. I was told a man swam around pulling up the heads of children who had drowned looking for his children. He survived, but no one else did.”
Even those who made it to America haven’t had it easy. The Hmong had no written language until a French missionary early in the 20th Century urged that one be developed so that they could read the Bible. Many older people still can’t read and find learning English nearly impossible. Though eager to adapt, few have marketable job skills. Some arrive with post traumatic stress syndrome from the war; some suffer deep depression from the loss of their families, their villages, their way of life.
High rate of suicide
The rate of suicide for the Hmong is high. A recent series of articles in the Fresno (Calif.) Bee newspaper was based on the suicides of six Hmong teens. In the past couple of months, three Hmong men in Wisconsin have killed themselves.
It is no coincidence that Kajsiab House (the name is Hmong and means the relief from stress caused by worry over the safety of loved ones) is part of the county’s mental health center.
After four years in a camp in Thailand, Xiong’s family made it to St. Paul.
“It was like paradise,” Xiong said. “In Laos, where it’s hot, ice is a reward to children for good behavior. There’s a lot of ice in St. Paul.”
And now, a lot of Hmong. It is one of the three largest concentrations of Hmong in this country, the others being the Central Valley in California around Fresno and northwest Wisconsin in the area of LaCrosse.
Tou Ger Xiong was valedictorian of his high school class, went to Carleton College and became interested in performance arts. In his junior year, he developed a service project combining comedy, storytelling (a strong Hmong tradition) and rap music. The idea was to bridge generations and cultures.
“I need four women up on stage,” he says to a mostly Hmong audience, a mix of ages from toddlers to elderly. “I’m looking for grandmothers,” he says.
This is on a videotape of a performance in Minnesota tailored to an audience of Hmong refugees and their American-born offspring, children he says who can be “The best of the best,” a reference they won’t understand until near the end of the show. He also does a stand-up show he calls “Bruce Lee Meets Snoop Doggy Dog.” He’ll give a still different show that night to benefactors of the Madison Children’s Museum where an exhibit on Hmong life in Laos, Thailand and America shows through May 30.
“Now you young people think the elders don’t know how to dance,” he says, doing some quick hip-hop moves. “I’m telling you they do, and I’m not talking about our beautiful folk dances.” (He does a few steps of traditional dance.)
He has rounded up four women, one in her 20s, the others — more reluctantly coming up — in their 50s, maybe older. Hmong people often look younger than they are. The older women were wearing at least some of the brightly colored embroidery and quilted jackets and skirts that are traditional.
“Show me,” he says in Hmong (Xiong’s shows are in “Hmonglish,” his mix of English and the dramatic, tonal Hmong language) how you would grind rice.”
The ladies begin to move their arms and shoulders in a vigorous back and forth motion.
“Show me how to crush the hulls.”
They do a one-footed high-step against the stage. He asks them then to show how to sift rice and how to pick corn and put it in a basket on their backs. They do a wrist flip and a one-arm fling over the shoulder.
The women are getting into it, showing off skills no one else has cared about since they came to America. The kids are beginning to giggle.
Xiong gives the commands one after the other in rapid succession, and, amazingly, these four women raised in villages with no TV, no radio, no touch from the modern world except war are making dance moves the kids recognize.
He adds to the effect by laying down a rhythm track with record scratching sounds voiced into the microphone.
Bridging old, new worlds
Everybody is laughing and applauding, the old people, the grandkids.
They get it. It’s about bridging the old and new worlds, about respect across the generations, about opening dialogue between people who love each other but can’t seem to communicate.
The women leave the stage clutching presents for their cooperation — T-shirts saying “Got Rice?”
In an interview in the gathering center, Xiong — dressed then just like any other young American — said, “I think if the elder people saw just a part of the show, “they might be offended or embarrassed. But by the end, they really seem OK with it.”
The big finish is a rap song recounting the heroic struggles of the Hmong. Xiong has been wearing a traditional Hmong outfit, black, pajamalike top and bottom, a red scarf around the waist — plus the sneakers he needs to exuberantly leap around the stage. For that number, he adds a comic Uncle Sam hat.
“We need to celebrate our differences, and not be ashamed or afraid of them,” he said in the interview at Kajsiab House, noting that he has done something like 1,200 shows making just that point — audiences of everyone from Hmong immigrants to police officers to corporate managers to newly arrived Ukrainians to Girl Scouts.
“I remember that the first American I saw frightened me,” he said. “I ran to my mother and said there’s a blond, blue-eyed monster (the Hmong are short) out there! He has a long nose and huge nostrils — I’ve looked up a lot of nostrils since then. My mother said, `Don’t get too close.'”
The rap follows the most serious stretch of the show focusing on taking pride in being who you are. He is discussing the topic, “What is Hmong?” His mother’s answer to that question gave the show its name. “I asked her,” Xiong said, “and she said, `I is Hmong.'”
He talks about the Hmong killed in the mid-1700s as a set-upon ethnic minority in what now is central China, where they had lived since prehistoric times. He takes a newspaper-size sheet of paper from a table and tears away a strip indicating that loss. The Hmong fled south, some staying in the southern highlands, some pressing into northern Vietnam, others — the ancestors of the audience — traveling farther west into Laos where they were shunned by the native population. Xiong talks about deaths and suicides there and rips away more of the paper.
Killing fields
Of the 300,000 Hmong who were living in Laos in 1973, 30,000 died during the Vietnam War and another 50,000 to 60,000 died trying to escape the country. The paper gets smaller still.
After the war, some Hmong stayed on in Laos and live in oppression and poverty there today. Others made it to the refugee camps, but worried about life in a country they feel had broken a promise to take care of them. Some, represented by just a small piece of paper now, came here.
Noting that the younger generation of Hmong is the first to get a formal education, Xiong holds up what’s left of the paper and tears away strips representing gang membership, drug use, getting pregnant too young. He’s down to just a postage stamp, and he holds it up high.
“This is the Hmong who go to college,” he says. “And who are they?” A girl in the back of the crowd raises her hand. She remembers the answer from earlier in the 90-minute show.
“They are the best of the best,” she says.
Refugees wait for assistance
There are more than 300,000 Hmong now in the U.S. The first arrivals, 150 families (about 750 people), came in January 1976. The heads of those families had been employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane. Their service was rewarded in the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, giving them the privilege of immigrating to this country.
Later, other Hmong were admitted because of service in the Secret War. They in turn were able to submit petitions on behalf of close relatives who had been left behind in Thailand. This year, the State Department is allowing in another 15,000 Hmong.
There is a current effort to restore government assistance for Hmong refugees here. In the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, there was a provision that immigrants could get benefits for seven years, which would continue only if they got citizenship within that time. Because of their widespread inability to read English, the Hmong were given a dispensation to take the test in Hmong.
Nonetheless, many sent in the paperwork and have waited — some for years — for the necessary interview to be scheduled. In the meantime, the benefits expired, leaving many Hmong wondering how they will survive in this glittering, expensive country and feeling once again that it has abandoned them.
— Charles Leroux
