4
The community
5
The
next generation
6
Conclusion
7
References
Introduction
It has been nearly thirty years since
the first Hmong families arrived to settle in Australia in March
1976. Many more families followed until 1992 when the last were
accepted from refugee camps in Thailand. Today, they number
about 1,800.
Given that most of them were former
soldiers or subsistence farmers from Laos, how have they managed
with their new life in highly industrialised urban Australia?
This chapter will try to shed some light on this question and update
the current state of Hmong settlement in the country since the
first overview on the subject which I gave at an international
conference on Hmong refugees in
1983 (Lee 1986).
Settlement
The Hmong form part of the Indochinese
refugee intake that the Australian government took from the
newly installed communist regimes in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in
1975. Technically, they are Lao refugees of Hmong
ethnicity. At the beginning, it was
relatively easy to get accepted into
Australia under the United Nations Convention, so many refugees
stayed for only a short time in the camps along the Thai border with
Laos. Then there were only simple forms to fill in, but these
bureaucratic requirements gradually became more complicated as
forms become more formalised and longer. When the
never-ending stream of applicants became larger, it was more
difficult for Indochinese asylum seekers to be recognised as
genuine refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
and Australia. Some were seen as economic
rather than political refugees. During the 1980s, many Hmong
families were thus accepted under the Family Reunion
programme rather than as political refugees. Under this programme,
relatives already living in Australia had to submit sponsorship
applications for those left behind in Thai refugee camps. The latter
were then interviewed by Australian immigration officials to see
if they were suitable for settlement in Australia. If they were
accepted, they then underwent medical checks and waited in the Phanat
Nikhom transit centre in Chonburi from three to six months for
their departure.
Once arrived in Australia, most Hmong
refugees chose to live where their sponsoring relatives
were already established, mostly in the main cities of the eastern
states. By 1984, the Hmong numbered 81 families with 384
persons found in Sydney (215 persons), Melbourne (112), Hobart
(37), Adelaide (11) and Canberra (9). The population was
relatively young with 55 per cent under the age of eighteen (Lee
1988: 535).
By 1996, the Australian census revealed
a total of 1,420 Hmong speakers in Australia dispersed in
the following way: 603 in Queensland, 384 in Victoria, 272 in
Tasmania, 126 in New South Wales, 29 in the Australian
Capital Territory, 7 in Western
Australia and five in South Australia.
Compared to the 1984 population figures, the Hmong have
become more numerous through further intakes from Thailand
and natural increase, although they have remained one of the
smallest ethnic communities in Australia. Queensland has
become the state with the largest number of Hmong, due to
secondary migration from the southern states to Cairns and Innisfail. By 1992, intakes of
Hmong refugees from Thai camps had
virtually ceased with the planned closing of all the refugee camps
in Thailand that year by the UNHCR and the Thai authorities.
Thus, any demographic changes within the Hmong community in
Australia are due to internal population movements, and any
increase in the number of Hmong in Queensland means a decrease in
other states, particularly in New South Wales.
The first Queensland migration occurred
in 1987 when Mr Lao Lee and his family from Sydney
started a banana farm in Innisfail and attracted a lot of
interest from other Hmong (see also
Tapp, this volume). The family was
reported to make good money working for itself, compared to the
majority of other Hmong who continued to work in unskilled jobs
bringing in only small wages.
After 1993, other families had decided
to sell their family homes and move to Innisfail. Gradually, they
were joined by other families from Melbourne and Hobart. The
reason for most of them was to go into the banana growing
business, with more than twenty families buying banana
plantations. Other families migrated to be with relatives, or to
live in a tropical environment with vegetation that reminded them of
their old mountain life in Laos, unlike other parts of Australia
with their monotonous boring gum trees. Those without banana farms
themselves often found work with those who had such farms.
Others settled in Cairns where they work in hotels and
restaurants as cooks and dishwashers,
or as vegetable-stall keepers.[1]
Apart from this internal migration, the
Hmong community in Australia has also experienced change
due to some men marrying Hmong wives from Laos, France
or the United States. A few young women have also joined their
Hmong husbands living in the United States or France.
