Hmong Have Experienced Continual Cultural

¶ … Hmong have experienced continual cultural and physical exodus. These forced migrations were exacerbated by the conditions of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. As Anne Fadiman points out in the Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the Americans are now coming to terms with who the Hmong are, and how their culture has been formed amid tremendous adversity. It can even be said that Hmong history is characterized by conflict. The Hmong have been able to maintain cultural identity and continuity partly as a means to resist invasions. Those invasions are not just physical but also cultural.

One of the main historical threads in Hmong culture is tragedy: being forcibly removed off of land, losing population in war, and struggling to preserve a culture against the odds. Fadiman urges readers to apply her encounters with the Hmong to other cultures, too. The way Fadiman treats the Hmong experience in America reveals the core means by which upheaval can affect a culture.

In Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992, Jane Hamilton-Merritt addresses different aspects of Hmong culture by focusing specifically on their role in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War marked yet another adversarial chapter in Hmong history, one distinguished by political manipulation. Hamilton-Merritt accordingly applies a deep, thoughtful, and critical evaluation of the American wartime strategy. These texts testify to the ability of the Hmong to remain a cohesive culture in spite of tragedy.

For many Hmong, the most recent migration to the United States will pose perhaps the most difficult challenge of all. Maintaining traditional culture in the melting pot of America can prove nearly impossible, as Fadiman points out. The pressure to conform to mainstream values, beliefs, ideals, aesthetics, and worldviews is tremendous. Although Americans do not use military force to shove cultural emblems down an immigrant's throat, McDonalds and Coca-Cola do mark an assault on the senses and the consciousness. When the Hmong refugees encounter the peculiarities of the Western medical system, their entire worldview is called into question. Yet it is mainly the Americans who struggle. The Hmong view of health, healing, and wellness differ so sharply from that of the Americans that it is we who must examine our beliefs, not the Hmong.