Hmong

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Sunisa Lee, the Hmong, & the Dignity of Refugees

Sunisa Lee. Photo by Danielle Parhizkaran/USA TODAY Sports

After Sunisa Lee won the Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, a reporter (Perry Russom) from NBC10 in Boston emailed me to ask if I would give a little background about Hmong people, given her importance to Hmong-Americans in Massachusetts and around the country. It was a pleasant conversation and he asked good questions about Hmong history. We spoke for maybe 15 minutes. The video below was the result.

https://twitter.com/PerryNBCBoston/status/1420956346841718784

The clip is fine. Obviously, not everything we talked about would make it into the final edited version. That’s not how television works. And the focus was where it should be — on Suni Lee’s remarkable achievement and what she means to Hmong people, who have long been overlooked in this country.

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Revisiting the Hmong of French Guiana

I recently saw this France 24 video on the Hmong of French Guiana. I haven’t written about this much here on this blog, but I actually did some of my Ph.D. research with the Hmong in French Guiana years ago (here’s an article I published in the Hmong Studies Journal). It made me nostalgic to see the village again, as well as some familiar faces. My research assistant, KaLy Yang, and I were treated very well by the people in the two main Hmong villages (Cacao and Javouhey), and I think of the people there often.

French Guiana (or Guyane) is certainly one of the more unusual endpoints for the Hmong diaspora. As refugees from Laos, many Hmong resettled in the U.S., Australia, and France, after the Vietnam War, with lesser numbers in Canada, Germany, and Argentina (in fact, I met one Hmong man who originally resettled in Argentina before moving on to Javouhey). When people first learn there are refugees from Southeast Asia in the Amazon rainforest, it usually elicits a powerful reaction, either confusion or amazement. But then you learn the history, and it makes as much sense as any diasporic endpoint in a small, interconnected world where migration (voluntary or not) is common.

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Shortcomings of the Body Mass Index (BMI)

I have been meaning to write about this topic for a while, and now I have Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump to thank for spurring me to doing so. In case you missed it (or you’ve forgotten because the news moves so quickly), last week Pelosi said that she wished Trump would refrain from taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against COVID-19, which he had been doing for more than a week. Pelosi’s comments revolved around the lack of scientific evidence of the drug’s efficacy, and that fact that it appears to be harmful. Her apparent concern was followed by some not very subtle backhanded comments, adding that Trump was at heightened risk for drug complications due to: “his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group – morbidly obese, they say. So, I think it’s not a good idea.”

Weight is a sensitive topic. Pelosi’s comments were seen by some as justified comeuppance, since Trump has an expansive history of insulting people, but they were more widely panned as fat-shaming. Still others, such as CNN Political reporter Chris Cillizza, wondered whether Trump really was in fact “morbidly obese” by looking at CDC guidelines on the body mass index (BMI).

There are certainly more important things going on in the world right now than worrying about weight or BMI. Still, there is some evidence that people in higher-income countries under lockdown are gaining weight – the so-called “quarantine 15” – while people in lower-income countries are at higher risk for famine. As someone who has used BMI in research, I’d like to focus on its uses and some of its shortcomings, as well as the potential stigmatizing effects of labeling people by BMI categories.

BMI is used by an array of health professionals – physicians, nutritionists, epidemiologists, humanitarian aid workers – as a screening tool for people who might be under- or over-weight, as a warning for potential health problems. One of the reasons BMI is so widely used is its simplicity. All you need are two measurements: height (in meters) and weight (in kilograms), which are then plugged into the formula kg/ m2. And, unlike other more direct ways of assessing body composition, such as skinfolds, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, or underwater weighing, BMI can be ascertained with just a scale and a stadiometer. This makes BMI a cheap method that requires minimal training. This also makes BMI a portable, field-friendly method for researchers (including biological anthropologists) working with people who live in a range of environments.

Categorizing People by BMI

A higher BMI is suggestive of higher body fat, which is a risk factor for various morbidities including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. For that reason, health organizations such as the CDC use rough categories to ascertain who might be at risk for elevated body fat (or adiposity). In adults, “absolute” cutoffs for categorizing adults are recommended:

  • Underweight – below 18.5 kg/m2
  • Normal or healthy – 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m2
  • Overweight – 25.0 to 29.9 kg/m2
  • Obese – 30 kg/m2 or higher
    • Class 1 Obesity – 30 to 34.9 kg/m2 
    • Class 2 Obesity – 35 to 39.9 kg/m2 
    • Class 3 Obesity – 40 kg/m2

If you know your height and weight, there are simple ways of finding your BMI if you don’t have a calculator handy, such as this site. Or, you may have seen a chart like this before.

