¶ … arrival of Hmong to the United States and delves briefly on the earlier conditions of the Hmong in Laos and Southeast Asia, their region of origin.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Friedan is a book about the encounter between a Hmong family and the American medical community. It also goes into great detail about how the Hmong became allies to the Americans in the war in Vietnam. Hmong is a race of people that originates in China. The Hmong are agrarian, with animism (belief in individual spirits inhabiting natural objects) being their source of religious influence. In the early 1960's, the Hmong people were recruited by the CIA, to help the American Air Force in protecting their radar sites during the Vietnam War and were also entrusted with duties to fight off the communists....
They were trained for guerilla warfare and funded and supported by the U.S. Government. But as the war came to a close, the Hmong people were left high and dry and the support from the CIA ceased, leaving almost a third of the total Hmong community ravaged by the reaches of the long lasting war. The Hmong had to abide by the flawed peace treaty that put the Communists into power and in control of Laos. They were then punished for their involvement in the war and were targets of biological warfare therefore to escape prosecution, many fled to different neighboring areas including the jungles while a lesser number of lucky ones made it into Thailand where after many years of living in refugee camps, a small number of them were allowed residence in the United States.
At first, the U.S. government, made the Hmong people settle across the country in several scattered…
