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the other survival techniques he’d mastered over the years.
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but my father was preparing my brother and me for the day the soldiers would invade our village. He knew it was simply a question of when, not if, my nightmare would come true, yet I never saw even a trace of fear in him.
    Not only did my father train my brother and me, but he also used to pull the men of our village together and trainthem in the basics of warfare, using the handful of guns we had in our village. As I mentioned, he knew what was coming. After all, dlaim ntawv , we were destined to live at the time when the Hmong way of life came to a horrific end.
    2. The Hmong place our tribal name first, followed by our personal name.
    3. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 123.

2
The Hmong Tom Sawyer
    Growing up in Laos, I was always hungry. It wasn’t that my father couldn’t provide. He was a farmer and a very good one at that. He was also an accomplished hunter, one of the best in our village. Even so, when I think of Laos, I think of hunger. No matter how hard my father worked, life in Laos seemed to fight him.
    I will never forget one particular day when I went with him to our farm. As we got close to the fields, I heard a strange buzzing sound. Even now, over thirty-five years later, I can still hear that sound ringing in my ears. I never heard anything like it before or since. It had such an otherworldly quality that I wondered if my life was in danger.
    I didn’t want to get any closer to the sound, but my father did. He picked up the pace and nearly sprinted up the hill to our farm just over the rise. Not wanting to be left by myself, I ran after him. The closer we came to the farm, the louder thesound became. My ears ached from the intense buzzing.
    As we topped the hill, I looked at our farm and couldn’t believe what I saw. All of our rice plants had changed color and appeared to sway in a way that wind could never cause.
    â€œWhat is it, Father?”
    He didn’t answer, which frightened me more than anything he could have said. He ran down the slope toward our rice fields and began swatting. With each swat, the heads of the plants appeared to rise, then settle back as soon as my father passed by.
    I ran after him. Only then could I see that the plants themselves weren’t moving; insects were. Our rice field had been transformed into something like one of the plagues on Egypt from the Bible. All around me, grasshoppers were piled on the heads of our rice plants. And their sound? It was more than a buzzing. They crackled as their bodies banged against one another, crunched as they chewed on our plants, and sucked the milky sap out of the plants, the sap that was just days away from hardening into grains of rice.
    I tried to keep up with my father. Grasshoppers popped under my bare feet. I looked up to a sky that seemed to be filled with huge, greenish-gray swirling clouds. Grasshoppers had contaminated the entire valley. More and more descended on our field.
    â€œFather,” I called out. I was afraid. At the same time, as strange as it seems, I was a little relieved. In my young mind, I thought, They’re just bugs. At least my life isn’t in danger. How little I understood.
    My feeling of relief dissolved as soon as I caught up with my father and saw something I never had before: tears ran down his cheeks. Hmong men don’t show emotion, and they never cry.
    Then my father began to pray, but this was a different kind of prayer than I’d heard him say. He cried out with a voice that broke my heart, “God, why did You let this happen to my family? You know how hard I worked. What are we going to eat now?”
    My father knew, just as I was about to learn, that we couldn’t simply plant more rice. In Laos, the planting season falls into a