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Dreaming Across the Oceans:
Media, Globalization and
Cultural Reinvention in the Hmong Diaspora
(By
Gary Y. Lee)
Revised paper presented at the
Workshop “(Re-) Making, (Re-) Inventing Culture and
Identity in The Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao
Diasporas”, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research,
Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies, Australian
National University, Canberra, 20-21 November 2004.
Published in Hmong
Studies Journal, Vol. 7, 2006.
Contents
1
Abstract
2
Introduction
3
Development of a new media
4
Globalizing Hmong culture
5
Cultural production and reinvention
6
Cultural maintenance
7
Diasporic identity formation
8
Media
hegemony
9
Conclusion
10
Footnotes
11
References
ABSTRACT
"The Hmong in Laos did
not have any commercially produced media until after
1975 when 200,000 of them became refugees and were
resettled in Western countries. Since then, they
have produced many Hmong music cassettes, video
documentaries and movies in America, Laos and Thailand
for the eager consumption of the older members of the
Hmong diaspora. These modern songs and videos often
allude to aspects of Hmong life and culture in Asia
which are missing in the new life in the West. This
emphasis on "images' and texts from the past arises from
a deep nostalgia for the homeland, the trauma of war and
their relatively recent forced departure, guilt over
those left behind, access to capital and modern media
technology, and more importantly a world-wide market. It
is argued that these moving video images and new singing
voices constitute a form of cultural reinvention that
connects the Hmong together as a global community,
and brings them a new changing identity, a new level of
transnational group consciousness both in the diaspora
and in the homeland."
There are no historical
records to show where the Hmong originated from. Some
claim that they left Mesopotamia after the fall of the
Tower of Babel, then gradually migrated north through
Russia, Siberia, Mongolia before ending up in their
present location in southern China (Savina, 1924 and
Quincy, 1988: 16-17). Others believe that they have
always been in this part of China, well before it was
taken over by the Han Chinese over the centuries (Ch’eh,
1947; and Yang, 1995). Today, they number more than 10
millions world-wide with 9 millions in China (if we
include other branches of the Miao nationality).
Emigration from China since the middle of the 19th
Century resulted in 500,000 of them living in Vietnam
today; 400,000 in Laos; 120,000 in Thailand; and
2000-3000 in Burma. The end of the civil war in Laos in
1975 also displaced more than 180,000 to the USA; 15,000
to France; 1,800 to Australia; 1,400 to Canada, 500 to
Argentina and 110 to Germany.
Whatever their origin may
be, the Hmong have always felt like homeless orphans,
with small groups separated from each other, or villages
every so often on the move, without a true home of
their own, living in remote mountains away from other
people, without roots and the feeling of belonging.
Everywhere, they are a minority, often looked down as
backward unkempt hill tribes. I make this observation,
not to draw sympathy for the Hmong, but to show that
this feeling of transnational alienation plays a pivotal
role in what I will have to say about Hmong media
production, consumption and cultural reinvention.
This paper will examine
this diasporic media and its different genres to see the
extent to which it contributes to the cultural
production, cultural maintenance and the development of
a transnational identity for the Hmong diaspora. As
this is only a preliminary exploration of the subject, I
will try to keep my discussion simple without abstract
postmodern jargons, like so many academic media studies.
My target will be the first generation of Hmong in the
diaspora who are the main consumers (mostly women) and
producers (mostly men) of Hmong videos. I am not
concerned here with the second generation who are much
more assimilated into the local cultures and languages
of the new host countries where they have grown up, who
show little interest in Hmong videos or cultural
traditions, and who have a very different attitude to
the homeland of their parents.
Many genres of
Hmong videos have been produced from rock music and love
songs set in America, to kungfu-style action and war
movies, and documentaries on Hmong life in Thailand,
Laos or China. There are also Thai, Korean, Indian and
Chinese films that have been dubbed in the Hmong
language for consumption by Hmong viewers.
