In new hills, home

Driven from Laos in the 1970s, thousands of Hmong are now thriving in North Carolina.

[Times photo: Wes Allison]

Pa Lo and her son, Kennedy, 2, work in the family garden outside Hickory, N.C.

MORGANTON, N.C. - It is one of those summer evenings when the roadside greens are made brilliant, the day lily and Queen Anne's lace refreshed by an afternoon shower that swept down from the highlands, leaving a moist cool behind. Everywhere is mountain view.

Out on a two-lane blacktop west of town, where the modest homes between the fields are graced with American flags and plastic geese, the names on the mailboxes announce residents whose roots here run deep:

Milligan. Comer. Moore. Black. But off to the right, on W Pine Hills Drive, comes another, unexpected: S HANG.

It sits outside a brown brick rancher, among the first of nearly 20 houses on a side street slanting down a hillside. Outside each front door are rows of sandals and shoes, and in each kitchen is a crockpot-sized rice steamer. In each back yard are a cluck of chickens and shrubby hot peppers.

These are the Hmong. Some 10,000 to 15,000 of them have settled along the valleys and low ridges around Hickory, Lenoir and Morganton, the largest concentration of Hmong in the eastern United States.

At first it seems an odd juxtaposition. The Catawba Valley is not one of those beacons of the New South that recently have drawn masses of Asian and Hispanic and Caribbean immigrants, like Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham or Tampa-St. Petersburg. This is a beacon of the Old South, a place where religion usually means Baptist, where the Confederate flag finds its way to truck bumpers, where the Hickory City Limit sign on U.S. 70 brags that the town is home to Dale Jarrett, the 1999 NASCAR Winston Cup Series champion.

But it is friendly, and the stands of bamboo behind the Hmong homes are thick. The corn is tall. Even rice grows well. The Hmong, pronounced "mong," share many values with their neighbors, especially a devotion to hard work, family and land.

On this cool, damp evening, Sho Hang is cutting the grass around his mailbox. Three of his children play volleyball with their cousins down the street. His fourth, a 9-year-old girl, is inside with his wife, preparing chicken and rice before her overnight shift at the battery factory.

Hang, 33, a stout man with iron-black hair, a caramel complexion and a good job at a printing plant, motioned to the houses and mobile homes on his street. All but three are owned by Hmong. Several hundred more Hmong live within range of a rooster crow. He is related to many of them.

They came from Minnesota, Wisconsin and California, which have the highest concentration of Hmong. They came for the ready work in the mills, and for a climate and topography that reminded them of home, in Laos.

They came, too, for the cheap rural land that has let them reclaim pieces of their traditional lifestyle: forested communes of extended families, large gardens and the animal sacrifice and other rituals of their traditional religion, ancestor worship.

"It's much like Laos. When you come home, you can do what you like. Nobody bothers you," said Hang, who moved here 10 years ago from California.

"Our families stick together. If I buy a home here, I want my brother-in-law to buy a home here, so we can be close. And he'll want his sister to buy a home here."

The Hmong do not belong in Philadelphia, Kue Chaw realized when he landed there with his wife and 10 children in 1976, after 20 years of fighting the Communists in Laos. It is too crowded, too noisy, too urban. He spent two years training in social work at Temple University, then set off in his car to find a new homeland.

Minnesota was too cold. California, too weird. Seattle had excellent weather, at least to the Hmong, but Chaw kept driving, covering most of the United States while his family waited in Philadelphia. He went through Georgia, the southern Appalachians. Then he found himself on the Blue Ridge Parkway, near Asheville, N.C.

"The people passing by, they do this to you," Chaw said, waving. "I thought that was good. Nobody do this anywhere else I go. I thought, maybe this is the place."

In 1980, the Chaws found a three-bedroom rancher in the foothills near Morganton, facing west the way the old Hmong like it. They converted the garage to a bedroom for the kids and stuffed it full of bunk beds. He found work at a furniture factory.

But Chaw sought more than a place of his own. When Laos fell to Communist insurgents in 1975, thousands of Hmong fled to refugee camps in Thailand. Many who made it to America over the next decade found themselves on welfare in California and Minnesota, with little English, little education, and little hope.

Chaw aspired to find a place they could work, own land and reclaim their culture and dignity.

First, he sought federal funding and formed the Hmong Natural Association Inc., with the goal of bringing Hmong to North Carolina. Then he approached local textile and furniture mills about hiring them, telling plant managers the Hmong are hard-working and loyal.

Lastly, Chaw spent one year trying to sell the Hmong to local residents, telling his new neighbors about their history and why they had come to America. He explained that from 1961 to 1973, tens of thousands of Hmong served in what became known as the U.S. Secret Army in the Kingdom of Laos, helping CIA and U.S. military advisers fight Communist insurgents and North Vietnamese troops.

