The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chinese tried to “pacify” and “sinicize” the Hmong by telling them that they had to surrender their arms, that they had to wear Chinese clothes, that the men had to cut their hair short, and that they were forbidden to sacrifice buffalos. Those who submitted were called the “Cooked Miao” those who refused were the “Raw Miao.” There were a lot more Raw Miao than cooked ones. In 1730 or thereabouts, hundreds of Hmong warriors killed their wives and children, believing they would fight more fiercely if they had nothing to lose. (It worked for a while. Thus unencumbered, they seized several passes, severing Chinese supply lines, before they themselves were all killed or captured.) In 1772, a small army of Hmong squashed a large army of Chinese in eastern Kweichow by rolling boulders on their heads while they were marching through a narrow gorge. The Manchu emperor, Ch’ien-lung, decided he would be satisfied with nothing less than the extermination of the entire Hmong tribe, a goal whose unsuccessful pursuit ultimately cost him twice what he had spent conquering the entire kingdom of Turkestan. Ch’ien-lung dispatched another general to the Hmong regions. After many months of sieges and battles, the general told Sonom, the Hmong king of greater Kintchuen, that if he surrendered, his family would be spared. Sonom swallowed this story. When he and his family were brought before the emperor, they were chopped into bits, and their heads were placed in cages for public exhibition.
    It is, perhaps, no surprise that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a large number of Hmong decided that they had had enough of China. Not only were they fed up with being persecuted, but their soil was also getting depleted, there was a rash of epidemics, and taxes were rising. Although the majority of the Hmong stayed behind—today there are about five million Hmong in China, more than in any other country—about a half million migrated to Indochina, walking the ridgelines, driving their horses and cattle ahead of them, carrying everything they owned. As was their custom, they went to the highlands, settling first in what are now Vietnam and Laos, and later in Thailand. For the most part, they built their villages in places where no one else wanted to live. But if the local tribes objected or demanded tribute, the Hmong fought back with flintlock blunderbusses, or with their fists, and usually won. Father Mottin quotes an official who said, “I saw a Meo take my son by the feet and break his spine against the posts of my hut.” After the French established control over Indochina in the 1890s, the Hmong rebelled against their extortionate tax system in a series of revolts. One of them, called the Madman’s War, which lasted from 1919 to 1921, was led by a messianic figure named Pa Chay, who had a habit of climbing trees so that he could receive his military orders directly from heaven. His followers blew away large numbers of colonial soldiers with ten-foot-long cannons made from tree trunks. Only after the French granted them special administrative status in 1920, acknowledging that the best way to avoid being driven crazy by them was to leave them alone, did the Hmong of Laos, who constituted the largest group outside China, settle down peaceably to several unbroken decades of farming mountain rice, growing opium, and having as little contact as possible with the French, the lowland Lao, or any of the other ethnic groups who lived at lower elevations.
    The history of the Hmong yields several lessons that anyone who deals with them might do well to remember. Among the most obvious of these are that the Hmong do not like to take orders; that they do not like to lose; that they would rather flee, fight, or die than surrender; that they are not intimidated by being outnumbered; that they are rarely persuaded that the customs of other cultures, even those more powerful than their own, are superior; and that they are capable of