However, these videos will not be the subject of this
paper. In order to explore Hmong cultural reproduction
and identity formation in the diaspora, my concern here
is mainly with Hmong videos (music, documentaries and
films) that focus on different aspects of Hmong life
and traditional culture in the homeland, on imaginings
and nostalgia for the geographic spaces left behind
after 1975 by those Hmong who now live in Western
countries, spaces such as migration routes, former
villages, military outposts like Longtieng, but more
importantly people such as relatives and friends who
remained in the homeland and who are the subject of much
transnational visiting, intense longings and feelings of
guilt by older Hmong in the diaspora.
It can be said that Hmong
media did not exist in its present-day form before the
change of political regimes in Laos, Cambodia and
Vietnam, following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
I can remember going to Ban Vinai refugee camp in
Northeast Thailand, the largest holding centre for Hmong
asylum seekers from Laos in 1976, and was asked to help
buy two music cassettes of Hmong modern singing that had
been recorded in someone’s kitchen by a group of young
men with much time on their hands and a big ache in
their heart. They were happy to have escaped alive from
Laos but sad about having to flee the old country,
unsure where to go from here and what it would be like.
The new songs were in the style of Lao, Thai, Chinese or
Western lyrics, but were rather amateurish because the
music was only made from empty tin cans and sticks of
wood, accompanied by an old guitar. This very
rudimentary band was headed by Lis Pheej.
The words in these new
songs often express the guilt of leaving loved ones or
family members behind and missing them, and the need for
Hmong people to love and care for each other so they
would not have to keep running from their oppressors,
and being separated from families and friends. In the
main, those who composed these new songs were sharing
their feeling of loss and calling for help through love
and unity, through joining force to protect themselves,
to find themselves a true Hmong homeland. It was as if
they were trying to promote Hmong nationalism and pride,
now that they were free from the clutch of a much feared
enemy. This is especially true of the new music of Lis
Txais, a leading member of a messianic movement which
was active in the Ban Vinai camp at that time. What is
ironic about these patriotic modern songs is that while
their lyrics urge Hmong to shed the contaminated
cultural elements borrowed from local dominant groups,
the melodies imitate the very songs of these groups such
as Thai military marching music.
Before 1976, most Hmong
music was heard only through actual playing of Hmong
musical instruments such as the reed pipe (qeej), the
flute (raj) or the mouth harp (ncas). For vocal
entertainment, young people of opposite sex sing “kwv
txiaj” or traditional dialogue songs to each other
during New Year or on special occasions like weddings.
This traditional singing consists of poetic
improvisation sung without music (what I will call
“dry” singing) in a variety of regional styles or
“seev suab”, depending on what subgroup of Hmong (White,
Blue or Striped) and what geographical locations are
involved (China, Vietnam, northeastern Laos, central
northern Laos, or Thailand). One has to be very good
with words to compose impromptu verses and to sing in
reply to the other person at the same time, something
that few people can do.
In the early 1960’s with
the civil war in Laos going on in full scale, radio
broadcasts in Hmong were introduced to disseminate war
propaganda, resulting in the recording and playing of a
lot of this traditional Hmong music and singing.
Listeners also used these “dry” songs to send personal
messages to relatives living in other villages or parts
of the country. Until 1975, there was no change to this
traditional music and its propagation through commercial
recording and market distribution. People only had
these government radio broadcasts to listen to, or might
record directly from those who knew how to sing or
play Hmong musical instruments for their personal use.
All this changed
dramatically after 1975. From the early improvisations
in Ban Vinai refugee camp, a new culture was born, a new
art form came to being after the Hmong started to be
resettled in Western countries. The trauma of escape
from the homeland and access to modern musical
instruments or recoding facilities helped to speed up
this change. The new songs, often recorded and sold by
the artists themselves, were later followed by video
documentaries and fiction movies. This new culture
would not have come about so quickly and globally if the
Hmong had not suffered from the trauma of exile, if they
had simply remained in Laos and adjusted themselves to
the new political system since there would be no craving
to invent the new media and no audience for it.