So far three young men and about ten young women have made such a
move. Some met their spouses through the internet, others
through visits to relatives in the United States or in Australia. By
and large, however, this intercountry
migration has been small, except for a
group of fifteen Hmong families with about 80 persons who
were accepted by New Zealand in 1998, but have since all
crossed the Tasman Sea to live with the larger Hmong population of
Australia (see Julian, this volume).
In mid-2003, it was estimated that there
were 104 Hmong families living in far north Queensland
(Cairns, Innisfail and Atherton) with more than 800 members.
Sydney has 28 families and 140 persons, Canberra seven families
with 30 persons, Melbourne more than 70 families and 435
persons, Hobart thirteen families and 95 persons, and Adelaide
one family with four people (a Hmong man married to an Australian
wife). The 1996 Australian census shows a Hmong family
with six persons living in Perth, but not much is known about them
as no contact has been possible. The latest trend for the Hmong
is secondary migration towards Brisbane where there are more
than 60 families and close to 350 persons. The current population
number of more than 1,700 Hmong living in Australia has not
changed much since 1996. There have been about 40 deaths
since 1976, and natural increase has been small as young Hmong
couples gradually adopt the Australian habit of having fewer
children. The average Hmong couple now tends to have about four
children, compared to their parents who may have had from six to
eight surviving a children a generation ago.
Before 1994 there were no Hmong living
in Brisbane, but cheaper housing and a warmer climate
began to attract many of those living in the southern states,
particularly those from New South Wales and Victoria where by 2003
house prices had become so high that many young families could
no longer afford to buy their own homes. Some of those who moved
more recently were able to buy houses built on five-acre
land parcels that could still be
obtained for around $200,000 when such a
sum would not even buy a small building block of 600 square
metres in the southern states. Chambers Flat, a semi-rural
suburb in southern Brisbane, now has many Hmong families living in
this way. Other families bought homes in other nearby suburbs,
although they live quite dispersed from one another, unlike the
Hmong in other cities who tend to live in close proximity to each
other. The reason for this wide dispersal may be due to the fact
that different families moved to Brisbane at different times and from
different states, not always knowing each other well so that there
was less reason to stay close together. They are also the latest of a
migration trend, having lived in other states for a long time and so
are now able to look after themselves well. They thus do not feel
the need to live near other Hmong, although there is still much
interaction between them.
Occupations and Social Mobility
As with most refugees, the Hmong are
predominantly political asylum seekers who were accepted into
Australia on this basis or on the grounds of family reunion. This
means that education and qualifications were not at the top of
the criteria for their admission
into the country, although the
Australian government was selective
in regard to a preference for younger
people and smaller families. In Sydney in 1987, for example, only
twelve of the 80 Hmong families there had members who were
older than 50, mainly elderly parents living with their
married children. In 1995, it was
found that of the 32 Hmong households
remaining in Sydney, 37 per cent of their members were in the
0–10 age group, with 54 per cent under twenty (Wang 1998–99:
40). The Hmong population was thus relatively young,
compared to the Australian average of 54.3 per cent under 35 years
of age, according to the 1991 census.
Laos was not only one of the least
developed countries in Southeast Asia, with few schools and
road infrastructures that allowed access between cities and
country residences, but also had
been ravaged by civil war on and off
since 1953. The Hmong who lived in rural and remote areas of the
country had few opportunities to study in the lowlands
where most schools were. More schools were built in Hmong
settlements after the 1970s, so
that nearly all the younger Hmong who
arrived in Australia before 1985 had received at least some primary
schooling in Laos, with a few even having completed high school or
teacher training college.
Most of their parents were, however,
illiterate, although some went on to study English in Australia and
managed to achieve some literacy. With their subsistence farming
background and lack of formal education, many of the older
Hmong were eager to take up English lessons as a first step towards
settling into the Australian community. In those days, the Australian
government was still generous with migrant and refugee
services with no restrictions on
the number of hours one spent learning
English. Many older Hmong were able to study English for a
few years, rather than the 530 hours allocated to new migrants
today.
