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?”