Sunday, July 15, 2007
Happy Hmong
The Hmong just keep on coming. They seem to be happy at the moment but, in general, they sound a touch violent, though one cannot help but admire their refusal to be written out of history or neglected. Tom Wolfe, when I interviewed him, was much exercised about the Hmong. I wonder if he still is.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Isn't that interesting?
ReplyDeleteCommenting on your own posts Bryan? It doesn't work if you don't use your secret identity. That's why you invented Nige, remember?
ReplyDeleteThere are quite a few Hmong in the St Paul area. I'm not so sure about the happy part. They get into the news usually for gang activity or murder/suicides. Gang activity is a typical assimilation problem for new immigrant groups, but the murder/suicide seems to be an Asian thing. Traditional men can't deal with their wives leaving them. I don't recall that being a problem with European immigrants.
I know one of the 10 defendents. We worked in the same office once. Although I had not seen him in 20+ years, I remembered he was quite close to the general and feared I would see his name among those arrested.
ReplyDeleteI was once told that the Hmong are descended from native Mongolians manning the boundaries of the Yuan Dynasty at its collapse. There was no way for them to return home safely and they were left to their own devices, and shortly forgotten in their homelnad.