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How War Gets “Under the Skin”

Unbending rigor is the mate of death,
And wielding softness the company of life
Unbending soldiers get no victories;
The stiffest tree is readiest for the axe.
(Tao Te Ching: 76)

 

Early in life, our bodies are like unmolded clay, ready to be shaped by our experiences. For some of us, that matching process can create problems. If circumstances change, we could end up poorly adapted to our adult environment. A child born into harsh conditions, though, may have to take that risk in order to make it to adulthood at all.

The Hmong in French Guiana may be an example of this process. They are a fascinating population for many reasons, the most obvious being that they are there at all. A few dozen refugees from Laos first resettled in French Guiana in 1977, a few years after the Vietnam War, after they and the French government agreed that life in small, ethnically homogenous villages in a tropical environment was a better option than acculturating to the cities of Métropole France. The experiment paid off. Today, more than two thousand Hmong are farmers in the Amazonian jungle, producing most of the fruits and vegetables in the country. The result is a level of economic autonomy and cultural retention that is likely unique in the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora.

scenes in fg

Scenes from Hmong villages in French Guiana. (Clockwise from top left: fields of Cacao, young men going on a hunting trip in Javouhey, swidden agriculture of Cacao, a street lined with farmers’ trucks in Javouhey.

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PBS Series on the Secret War in Laos

Minnesota PBS has an upcoming documentary on the Secret War in Laos to complement the one on Vietnam by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. I’ve been told it will be available on October 3rd. 

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On Multiraciality: Perceptions of Homogeneity and Difference

“I note the obvious differences between each sort and type./ But we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”  (Maya Angelou, Human Family)

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It’s been said that young primates engage in social learning in three main ways (van Schaik 2016). They can obtain information horizontally (from peers), vertically (from parents), and obliquely (from other adults). For the most part, the vertical transmission of information tends to flow in one direction; juveniles learn from the experiences of their parents rather than vice versa.

Yet parents can also learn from their kids. The street is not entirely one-way. My own children (who are also primates, just like you and I) have taught me a lot: from what they learn in school, see online, or their slang (derp). As “biracial” children, they’ve also taught me a few things simply by existing. There are general lessons that most parents learn – that having children can reorient priorities, and that parenting is a mix of vicarious pain, joy, and fear. For me, one specific lesson as a specific parent of these specific children, has to do with the ways that people perceive similarities and differences. I’ve been hesitant to write about my kids here (we all deserve some privacy). Still, I think there are some lessons I’ve learned that might be useful.

First, a step back. Most of my recent ancestors, as far as I know, come from Ireland and Britain, with some Scandinavians thrown in there, as well as ancestors from other regions of Europe. Oh, and Neanderthals too; they aren’t exactly recent, but we can’t forget them. Before that, my ancestors eventually trace back to Africa, as is true of everyone. If someone were to ask me about my ethnicity, I’d probably say that I am Irish-American, though I know that any label must necessarily discard some complexity. After all, a single name cannot possible encompass the nearly infinite number of  ancestors standing behind me. Identity, ancestry, and genes certainly correlate with each other, but never perfectly so. My wife is the daughter of Korean immigrants and would refer to herself as Korean-American. And her recent family tree, as far as she knows, contains ancestors who lived not only in Korea, but also in northern China.

With the kids at the beach.

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The Biology of Forced Displacement

“Seeking asylum is not illegal under international law and people have a right to be treated humanely and with dignity.”  – UNHCR

“We crossed the Mekong to get to Thailand at night, so no one would see us. We had always lived in the mountains (of northern Laos), so we did not know how to swim. When we came to the river, we used anything to help us float – bamboo, bicycle tubes. But at night, it is easy to get lost. Someone in our group said: ‘Remember, if you get lost when you’re going down the river (with the current), don’t panic. Thailand is on your right.’ ”

 

 

Every refugee has a story. The one above was told to me by a Hmong man I met in French Guiana in 2001. I went to learn about the experiences of the people there and how they had adjusted to being resettled half a world away, from Southeast Asia to a French ‘overseas department’ in Amazonia. They were actually doing quite well at the time, living as independent farmers who had been given land by the government years earlier.

Hmong men in French Guiana going hunting by bike.

Hmong men in French Guiana going hunting by bike.

