Maichoa and Blong Lee
They are people of the land, accustomed to depending on it to
sustain them. But it is clear when you pass Maichoa and Blong Lee’s
home in inner-city Des Moines that they are struggling with their tiny
allotment. The front-yard garden, even with its brave display of an
American flag, speaks of
meagerness.
The Lees and their relatives Yer Yang and husband Mai Vang represent
two Hmong families of the approximately 169,000 Hmong in the United
States, and the 280 who have settled in Iowa. In 1975, Iowa opened its
doors to Laotian refugees who had been persecuted and driven from their
homeland because of their cooperation with the United States’s CIA
during the Vietnam War.
The Lees, who lived in a refugee camp in Thailand for six years before
coming to the United States in 1988, learned resiliency and
self-sufficiency. Their small front yard in inner-city Des Moines quite
simply was not big enough for the garden they needed. “We were shopping
too much,” says Blong empha-tically. “Too much!”
Although Laotians are typically very private people, the Lees struck up
a friendship with their neighbor, State Representative Ed Fallon. Both
the Lee’s and the Fallon’s yards featured more fruits and vegetables
than grass. When the Lees became U.S. citizens in 2001, they asked Ed
to help them vote for the very first time. Then they had one other
request. “They told me they needed more land,” Ed remembers. “Couldn’t
I find it for them?”
He could, and did. He asked his friend
LaVon Griffieon, a farmer and advocate of responsible land use, if she
could give a few acres of land to the Hmong families to farm. “He
shamed me into it,” LaVon laughs. “He said, ‘With 1,100 acres, surely
you can find a few for them.’” In the summer of 2002, Craig and LaVon
Griffieon invited four Hmong families to establish gardens on 2.5 of
their acres. The federal corn base that stipulates a minimum number of
corn acres prevented them from giving more, LaVon explains.
The Hmong tribes, originally a displaced people from China, settled in
the rugged, isolated highlands of Laos. The Lee family shows visitors
videos of their former home that reveals a culture devoid of
mechanization. There is no electricity or running water; houses are
made of grass and mud. Mai Vang remembers that he didn’t have a pair of
shoes until he was six years old.
But there was plenty of land to farm, and although the farmers walked
seven miles one way to their plots and farmed with only oxen and hoes,
the land sustained them. The hoe is one of the few possessions that the
Lees brought with them from their old country, and Maichoa proudly
shows it to guests. “We do everything with this,” she says.
On
the Griffieon farm, the Hmong families plant cucumbers, melons, herbs,
onions, squash, spinach, zucchini, lettuce, and flowers. Some of the
food is eaten, some is sold at the Downtown Farmers Market in Des
Moines. Gardens are usually spoken of as “niam teb,” which means
“mother’s land,” for it is women who do the planting, weeding,
watering, and harvesting. Seeds are rarely purchased, but saved from
last year’s harvest and traded among the families.
The Lee’s kitchen window is full of plants, which will be used to make
medicine. In the living room, two baby chicks (a gift from their
neighbor Ed Fallon) routinely escape from their box and run, peeping
around the room. The full-grown birds are also used for medicinal
purposes. Because all parts are used, grocery store chickens are not
suitable.
Videos of their home in Laos show a strikingly beautiful land—pastoral
and mountainous. But there is no trace of homesickness in the families’
voices. Life was hard.
There is one area, however, that Hmong families find frustrating in the
United States. Children do not abide by the traditions and rules of
their parents as they did in Laos. “This is the one thing where the
United States is not good for me,” says Yer Yang. Yer and Mai’s
children were all born in the refugee camp in Thailand, but Thai is not
the parents’ native tongue, and English is difficult for them. “My son
holds his head and says ‘My head is broken; I don’t know anything you
say.’” Yer demonstrates, holding her own head ruefully.
But despite parenting issues, Yer Yang and Mai Vang have faith in a
better future for their twelve children, and the Lee’s for their five
children. “I believe my kids…” Blong Lee loses the English words he
needs to communicate, but he raises one hand high in the air, to show a
higher level of living. “They will be higher here.”
What can Iowans learn from the Hmong farmers? LaVon’s answer reflects
her own passion about the importance of preserving Iowa’s farm land.
“We have taken an agrarian people and put them on asphalt, two blocks
from the welfare office. The desire to farm burns in their gut. We do
both our state and our immigrants a disservice by keeping them from the
land. Will we ever embrace the diversity that we need in crops,
communities, and people to sustain Iowa?”
Maichoa and Blong Lee
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