Minnesota Hmong see parallels in Afghan refugee crisis

As Fridley’s Lee Pao Xiong watched the murderous chaos at Kabul airport on his television last month, his thoughts rushed to his own desperate flight from his homeland decades earlier.

“When I saw the evacuation of the Afghans, the people who were fighting, rushing to get on these flights, it brought back memories to me, and I said to myself: ‘Oh, here we go again’, he declared.

Xiong was 8 years old when his father, a military captain, struggled to get him on a plane departing from Long Tieng military base in Laos. Like many members of the Hmong community, Xiong’s family was forced to flee North Vietnamese forces who retaliated against the Hmong people for helping the US CIA wage a secret war against communism in Laos.

When he boarded an evacuation flight on May 13, 1975, Xiong said it became apparent that there was not enough room for all of his family.

“My dad pushed me, pushed my mom, my brother and myself. We get on the plane and they are left behind, ”he said.

Her father eventually caught another flight from Laos later that day, and Xiong’s family spent the following year in a refugee camp before being resettled to rural Indiana.

Hmong families who failed to board the evacuation planes fled through the jungles of Laos where many died. Others drowned while crossing the Mekong River on their way to Thailand.

“My family was one of those that remained, one of those that had to find a way out,” said Kao Kalia Yang, a writer who lives in Saint-Paul. She was born in Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand in 1980. The camp was filled with disease and death, and people whose lives were in limbo.

Yang’s father, a songwriter, carried her on his back to the treetops so that she could see a larger world beyond barbed wire fences and armed soldiers. He told her that she was not a child of war, but a child of hope.

“I belong to a generation where we all bear the names of the dead and the hope is that we live a life that will make them proud,” she said. “There is a simple reality that I think every refugee child carries: that we have to live a life worthy of so many other lives that never have.

When Yang was six years old, her family finally arrived in Minnesota and started a new life. It took a while, but her parents finally found work and saved enough money to buy a small house. They are doing well now, but memories of their flight from their homeland still haunt her parents today.

“My mother and my father [up] until 2021, they still wake up in the morning [and recall dreaming] that they were chased by North Vietnamese soldiers all night. It happens all the time, ”she said.

Yang has written a memoir on his refugee experience and another book detailing the collective stories of Minnesota refugees. As the first-hand accounts of the ancient Hmong are lost, she said it is important to document these stories so that future generations do not forget their own history.

“The story of my people is just very sad and violent,” said Minneapolis artist Cydi Yang, 26, a second generation Hmong American.

Talking about the history of the Hmong makes her a heavy heart, but Cydi says her family’s survival story is integral to who she is today.

“People of my generation may be feeling a lot,” she said. “We are feeling the effects of what happened to our parents and grandparents where we are now and how we are connected to this story.”

For some, these links change as more and more details about their history emerge. Kao Kalia Yang says the refugee crisis in Afghanistan inspired some of his relatives to share more about what happened to them decades ago.

“These are the stories that are coming out for the very first time in my family,” she said. “So the story goes [in Afghanistan] changes my own understanding of the stories that I have lived my whole life, the legacies that I hold onto, in a very deep way.

And while Afghan and Hmong refugees may have very different lived experiences, Yang says the lessons for US society and foreign policy are the same.

“The history of Afghanistan is the history of Afghanistan. Hmong history is Hmong history. But they have a lot more in common that many of us are comfortable with, ”Yang said. “Because history repeats itself. Because we are told opposite, whatever lessons may have been there, these lessons have not been learned. “