During the early years of their arrival
here, it was relatively easy for the Hmong to get factory jobs
if they were willing to do any kind of work. Employers were mainly
interested in workers who were prepared to learn and to work
hard. There was also less competition for jobs, since there were
few or no written or general knowledge tests of the type to which
today’s employers usually subject job applicants. Many Hmong, both
men and women, were thus able to obtain paid work within
three to six months of entering Australia. They were keen to
leave the migrant hostels to settle in the general community, and
wanted to work in order to achieve this. Although some sought jobs
through the then Commonwealth Employment Service, the
majority found work through friends and relatives, or
private employment agencies.
Apart from a few months spent studying
English, hardly anyone took up retraining to return to
their former professions such as teaching or the public service.
Most did not have tertiary education, unlike Vietnamese refugees,
some of whom were able to re-enter their old fields of work. The
Hmong realised too well that they could not compete against native
English speakers, nor did they have the time to undertake long
courses of studies. Family obligations and the need to re-establish
themselves as quickly as possible in their new country meant that
the sooner they could become self-supporting, the better it
would be for their families. Young children became the priority for
parents who, like all migrants, pinned their hopes more
realistically on the next generation rather than themselves.
Nevertheless, the employment rate of the
Hmong in general has continued to improve over the years.
In 1987, for example, 35 per cent of the Hmong community in
Sydney were unemployed and of those employed, 93 per
cent were process workers doing unskilled factory jobs
(Lee 1986). In 1995, Wang (1998–99: 48) discovered that this
unemployment rate had come down to 27 per cent (12.5 per cent among
females and 33 per cent among males) with a significant
proportion of those employed doing semi-skilled or unskilled jobs,
compared to 93 per cent in 1987. The number of skilled workers had
also increased (30 per cent among females and 19 per cent among
males). The few who could obtain formal qualifications
seemed to be in more secure and
well paid jobs — a trend that, Wang
(1998–99: 49) observes may continue for those younger Hmong who are
still at school today.
During their first years in Australia,
the main tangible sign of the Hmong’s ability to adapt and move
ahead was the possession of cars, at least one for each family.
Cars were seen not only as a symbol of wealth, but an essential means
for getting to work, for shopping or to socialise. Soon, however,
a few Hmong families began to buy their first homes. By the
mid-eighties, many of them were living in houses that they had
bought or were paying off. Wang (1998–99: 42) found that 42 per
cent of the 32 families she surveyed in Sydney already owned their
own home by 1995 and 19 per cent were paying them off. This
represents a much higher rate of home ownership than the
Australian average of 41 per cent,
and far higher than the figures of 13
per cent for Vietnamese and 14 per cent for Cambodian-born refugees.
Wang attributes this to the fact that the Hmong prefer to direct
their money into more productive use by paying off their
mortgages rather than spending it on rental accommodation. Hmong
families also help each other with deposits towards the purchase of
houses for relatives, thus allowing more of them to own their homes
much earlier.
Apart from their own principal place of
residence, a number of Hmong families have also gone into
real estate investment - with six families now having from one to
five investment properties. This high rate of home
ownership has enabled many Hmong families to migrate later to
Cairns and Innisfail in north Queensland, as mentioned above, using
the money they obtained from the sale of their houses to buy
farm lands or to finance their move, to purchase new houses, and to
lease or buy their banana farms or other businesses. Many of those
who did not have this initial capital have also worked hard
hiring out their labour in banana plantations, or doing market
gardening. This has allowed some to buy their own houses, while
others still remain in rented accommodation.
Having been in Australia for thirty
years with only a small population and the second generation
just starting to get into the work force, the Hmong may not have made
much headway into various social and economic strata of
the Australian community. However, most have been able to
re-establish themselves economically, found employment and
become homeowners — even those who have not been able to
find permanent employment. Given their background as
subsistence farmers, students and soldiers in Laos, they have
done well in the face of many language, social and cultural
barriers.
The Community
On the whole, the majority of the older
Hmong in Australia tend to stay among themselves and have little
or no social interaction with people outside their own small
community. In a sense, this is no different from most ethnic groups.
The first generation of new arrivals often maintains some strong
community ties that continue to hold them together as a linguistic
and cultural community, while the second generation of children
who are born or raised in the new country tends to venture further
into the broader community and prefers to mix socially
with other groups.
