Mai Na M. Lee - Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960

Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom

The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 18501960

Mai Na M. Lee

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

NEW PERSPECTIVES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

Series Editors

Alfred W. McCoy

R. Anderson Sutton

Thongchai Winichakul

Associate Editors

Warwick H. Anderson

I. G. Baird

Katherine Bowie

Ian Coxhead

Michael Cullinane

Anne Ruth Hansen

Paul D. Hutchcroft

Courtney Johnson

Kris Olds

Publication of this book has been possible, in part, through support from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Mai Na M., author.

Dreams of the Hmong kingdom: the quest for legitimation in

French Indochina, 18501960 / Mai Na M. Lee.

pages cm (New perspectives in Southeast Asian studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-299-29884-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-299-29883-8 (e-book)

1. Hmong (Asian people)IndochinaHistory. 2. Ethnic conflictIndochina.

3. IndochinaEthnic relations. 4. IndochinaPolitics and government.

I. Title. II. Series: New perspectives in Southeast Asian studies.

DS509.5.H66L45 2015

959'.00495972dc23

2014035663

For the two Niam Nkauj Zuag Paj in my life: my mother, Lia Vue,

and

Mao Song Lyfoung

This work is the culmination of twenty years of thinking, intellectualizing, and researching and a lifetime spent dreaming about the Hmong. This slow history is the journey to find myself, my place among my people, and to locate our place in human history. I embarked on my first oral research for various term papers during my years as an undergraduate at Carleton College. My first primary informants were immediate family members like my mother, Lia Vue, my father, Lee Cha Yia, and my grandfather, Lee Nao Mai, a shaman and highly renowned Hmong ritual expert who was also a former assistant to Tasseng (subdistrict leader) Lee Blia Tria in Muang Pha, Xieng Khouang, Laos. An eyewitness to Pa Chays War, my grandfather was the last of his generation. He was born in about 1904 and passed away in 2006. He went from the horse-riding age to the age of automobiles, airplanes, and space exploration.

My first non-Hmong informant was Robert Anderson, then executive director and a founder of the Hmong American Partnership (HAP), a nonprofit organization in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He provided insight about the political divisions within the Twin Cities Hmong community in the 1990sparticularly about how HAP was being perceived as a threat to Lao Family Community, another nonprofit organization founded by General Vang Pao. Mr. Andersen lent me some books on the Hmong to read, books that I am ashamed to admit I still have to return to him. In short, I have been doing oral research since my undergraduate days, having interviewed hundreds of informants. Only those I quote directly appear in the bibliography.

The research here spans the globe. To balance the narrative and construct a historical chronology of the Hmong, whose history has primarily been depicted from the outside using external sources, I have woven together French archival sources, oral interviews, Hmong oral traditions, and secondary sources. The multiplicity of source types and the complexity of source materials present different challenges that I hope I have managed to transcend to an extent. Interviews were recorded and lasted between three and six hours, but sometimes they were spread over a period of several days. It was impossible to record everything, however. The most intriguing information often seeped through when the recorder was off and the subject was not on the spot and, therefore, was more relaxed, such as when the informant and I were just conversing during a meal or while we were looking at a collection of photographs or other mementos. The recording device presents its own limiting difficulties, which cannot be addressed here. So ethnographic observations, personal communications, and conversations also inform this work.

This book is about Hmong aspirations and why the Hmong ally themselves with different powers and states in the hope of achieving their most cherished dream. That coveted dream is sovereignty, but, as demonstrated here, they have settled for autonomy. In the midst of pursuing their dream, the Hmong face divisions along political, regional, and social lines. These divisions occur as the result of both conscious choices and the larger historical processes that lay beyond Hmong control. Division and competition are strong themes, but these issues should not be taken negatively as symptomatic of a Hmong cancer of some kind. Rather, this work should be taken as a demonstration of the dynamism and plurality of ideas in Hmong society. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that consensus can be found, that in the midst of political struggles there is the larger picture of the Hmong as a group, a people. Individual ambitions should be, must be tempered by this larger consideration. Others who have developed great civilizations already know this fact. The Hmong seem to know it only subconsciously. This is the one big lesson that this work hopes to impart to the new generation of Hmong leaders emerging around the globe.

The need for the oral historian to justify his or her sources and methodology is a product of oral historys secondary position within a discipline that privileges written documents. Yet Paul Richard Thompson reminds us that oral history was the first kind of history. And it is only quite recently that skill in handling oral evidence has ceased to be one of the marks of the great historian. With literacy and modernity almost synonymous, it is not a surprise that nonliterate groups such as the Hmong, as demonstrated throughout this book, have expressed a strong desire for literacy. The Hmongs longing for a writing system of their own can be contextualized amid western modernization.

By the eighteenth century, the preponderance of printed sources made it possible for some historians at least to dispense with their own field-work, and rely on documents and oral evidence published by others.

Oral history has been revived with efforts taken in the twentieth century. Karl Marx was quite keen in observing the elitism of historians, writing in 1856, I know the heroic struggles the English working class has gone through since the middle of the last century; struggles not the less glorious because they are shrouded in obscurity and burked by middle class historians.