Many, like Chaw, served on helicopter rescue teams, racing the Viet Cong to downed American pilots in the jungles of Laos and Vietnam. Some 35,000 Hmong and Lao died. A plaque in their honor was placed in Arlington National Cemetery in 1997, but until then few Americans knew of the secret war, or the Hmong's role in it.

When Laos fell, Communist troops stormed mountain villages to rout the Hmong and others who had aided the Americans. Every Hmong in North Carolina over the age of 30 remembers fleeing to Thailand, where they lived in prisonlike refugee camps, often for years, until they won passage to America as political refugees.

"I explained to them that I am your friend, our people fought side by side against the Communists and the Viet Cong, and sacrificed, and please be a friend," Chaw said.

Chaw brought the first five families down in 1982. He brought five more every year until his funding ran out in 1991, but by then the Hmong land rush was on.

In 1990, the U.S. Census counted 286 Asians - virtually all Hmong - in Hickory, a city of 38,000; by 2000, the number had jumped to 1,673, and city officials say hundreds more likely weren't counted.

Now the columns of Vang, Yang and Xiong in the local phone book rival the columns of Childers, Bradshaw and Yancey. The Hickory-based United Hmong Association of North Carolina Inc., one of at least three Hmong organizations in the state, counts 15,000 Hmong in the Morganton-Hickory area, and some 20,000 statewide.

Most live as rural residents of the Piedmont have lived for generations, near family, on land they own, counting on factory jobs and farming to put food on the table.

A few miles outside Hickory, Spencer Lo stood on the front porch of his manufactured home and beamed with satisfaction at the wide communal garden below and the neighboring homes in the woods on the low ridge around him.

His is one of eight Hmong families, mostly related, who bought 30 acres along a river, in a mixed hardwood forest of maple, birch, redbud and oak. Lo pointed through the leafy trees.

"That's my nephew's. That's my brother's. My cousin lives there."

Next to the garden, the families have pushed the red clay into berms to divert water from a creek for a rice paddy. It will yield about 1,000 pounds this fall, just half the rice Lo's family of six will eat in a year, but enough to remind the older Hmong of home, and teach the kids how they lived.

"When you live like this, you don't miss your country," said Lo, 41, who moved his family down eight years ago from Minneapolis. He works second shift at a ball bearing plant, while his wife works days at a textile mill.

"Some people come here and live inside an apartment and look out the window day after day after day. It kills them."

The focus of Hmong life is family. Often, one parent works days, and the other works second or third shift, so one can be home with the children. Many have grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins living with them as well.

All Hmong belong to one of 18 clans, differentiated by last name, and they are forbidden to marry within it. The clans have local and regional leaders who meet regularly to discuss Hmong business, or families who are struggling. The Hickory-area clans recently pooled their money to buy 37 acres in country south of town for a cultural center, where they can hold celebrations, rituals and festivals.

Traditional celebrations are held for births and weddings, often drawing 200 to 300 people. The food is much like Chinese, with fresh vegetables and hot peppers. Rice is served with every meal. To their neighbors' amazement, a favorite is shoots of wild bamboo cooked with meat and spices.

Locals always considered bamboo a weed.

Chaw recently invited neighbor Ray Hipps to lunch after Hipps did some work for him. It included a tasty bamboo and chicken dish and sticky rice that held the same place at Chaw's table as bread held at his.

"He just reached over and tore me off a chunk of rice about as big as my fist, and we just lit in," Hipps said.

Hickory Mayor Bill McDonald got his first call from Khue Khang about 10 years ago. Like everyone in town, McDonald had noticed the Hmong teens hanging out at Valley Hills Mall, and playing on the high school soccer team. An Asian market or two had opened, and Hmong were working in local factories.

Khang, a Hmong entrepreneur and community leader, met the mayor for lunch at a Japanese steakhouse. Khang told him the Hmong were here to stay, more were coming, and they wanted a bigger role in town.

It was a savvy move, one of several the Hickory Hmong would make over the next decade. McDonald, the mayor for 20 years until he retired in 2001, knew about everyone in town. While surprised by Khang's entreaties, he was impressed by his ambition and the Hmong's desire to fit in.

After lunch, he added Hmong leaders to his list of volunteers for boards and commissions. It wasn't long before Hmong were serving on the human relations committee, the beautification committee and the board of the American Red Cross chapter.

The United Hmong Association, meanwhile, padded its advisory board with McDonald and other officials from local institutions, including law enforcement, public schools and colleges.

The group distributes calendars with Hmong history to businesses. Hmong leaders never miss a chance to speak at Ruritan or Rotary luncheons.

"We want the people here to see the Hmong community as helping this community to grow, to prosper," said Khang, president of the United Hmong Association. "We feel we belong here, so we also feel the responsibility."

The Hmong here are proud of their success, compared with Hmong in more urban areas: About 7 percent of North Carolina Hmong receive public assistance, compared with 50 percent of Hmong in California, and 28 percent in Minnesota, according to the Hmong Resource Center of St. Paul, Minn.