They also retained a good degree of cultural continuity. While most are fluent in French, the majority of the 2,000+ Hmong in the country lived in rural, semi-isolated, ethnically homogenous villages. This gave them a buffer of sorts, allowing them to acculturate on their own terms. As they often put it, they were “free to be their own boss,” free to be Hmong, and most said they were happy with life in French Guiana. This combination of traits – economically self-sufficient, culturally distinct, mostly content, living in a rural overseas department – is not the typical refugee story. In fact, because of that relative uniqueness, the French Guiana Hmong have drawn attention from media outlets such as the BBC and the NY Times.

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Civilians, Refugees, and the 2nd Indochina War in Laos

[Note (June 2020): I’m seeing an uptick in the number of views on this essay. Is there any reason? Since this site is a labor of love, I’m just curious how it is being used.]

“In Houa Phanh and Xieng Khouang provinces, the war (in Laos) has reached into every home and forced every individual, down to the very youngest, to make the agonizing choice of flight or death.” (Yang 1993: 104)

“Those who suffered the most from the escalating conflict were populations living in the east of the country: overwhelmingly highland minorities, Lao Thoeng and particularly Lao Sung (Mien as well as Hmong), but also upland Tai, the Phuan of Xiang Khouang and the Phu-Tai of east central Laos.” (Stuart-Fox, 1997: 139)

“Military Region II (northeastern Laos) bore the brunt of the war for almost fifteen years. Nearly 80% of the refugee population in Laos originated in MR II, including the refugees on the Vientiane Plaine. Almost the entire population of Houa Phan (Sam Neua) and Xieng Khouang Provinces were gradually forced south into the Long Tieng, Ban Xon, Muang Cha crescent.” (USAID, 1976: 210)

Displaced Hmong in Laos, probably in the early 1970s. Source: Roger Warner. 1998.

Displaced Hmong in Laos, probably in the early 1970s. Source: Roger Warner. 1998.

A consistent feature of war is the harming of civilian lives. The extent of harm is not always easy to ascertain, but is sometimes quantified in the number of “excess deaths” that occur during a war. For example, Hagopian et al (2013) surveyed two thousand randomly selected households throughout Iraq, interviewing residents about their family members before and during the US-led invasion and occupation. They estimated that from March 2003-2011 approximately 405,000 deaths occurred as a result of the war, mostly from violence.

However, such studies always have limitations – recall bias, survivor bias (the dead cannot be interviewed), and logistics in surveying high violence areas – meaning that mortality estimates will never be perfect, and Hagopian et al. gave a range around their figure (a 95% uncertainty interval of 48,000 to 751,000 excess deaths). Whatever the exact number, which we will probably never know, we can still be confident that mortality rates increased during the war years.  

The same challenges apply to all wars, including one that I have been interested in for a while – the Second Indochina War in Laos. The Australian historian Martin Stuart-Fox wrote that: “loss of life can only be guessed at, but 200,000 dead and twice that number of wounded would be a conservative estimate” (1997: 144). Mortality estimates for Laos are further complicated by the fact that it was one the least developed countries in Asia at the time of the war, likely with unreliable census data and other record keeping (though, for those who are interested, see the 1961 Joel Halpern “Laos Project Papers” from UCLA, which contain demographic and health statistics).

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Infant Mortality Rates, War & Laos

I finished my dissertation on how the war in Laos was correlated to the physical growth of Hmong refugees in 2004. The general idea was that early stressors, particularly prenatally and in infancy, can have long-term impacts on growth and health. The model I was working with came largely from David Barker’s (and others’) ‘fetal origins hypothesis,’ based on evidence that low birth-weight infants tended to grow up to have higher rates of things like type 2 diabates, coronary heart disease, hypertension, etc. A classmate in graduate school, Stephanie Rutledge, introduced me to Barker’s work and told me that I’d find it really enlightening. I did. Sadly, Barker passed away earlier this year, but his work helped spawn a new direction in research. 

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How War Gets Under Our Skin

beinghuman.org front page

I wrote this piece on BeingHuman.org about how war (and the world in general) gets under our skin. It looks at the Hmong example, as well as examples from a few other wars around the world (the Dutch Hunger Winter, the Biafran famine, and the Khmer Rouge period), and how these experiences get into our bodies. 

 

http://www.beinghuman.org/article/how-world-gets-under-our-skin

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Unbending rigor is the mate of death,
And wielding softness the company of life:
Unbending soldiers get no victories;
The stiffest tree is readiest for the axe.
Tao Te Ching: 76

 

Early in life, our bodies are like unmolded clay, ready to be shaped by our experiences. For some of us, that matching process can create problems. If circumstances change, we could end up poorly adapted to our adult environment. A child born into harsh conditions, though, may have to take that risk in order to make it to adulthood at all.