In the Jungles of Laos…

There’s a little boy underneath the earth, a small mound in the middle of the jungle, and a man and a woman at its side, perhaps his mom and dad although they look too old and too thin to have a child so young. The caption says, “In September 2007, soldiers killed Mee Xiong, a 5-year old boy. The boy’s family wept over his grave.” There’s a pair of blue rubber flip flops on top of the mound. Perhaps his favorite pair of shoes; they were likely his only pair.

He was born in the jungle of Laos. He is the children of Hmong rebels fighting for a long ago American cause. 

On December 17, 2007 the New York Times published a piece, Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding in Laos by Thomas Fuller. 

Today is January 11, 2008. It’s 6:59 PM here, in Minnesota, and it is snowing outside. It’s a cold night. I’m safe and I’m warm and I’m at my desk looking at the night cars passing by on University Avenue, a corridor for Hmong dreams, in Minnesota, and the rest of the country is spending their Friday night pursuing the dreams of a nation at rest, and the rest of the world is up and is asleep and dreaming along. I sit here and I feel like I am dreaming alone.

If I can dream myself into reality, I would dream a dream that takes place faraway from here, in the jungles of Laos, with the people in the article, with my people, the small groups, five old men, a few young ones, handicapped by bullets and by the nature of memories alive and armed, the few women, the numerous children, orphans and remnants of what their parents had been. I would sit with them underneath the jungle trees, so tall and so large and so looming, and we would talk of the years past. In my Hmong voice I will find the seeds of understanding lost in the chasms of a war, flooded by Hmong blood, an unnamed secret war that ripped a people apart, and chased them across the continents of a world that does not know who they are. 

We will talk about the little boy that sleeps with eyes closed forever to dreams and the pair of blue flip flops on the mound of earth, and I will hold the hands of the man that is too skinny and the woman that is too old, and look into the possibilities of reviving what has been dead for so long:  hope and faith and a fair chance at life.

Return to the Past

We go home when we are lost and afraid of the big, bad world.  We go home and we look to find comfort and care. We go home looking to rest our weary souls, our tired bodies, our despondent hearts. It is natural and it is necessary.

It is so often the case now that we return to our motherlands in search of love, this thing we lost on our long journey to America. There is no right and wrong:  the hopeful hearts that keep trying.

The transmission of culture happens when two people speak in a shared language, divide up on the currency of the moment, and commit to lifelong allegiance.  The best way to communicating culture is through the acts of loving.

Because I love you, I will put a ring on your finger. No matter that my first wife left me on the day I hadn’t seen coming, for a man whose face I dare not look at, afraid at what I would find. Because you are younger and more beautiful, you will travel with me to my life faraway. I am humble by your courage. I am desperate for your body. Let’s take a photo of our wedding ceremony. I will get a lawyer and we will bring you to a new world, beneath a new sky. Let us plant our love in a house in the suburbs of Minnesota.

Will you turn away when others stare? Because I am older now and less handsome, I will step up and look like we belong—just to ease any questions. I know that your boyfriend nurses a heart that yearns for you and that together you both may whisper of a better world, where love need not thrive on the pulse of a weighted economy. Oh, the distance between us. I feel it every time I slip my arms around your slender waist and I feel the smoothness of youth give way to the sagging weight of gravity gone on too long.

My vocabulary is limited to the language of your parents. My oldest son speaks only English. He looks out at you from the corner of his heavy gaze.  He is afraid to let questions flow and curiosity go unsatisfied before your demure look, bold only when aimed at me, the weakness that I carry in my bones for a love that will go on in the world unknown and misunderstood.

Why do I travel so far to find the warmth of your smile beneath the hot Laotian sun? Why do I come in hordes with my friends? Why do I come and come and come, trying once and again, at a purchase no rich man will make?

Because I am impoverished in America. Because the wealth of this nation is not enough to satiate my hungry heart, my aging body, my thirsty, thirsty tongue.  I come home every time I come to you. My home with the beautiful brown legs. My home in the swish of your skirt, the dangle of gold on your wrist, the smell of skin soaped by the waters of my past. I am tired now. But you keep the future coming. You call out to me in your rolling love, waves upon waves of sorrow and despair, oceans of grief, skies of sorry. 

You are the apology I cannot demand from a world that will not give. Forget right and wrong. I come because I know no where else to go.

When Flowers Spoke

Voices cried in the water,
gunshots ringing from the other shore,
currents pushing and pulling.

Eyes go blind threading needles,
punctuating coarse fabrics.
Flowers of red and green
on white and black
child-carrying cloths.
Silent, beneath the hot sun.

Pieces of embroidery between baby and mother,
cold river currents rushing in between,
crimson blood,
diluted by water.

I will find my way back
to the place my mother sat
in the unwavering sun
needle in her hand
blinding herself
threading our stories
for me and my baby.