About 70 percent own their own homes, and 90 percent of Hmong students graduate from high school. About half in the area are U.S. citizens, the Hmong Association says.

"They're in the community, they're part of the community," said McDonald, 69. "They want people to understand the Hmong tradition, and they very much want to be accepted."

But there are signs the Hmong in North Carolina are at a crossroads. Textile and furniture jobs have been leaving for China, while Hickory's share of the dot-com bubble, the manufacture of coaxial cable, burst, too.

Throughout the 1990s, the jobless rate in the Catawba Valley hovered around 2 percent; since 2001, it has floated between 7 and 9 percent, and many, including Hmong, have been laid off. An influx of Hispanics, the South's largest new immigrant group, has added to the competition.

How well the Hmong handle this slump will go a long way toward validating the true success of their North Carolina settlement.

With factory jobs much more precious, they also may find themselves less welcome. Taking a break from cutting grass for cash near downtown Hickory, Chris Mulchi and Sammy Turner complained Hmong steal their jobs by working for less.

Turner, 34, added: "Ten or 20 of them, they work, and then they go in together, and the next thing you know they own the whole neighborhood. They go around thinking they're all better than you."

Some aspects of traditional Hmong culture, meanwhile, don't mesh with 21st century America, even in Hickory. The Hmong's is a patriarchal society, where men have the final say, although women are encouraged to work, and most do. Polygamy was once widely practiced. Many girls still marry as teenagers.

At the same time, attempts by some Hmong to become more American have led to intergenerational conflict and fears about the erosion of Hmong culture.

Most Hmong children, like their parents, tend to socialize primarily with other Hmong. But as a cluster of young Hmong men piled out of a Hickory noodle house recently, they could have been mistaken for any Asian-American kids anywhere, with their baggy jeans and baseball caps, their T-shirts and sneakers. They cruise Hickory's commercial strip and hang out at the mall.

The Hmong had no written language until the 20th century, so their cultural, religious and historical record is largely oral, passed down by the elders. Today, some Hmong children can't speak their native language.

By 10:30 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, Kue Chaw had made his rounds, delivering bags of steamed sweet corn from his garden to his American neighbors, just in time for lunch. One of the bags went to Ray Hipps, and another to Phillip Houk, co-owner of Sid's Market west of Morganton.

It sits within a couple of miles of several hundred Hmong, including Chaw's place and Sho Hang's enclave. Burke County is dry, so there's no beer, but the Hmong come to the cluttered country story for almost everything else they need: vegetable seeds and chicken feed, tools and poultry wire, cigarettes and canned goods. They have for almost 20 years.

Houk said many more speak English now, and the young ones seem more American every day. Traditional square-cut togs and wide-brimmed straw hats have given way to jeans and ballcaps.

Some have picked up his sayings, catch phrases like "What a deal," and "Great day," an old Southernism used to express surprise.

A few use "ain't."

"I've looked in some of them's cars, and seen packages of poultry," Houk added. "Fifteen years ago, I guarantee you wouldn't have seen any of them with processed meat."

The Hmong came from the mountains of central China, where they cultivated their own language and tradition apart from the Chinese as long as 4,000 years ago. They were persecuted, however, and after uprisings in the 19th century, hundreds of thousands fled to Laos and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In the 1950s, the French recruited the Hmong in Laos to help fight Communist insurgents from North Vietnam. When the United States sent military advisers and equipment to the region in 1961, the Hmong and the Lao guarded U.S. radar sites in Laos and rescued American pilots shot down on missions over neighboring North Vietnam.

Known as the U.S. Secret Army in the Kingdom of Laos, the Hmong and the Lao also fought the North Vietnamese army to a stalemate in Laos for a decade, until Laos fell in 1973.

After the war, the Hmong and many Laos fled to refugee camps in Thailand. Over the next 15 years, more than 100,000 Hmong were given refugee status and allowed to immigrate to the United States.

During the first wave of migration in the late 1970s and '80s, most settled in California's central valleys and urban areas of the Upper Midwest because of job opportunities, the availability of social services and large resettlement programs.

The 2000 U.S. Census counted 169,428 Hmong in the United States, a 90 percent jump from 1990. But the Hmong Studies Resource Center in St. Paul, Minn., which compiles demographic data, contends the actual number of Hmong in the United States is double that.

According to the census, North Carolina had 7,100 Hmong; state and local officials, along with Hmong leaders, put the actual number at more like 20,000.

The Tarheel State ranks fourth in Hmong population, behind California (66,000), Minnesota (42,000) and Wisconsin (34,000), the Census Bureau says.

- Source: Hmong Studies Resource Center, St. Paul, Minn.; Hmong National Development Corp., Washington, D.C.; the United Hmong Association of North Carolina, Hickory, N.C.

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