The Hmong are no different in this
adjustment pattern. Like other communities, they have
learned to adopt various means to help them settle into their new life
in a Western and predominantly Christian society. Their
traditional social structure of clans and extended families has been
disrupted by the long years of war and resettlement as refugees in
various parts of the world. No one family has been able to have all
its relatives living in one country: there may be a few closely
related married brothers together in Australia, but married
sisters may have gone to America
or France with their husbands, while
other relatives may still be left
behind in Laos. The Hmong have thus gone
through a real global diaspora, and with it many adjustments
have had to be made to their cultural practices and traditional
social relations.
Among these changes, the most important
are those relating to the clan system, used as the primary
means of identifying relationships on the basis of the
sharing of a clan name, whom one
could marry and whom one could not
marry, and who could participate in a family’s ritual
performances, funerals and celebrations.
In the first ten years of their
settlement, only eight clans were
represented among the Hmong in
Australia: Chang, Lee, Moua, Thao, Vang, Vue, Yang and Xiong. Later,
members of the Hang and Kue clans were added. But this still
does not include all sixteen clans as is commonly found in Southeast
Asia. This has somewhat restricted the choice of marriage
partners since Hmong can only marry outside their own clan group. In a
sense, however, this situation has also forced the Hmong to
forge other ties in order to remain close as a community on grounds
other than by clan relationship alone.
A new social structure that the Hmong
have adopted as an additional means to help in their
settlement is the formation of mutual assistance associations. The
first such organisation was the
Hmong Australia Society (HAS) which was
formed by Dr Pao Saykao in Melbourne in 1978.
The Society aims to unite all Hmong
residents in Australia as a community in order to maintain the
Hmong identity. It serves as the focus where the Hmong turn for
assistance in times of need, sickness and bereavement. It also
promotes understanding of the Hmong and their culture to the broader
Australian society. The Society has a federal body and is
represented in different states by
state branches with executive
committees. The federal executive
committee rotates every two years
between Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland where
most of the Hmong live. Nearly all Hmong in Australia were HAS
members.
In the early years, HAS initiated many
projects for members, such as teaching Hmong language
and culture to Hmong school children, and provided
settlement information sessions on various subjects deemed
useful for the successful integration of the Hmong into the
Australian community. It held social functions, picnics and the Hmong
New Year celebration to encourage members to get together as
often as possible. In order to promote Hmong culture, classes on Hmong
religious rituals were also held for interested young adults to
learn to perform rituals in their own homes. HAS also participated
in festivals and celebrations organised by local councils
and other groups by lending them Hmong costumes and
handicrafts for display, or giving talks and traditional dance
performances. Young Hmong dancers became very popular and were
often invited to perform in various locations in each state. Within
the Hmong community, HAS executive members were kept busy
helping with family problems, collecting members’
contributions towards funeral costs,
and ensuring that members followed the
Society’s rules regarding funeral arrangements, wedding costs and
dowries.
In later years, many of these activities
stopped as HAS members became more skilled in finding
their own way around the broader community. Hmong language
learning through formal classes also ceased, as young children
grew up preferring to speak English. Disagreements among members in
Victoria and far north Queensland also saw some members
splitting away from HAS and forming their own small associations
such as the Hmong Federation Council. A need-specific
group, the SPK Inc., also came into existence in Cairns to serve
the housing needs of new Hmong arrivals in the area. These new
groups, and other factors, have now made many of the HAS activities
redundant. There have been talks about abolishing HAS, but the
majority of members want to keep it going for, if nothing
else, it still retains its major
function of collecting member
contributions for funerals and other
emergencies.
One of the original aims of HAS which
brought high hopes and great enthusiasm to members in the
early years was the teaching of religious rituals and
cultural performances for younger
members. Although many sessions were
held using elderly ritual experts and experienced funeral
reed-pipe players as teachers, the
programme only ran for a year and
yielded few results. The few young men interested in such cultural
learning were also too busy working for a living and found the extra
time they had to put in during evenings or weekends too
demanding. Similar classes are now being held in Melbourne with good
participation, and it is hoped that they will be more successful.
A few ritual experts were later sponsored from the refugee camps
to come and help with the community’s spiritual needs, but their
small number did not amount to much in terms of promoting and
maintaining the community’s cultural knowledge.
