THE HMONG TIGER


I came from the mountain ranges of Laos:
Where opium poppies and dirt road villages
dot the mountainside,
Where people rise up to the sound of roosters,
Where roosters crow because they are not locked up 
in multi-complex hen houses,
Where grandmas and grandpas watch the children
because they are too old to work in the fields,
Where children walk barefooted along streams and woods and logs,
searching for mushrooms or berries or birds eggs or crabs,
Where children ran around chasing grasshoppers, beetles
and lizards and roast them for snacks,
Where men carry axes and rifles
and theirs wives carry baskets and hoes,
Where people fear the dark
and strange growls in the night,
Where men talk of tiger sightings
and tiger attacks but of which none has seen,
Where old men, young men and boys
raised to the sound of war
stirred by the callings of flamboyant leaders
with their many wives and their U.S. dollars,
Where 12 year old boys carried rifles
as tall as them,
Where men fought secret wars
with their northern neighbors for U.S. idealism,
Where they died, unknown, unheard and unreported 
by the American press,
Where rice farmers are taught good and evil by CIA personnel
with McCarthian propaganda,
Where the girls keep their skin white
and marry men with wealth and power because 
they are tired of their fathers' rice fields,
Where the adults are more afraid of ghosts than the children,
Where the funeral rites last a whole week
and the funeral drums can be heard throughout the whole village,
Where mourning is encourage as a public display of sorrow
and family members take their turn at the coffin,
Where the dead goes not to Heaven nor to Hell,
Where shamans decorated their altars with pig chin bones,
incense and paper money,
Where food and wine and clothing are given
to accompany the dead on their journey to the ancestral land,
Where the dead are dressed in their best clothes
and their shoes are crisis-crossed
so they can not come back to haunt the living,
Where the children are not baptized
and their parents do not teach them morality,
Where homosexuality is unheard of
and sin/salvation are unknown.

I am the Hmong tiger.
I came from a land:
Where men and women, young and old,
giggle at the sight of long legged strangers,
Where a dead man's wife is usually given
to his unmarried brother,
Where every answer to a young man's crisis 
is to get him a wife,
Where young girls are consider "soft"
and girls 18 years or older are consider "rough,"
Where marriages are usually forced or prearranged 
but the song verses are full of love and romance,
Where men eat before the women and children
at ceremonial gatherings,
Where men get out their home made rice wine
and drink long into the night,
Where women sat around a fire
and chatter about their sons and daughters,
Where children play hide and seek 
in the dirt streets in their worn out clothes,
Where men tell hunting stories to each other
with each successive story more spectacular than the previous,
Where the old men tell of their encounters
with goblins and tigers and ghosts as if it were their passage rite,
Where a woman's right is to scorn her husband
for drinking too much,
Where people think the world is flat
and that the rainbow is a dragon 
rising up to drink water during rain showers,
Where the people think Americans are cannibals
and yet consider them semi-divine because of their white skin.
Where people caught up in a war beyond them
sided with the idealistic and wealthy, Americans and French,
countries where politicians determine their policies 
through gallop polls and 30-second television ads,
Where souls can not reincarnate 
because there are no wombs to receive them,
Where dead bodies lay untouched in some deep ravine
where even flies do not bother with them,
Where mothers and fathers put their beloved children
on top of their bags and carry them on their backs,
Where people were shot like animals while swimming the Mekong River,
Where once free independent people are now forced to live
in refugee camps with nothing to do but wait
for their daily rations from the Red Cross
and other western humanitarian agencies,
Where thousands of people fled 
the war torn mountains of Laos 
only to end up the black ghettos of Detroit.

I've live through the tragic war in Laos.
I now live in a country:
Where refugee teenagers think they are Americans
but all they know are the public housing ghettos,
the American slag of Ebonics and public assistance,
Where the poor live in small communities of reddish-brown houses 
in the side of town where the streets are filled with pot holes 
as if they are blown up by land mines or bombs,
Where the rich live in luxurious communities with court streets
that curve and blocks that do not intersect,
Where refugee parents that have succeeded in the American dream 
do not speak to their children in their native tongue,
Where the rich Americanized Hmongs are embarrassed 
to associate with their less successful fellow countrymen,
Where the children of the rich have a flawless American voice
but still have flat noses and yellow skin,
Where the parents pay their children to do the dishes 
because they saw it done by their American sponsors,
Where the teenagers wear wide leg jeans 
With bandanas on their heads
and talk with hands and body gestures 
like Rap artists in music videos with big and irritable egos,
whose whole livelihood depends on being cool and outrageous,
Where teenagers roam about in packs and take collections 
outside Amoco gas stations to buy cigarettes and beer,
dressed in self-altered clothes,
complete with hand signals and all
like the small guerrilla units their fathers were in 
back in the days of the war in Laos,
Where parents are taught to consider their children
as their best friends,
Where children play solider in living room on their nitendos
instead of their backyards or near by woods,
Where grandmas and grandpas are sent to nursing homes
because they are too old to care for themselves,
Where they do not make food offerings to the dead
on the first day of the year or on any days at all
because the dead have plenty in the kingdom of God,
Where high power celebrities raise thousands of dollars 
For some environmental or idealistic causes 
for some distant part of the world
while beggars with, "Will Work For Food," signs
stand outside the convention halls,
Where people still go hungry every night
searching through dumpster and sleeping on park benches 
as if they were in Ethiopia or some other poor third world countries,
while ADM praise itself for being a supermarket to the world,
Where the people protest and battle and throw rocks and spits
and insults and sometimes kill and bomb each other
over social issues like abortions and euthanasia and the death penalty
and religious rights and racism and homosexuality
and complicate them with biblical theology and moral philosophies,
Where ethics and morality are complete disciplines in themselves
but the people are not any more moral than the bush men 
of Africa.

I am thee Hmong Tiger, 
Raw and yellow,
I use to lay in some quiet spot
and wait for some bird or a deer to come by,
I would kill it and drag it home to my family;
to my children, my wife, my mother and my father.
Such were the times on the mountain ranges of Laos.