Off the Shelf
Meet the Neighbors
Alumnus and author Paul Hillmer offers a warm introduction to the Hmong community.
Paul Hillmer (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’01) is the first to admit that he may not appear to be the most likely candidate to write an in-depth history of the Hmong people. “Most of my historical training is focused on 19th and early 20th century American history,” says Hillmer, a native Iowan of German ancestry who is a professor of American history at Concordia University in St. Paul. “So people might justifiably ask, ‘Who is this guy and what the heck is he doing writing about the Hmong? And why should we care?’ ”
Hillmer’s new book, A People’s History of the Hmong, was published in December 2009 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. But his interest in Hmong history took root in the spring of 2001. While taking a Hmong student to an internship at the University of Minnesota, Hillmer asked him about his family’s experiences in Southeast Asia before coming to America. The student confessed that his parents had told him very little about their past. “Do you want to know?” Hillmer recalls asking the student. “How can we facilitate you going to talk to your parents about these things that you might actually want to know?”
Photo: Paul Hillmer is reflected in the glass covering Hmong needlework, called paj ntaub.
This fortuitous conversation sparked the creation of the Hmong Oral History Project at Concordia. Hillmer gathered together a group of Hmong students and equipped them with the tools they would need to effectively interview parents and other family members about their life in Laos before and during the Vietnam War, their experiences in Thai refugee camps after the war, and their ultimate resettlement in Minnesota.
Eventually, Hillmer himself got in on the act, interviewing former CIA operatives, American embassy staff, and humanitarian agency workers who worked with the Hmong. With the help of translators, he also interviewed Hmong people about the “Secret War,” in which Hmong guerillas led by General Vang Pao fought against North Vietnamese and Lao communist forces with covert American encouragement and assistance.
“My intent was that I was just going to do the interviews, and then some Hmong scholar would come along 10, 20 years from now and use them,” says Hillmer. But after receiving a History Channel grant in 2006 to produce a documentary with local high school students about Hmong immigrants’ effect on the city of St. Paul (home to one of the nation’s largest Hmong communities, numbering more than 25,000), the idea of writing a book about the Hmong started to come into focus. Talking to Hmong friends and faculty colleagues helped him overcome his initial reluctance. He finally convinced himself to “stop being so German Lutheran and just realize that it’s OK to have an opinion and to write extensively about a community outside of your own personal experience.”
Other books had been written about the Hmong and their role in the Secret War. “But my angle was, I want to focus on the Hmong themselves—not on the war, not on American foreign policy,” says Hillmer. “And I want to write not just about what happened to the Hmong in the war, but who they were before we stumbled upon them—what their values are, what their worldview is. And also, once they came here, how they made a life for themselves. Because to me that’s as compelling as anything that happened during the war.”
While the book does to some extent employ the patchwork oral history approach popularized by Studs Terkel, Hillmer provides context for the lengthy and abundant quotations lifted directly from his interviews by weaving them together with what he describes as “old-fashioned narrative history.”
“I felt that I had to be the person who didn’t just edit the interviews but who introduced the Hmong people to an audience,” Hillmer explains, “so that the people who told these really powerful stories would connect to the audience that was reading the book.”
A People’s History of the HmongBy Paul Hillmer (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’01)Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009
One of the most striking features of Hmong culture brought out by Hillmer is its emphasis on family—an emphasis that extends far beyond the typical Western focus on the nuclear family. That had a profound effect on resettlement decisions, as illustrated in this exchange recounted by Long Vang of the Hmong army. After the war, CIA adviser Jerry Daniels had told Vang that he should leave the country:
“I told Jerry, ‘But I [will] miss my family.’ He said, ‘You can take your family with you.’ . . . I said, ‘In the Hmong culture the family is mother, father, brother, sister, wife—all this is family. . . . I have about a hundred people.’ He said, ‘No . . . [the] American way is you and your wife and your children. That’s what we call family.’ ”
Hillmer takes pains in his book to parallel the Hmong experience with that of other immigrant groups in American history. “The Hmong have been here for 35 years, and most of them for a lot shorter period of time than that,” he says. “Where were our ancestors 30 or 35 years after they came off the boat? Most of us don’t take the time to look over our own shoulders and remember where we came from.”
All too often, Hillmer insists, our impressions of the Hmong are informed only by negative and unrepresentative news stories, such as the 2004 incident in which a Hmong hunter killed six white hunters in Wisconsin. “Why is that a Hmong issue?” he asks. “That to me shows that we as a community still have a long way to go in thinking of our Hmong neighbors as our neighbors, as fellow citizens. Because our community still thinks of them as ‘those people,’ they made it a Hmong issue. And Hmong organizations were forced to speak out publicly to defend themselves and their people because we had a lot of people who at least metaphorically had pitchforks and torches and were ready to do their worst if given the opportunity.”
Hillmer credits the “giants” under whom he studied history at the University of Minnesota—professors like Clarke Chambers, Rudy Vecoli, and David Noble—for preparing him for his later endeavors. In fact, Hillmer’s educational background may have given him more insight into the Hmong experience than one might expect.
“I studied the industrial revolution, a period of tremendous immigration in which we had nativistic impulses and wanted to send certain groups of people back, in which we had any number of social changes and technological changes that turned our society upside down,” Hillmer says. “There are a lot of ways in which that kind of study did prepare me for this project.”
—David Mahoney