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They fled terror in Laos after secretly aiding American forces in the Vietnam War. Now 200,000 Hmong prosper-and struggle-in the United States
LATE ONE NIGHT this past April in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, a window in Cha Vang's split-level house shattered and a container filled with fire accelerant landed inside. Vang, his wife and three daughters, ages 12,10 and 3, escaped the blaze, but the $400,000 house was destroyed. "If you want to terrorize a person or send a message, you slash a tire," Vang, a 39-year-old prominent Hmong-American businessman and political figure, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "To burn down a house with people sleeping in it is attempted murder."
Police believe that the incident may have been connected to two previous near-fatal attacks-a shooting and another firebombing-directed at members of the local Hmong community The St. Paul-Minneapolis metropolitan area is home to 60,000 of the nation's roughly 200,000 Hmong (pronounced "mong"), an ethnic group from Laos who began seeking sanctuary in the United States following the Vietnam War. Vang is the son of Gen. Vang Pao, the legendary commander of the Hmong guerrillas whom the CIA recruited in the early 19605 to aid U.S. pilots shot down in Laos and bordering Vietnam and also to harry communist forces there. Today, Gen. Vang Pao, who resides near Los Angeles, is the acknowledged patriarch of his exiled countrymen. Many Hmong-Americans are convinced that agents of the communist Laotian government were behind the attack on Vang's family.
The violence in St. Paul briefly cast a light, albeit a harsh one, on what otherwise may be the most extraordinary immigrant story in this immigrant nation in a long time. No group of refugees has been less prepared for modern American life than the Hmong, and yet none has succeeded more quickly in making itself at home here. In Laos, the Hmong inhabited isolated highland hamlets and lived as subsistence farmers, some also growing opium poppies as a cash crop. Though they are an ancient people tracing their ancestry to China, where they endured more than 4,000 years as an oppressed minority before fleeing to Laos 200 years ago, the Hmong, at least as far as scholars know, did not have a written language...