The Next Generation
Having been in Australia for nearly
thirty years, one of the biggest
challenges to the Hmong is the loss of
traditions and language among the younger members of the
community. Like other migrant groups, members of the younger
generation quickly learn to adopt social values and behaviour
patterns considered to be alien or detrimental to the beliefs and
culture of their parents. Up to the age of six, most children speak
Hmong well and are not shy to do so. As soon as they start going to
school, however, they gradually come to use more and more
English so that by the time they reach puberty few want to speak
Hmong or even know how to anymore.
Few also take part or show much interest
in religious rituals as they are observed or performed by
their parents. The Hmong practices of animism and ancestor
worship mean that a family head has to know how to carry out at
least some simple rituals, for the Hmong’s religion is essentially a
family religion. Many elderly Hmong today are concerned that their
traditional religious practices will die out after they are
gone, and no one will know how to make offerings to them in the
afterworld.
Even with the present first generation,
this process of cultural and religious degeneration is
already occurring with some husbands knowing less about rituals than
their wives. Although women can also perform household
rituals, the latter are generally
men’s responsibility. Men who have
formal education spent many years away from their families to gain
this education, and are thus less skilled in ritual matters. However,
their wives are often more familiar with preparing ritual food and
may know more about performing small household rituals. They
are thus the cultural carriers in such households. Apart from
this, it has been found that children who grew up in Australia but
who were born overseas are usually more accepting of their parents’
religious practices and associated food offerings to ancestors.
They will at least eat ritual food which is often prepared from
chicken or small pigs slaughtered for the purpose. Children
who are born in Australia and who are not familiar with such
practices often shun the consumption of such food, let alone take
an active interest in the rituals themselves.
Another challenge to the Hmong in
Australia is the difference between the expectations of
parents of their children’s academic achievements, and the actual
outcomes. As stated above, the majority of parents did not have a
high school education, but were willing to work hard in order to
put their children through the education system at as high a level
as possible. They put all their hopes for good jobs and high pay
in their children, and have high expectations of the latter
achieving these hopes. However, few
Hmong children in Australia have been
able to fulfill their parents’ academic expectations. Many are more
eager to get into the work force, even if it means doing unskilled
menial jobs, than trying to gain further qualifications. Since their
settlement here, less than ten young Hmong have graduated from
universities, although most have managed to complete Year 12 in
high school and went on to do further vocational training at
TAFE colleges. Currently, about half a dozen young men and women
are enrolled in bachelor’s degree university courses in
Cairns, Sydney and Melbourne. It is hoped that this trend
will encourage others to follow them.
Conclusion
Where will the Hmong of Australia go to
from here? After the first generation, will their children still
retain enough of their Hmong cultural heritage to be called Hmong? Or
will they be Australian in their hearts and minds, and Hmong only
in their appearance? These are questions that many elderly
Hmong in Australia, like those in America, are asking themselves.
They are wondering whether they have not tried hard enough
to change and to fit into their new environment, or whether their
children are trying too hard and changing too fast. The big
challenges are no longer related to those of economic survival or
the accumulation of material assets. Most families are now
comfortably off materially, like the majority of the Australian
people. What they face and worry more about is the survival of
their cultural identity in the midst of the vast ethnic diversity in
this country.
The dilemma of how much to retain of
their own culture and how much to change to accommodate
the demands of the broader community around them is real,
and too complex to dwell on here. Many Hmong realise that they
need to change, and are already changing in many respects. There
can be no turning back to the old times, for even things in the
old country they originated from are fast changing. They have
enjoyed freedom and many other benefits coming to live in
Australia, and are trying to contribute as much as they can to their
new country while still following some of their old traditions
in order to maintain some kind of cultural identity. The next
generation will have to make their own social accommodation and find
their own way ahead — probably more as Australians, but
perhaps also as Hmong. If the Hmong of north Queensland are any
indication of future trends, members of the younger generation will
continue to marry within their own community and maintain their
mother tongue even while interacting frequently with non-Hmong
people and using English most of the time.
Footnotes
[1]With thanks to the Chiang Ching-Kuo
Foundation, Taipei, for funding of
our recent research in Cairns and
Innisfail.