http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/93446-global-voices-witnesses-to-a-secret-war/
Regular airtime: Thursdays, 8pm (PBS)
Cast: Cy Thao, KaYing Yang
US release date: 17 May 2009
18 May 2009
By Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
I Am Here
Editor's Note: Witnesses to a Secret War will screen at NYC's Visual
Arts Theater on June 2nd, 2009 at 7pm. The screening is free and open
to the public. The director and crew will be present for a Q and A
afterward. The Visual Arts Theater is located at 333 West 23rd
Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, in New York City.
In a classroom at Wat Tham Krabok Refugee Settlement in Central
Thailand, students learn to speak English. The Hmong refugees
practice what they will need to say once they have arrived in the
U.S. "I am here," they say, again and again. A girl giggles as she
speaks, self-conscious about her pronunciation. Their teacher, KaYing
Yang, explains the context. This is "cultural orientation" class, she
says, though there is no word for it in Hmong. "Call it 'preparation
for America,'" she smiles, and her young students smile as well. At
long last they are leaving the camp where they have lived their entire lives.
"I always wanted to go back to the refugee camp," says Yang, now
working for the International Organization for Migration, "because
when I was there, I was too young to understand what was going on in
the struggle. To be able to go back and give something back to the
community is a dream come true."
As she explains in Witnesses to a Secret War, airing as part of PBS'
Global Voices, Yang's story is not unusual. When she was last
"there," in Laos, 30 years ago, the U.S. military was pulling
outabruptly. With the Vietnam war ceasefire declared in Paris, 18
April 1975, the secret war that had been raging in Laos and Cambodia
also ended. CIA officials evacuated just 2500 top Hmong officers and
their families, leaving "the vast majority" of Hmong soldiers and
their families behind to face the vengeful Pathet Lao. Throughout the
rest of 1975 and 1976, KaYing's family and thousands of other
refugees fled the country, crossing the Mekong River into Thailand
during the dead of night, under fire from the vengeful communist
troops, fearful and desperate and utterly on their own.
Choua Thao, a nurse during the war, remembers promises made by
Americans who said, "Win the war, we're on top of the world, if you
lose, we will tear up you." Boua Vang Yang, once of several members
of the special guerrilla unit trained and supplied by the CIA,
recalls, "They recruited us for a war we didn't want to fight. We had
to leave our loved ones and our homes for months, years at a time."
The fighting haunts veterans still, as does the loss they suffered.
Lia Yeng, a former soldier, says, "It's more than your father or your
parents or somebody close to you die. It's your nation, die. It's
more than any experience you ever have in your life, because it's not
just the past. The future is dying too."
Deborah Dickson's documentary, like Ellen Kuras' Oscar-nominated
Nerakhoon (2008), looks at the many betrayals and losses endured by
Hmong refugees. Witnesses includes interviews with multiple subjects,
refugees who moved to the States in the 1970s as well as camp
dwellers who, in 2003, decide to take up the last American offer for
"resettlement" in the States. The choice is not an easy onethen or
now. "An immigrant has a choice to come to America," says Tzianeng
Vang, "But a refugee really has no choice. You either resettle or
you're exterminated, you have no home to call home." Those who
remained in Thailand in 1975 were hoping against hope to return to
Laos, to reclaim the home they knew. As that possibility faded over
time, they lived surrounded by barbed wire, their homes small and
dilapidated, their livelihoods limited, their expectations
increasingly meager.
The film turns from Thailand to St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities
home to "the largest concentration of Hmong in the western
hemisphere" (his point is neatly illustrated with a series of shots
in the grocery store shelves, where U.S. detergents, sodas, and snack
foods are lined up alongside equally bright packages labeled with
Hmong script and spring rolls at the deli counter). "Now we are
living like people in other countries," says one recent immigrant.
"Here we have the opportunity to be successful." To live "like other
people," however, means to abandon some Hmong traditions. "Here, we
don't see each other as often. There's a longing."
This longing is expressed variously in the film. Cy Thao, artist and
Minnesota state representative, shows in his paintings the stories he
has heard from elders of "The Hmong Migration." He remembers that
when he first came to the States as a child, "I didn't speak the
language, I didn't know how to read or write, but I knew how to draw
pretty well. That was my way of communicating and making friends."
When, in college, he "came across" a picture of a Hmong family being
tortured by the communists, he was moved to preserve that history. "A
lot of the folks who I had talked to about the war," Thao says, "They
kind of needed someone to communicate their experience and to put
some closure to it." Whether or not the paints bring closure is up
for question, but they do tell a brutal story, with bold, thick,
almost Gauguin-ish figures set against blue skies and green fields,
farmers bent over their work, dead cows with necks twisted in agony,
and soldiers with guns all painted with the same verve.
Another sort of vivacity is visible in the real lives of refugees.
KaYing remembers the discrimination she felt when she came to the
States in 1976. "White students always said, 'Go back to where you
came from,' and I didn't really know where I came from." When she
leaves the camp to come home after two years working there, KaYing
visits with her friend, Mae Yia Thao. Standing in her kitchen in St.
Paul, she notes how well her children are adjusting to the change:
"We're older so it's harder for us… We want to work, but we can't
understand what they say to us." Thao's husband Xue Xiong adds, "When
we got here, life was difficult. Our life back there seemed simpler.
But once we understood our happiness was here." Here and there, life
remains hard, but also unstoppably hopeful.
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