I will now look at the
different forms of transnational Hmong media (audio
music cassettes, videos, CDs and DVDs) that have been
produced and seemingly consumed avidly by Hmong audience
world-wide. Based on the chronological order of their
development, these media products can be grouped into
the following classifications:
1. Musical Appropriation
and Hybridity
In the early years of
their resettlement in the US from 1976 to 1983, the
Hmong were content to continue experimenting with modern
music and Western-style songs. The group that started in
Ban Vinai had disappeared by this time to be replaced by
a number of individual artists who composed their own
songs and who hired local American bands to back them up
and record their work for commercial distribution.
They then released their music cassettes to the Hmong
public through personal contacts or Hmong grocery
stores. Some of these early cassettes sold well,
especially with younger Hmong refugees in America who
were learning to prefer Western-style songs. Notable
among these early singers were Es Lis, Lis Pos, Tub Lis
Vam Khwb, Toj Lis and Mas Lis Vwj, the latter even
making a few concert tours around the US and France.
These early commercial
attempts were followed by other young Hmong with
artistic ambitions in Laos and in Thailand – both those
in the refugee camps and in village settlements. The
most successful Lao Hmong singer in this early period
was Koob Lisnhiajvws, while in Thailand Luj Yaj and Tsab
Mim Xyooj became the favorites. All three made a number
of tours to the US in the late 1980’s, and later also
acted as the leads in a few movies produced by ST Video
International, the first video production company set up
in Fresno, California, by Xub Thoj, a Hmong refugee from
Laos. Luj Yaj has remained in Thailand, but Tsab Mim
later married an American Hmong and now lives in the
USA.
Many other aspiring
artists also appeared on the scene, especially in
America but they were not as successful. Those who
succeeded usually have a good rolling voice and the
capacity to improvise, to make new genre of songs and
music, to upgrade and modernize. Above all, in order to
appeal to a wider transnational Hmong audience, it
requires that the aspiring artists are able to
appropriate lyrics from other cultures such as Thai,
Lao, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and the West.
This experiment in musical hybridity and simulation is
not unusual, given that many Hmong artists and consumers
have long been exposed to a vast variety of Asian and
Western music.
All of these Hmong
singers and musicians are amateurs with no professional
training. In the early days, the singing, music and
recording left much to be desired. For example, the
voice might be flat or the music might be too loud and
muffled the voice of the singer. Today, however, with
the advent of electronic music and digital recording,
many excellent singers have been able to put their
talents to maximum use. The field is very fluid with
good singers coming and going while new ones appear each
year in Laos, Thailand or the US. Even Hmong singers in
China have had their songs recorded on videos and
marketed. The most famous of the female singers now are
Ntxhee Yees Xyooj (Thailand), Paj Muas (Thailand), Ntxhais
Yaj (US), Dawb Thoj (Laos), Lis Vaj (US), Maiv Muas
(Laos), Mim Haam (China) and Npaub Vaj (US). For male
singers, some recent notables include Zeb Vwj (Laos),
Yujpheej Muas (Laos), Pov Thoj (Thailand), Ntsaim Thoj
(Thailand), Lis Ntaj (France) and Maim Lis (Laos).
Although his voice is now faltering, Luj Yaj (Thailand)
still dominates even after more than 15 years, due to
his many songs being regularly re-issued on DVDs.
It is also worthy of note
that styles of singing may differ from one singer to
another. While most do soft melodies in the fashion of
Thai or Korean singers, some Hmong artists also resort
to singing in traditional Lao (molam) style in all its
regional variations, especially with singers who live in
Laos. To capitalize on the avid consumption by the Hmong
world-wide, a number of famous Lao singers (Phouvieng
and Ko Viset) have even ventured into recording their
songs in the Hmong language! Of course, the younger
and more Westernized Hmong artists (whether in Thailand
or the US) also do rock and pop music, writing lyrics
mixed with English, forming their own bands and doing
their own recording. A few even do rap music. By and
large, they appeal mostly to Hmong teenagers in America,
so their audience is rather limited.
Many production companies
and recording studios have now been established, some in
Laos but most in America, to cater for this niche
market, and usually sign up their own singers or
actors. They have gone out of their way to try to
appeal to Hmong audience in the diaspora by changing
their presentation and packaging of their artists
according to the changing tastes and technologies in the
mainstream. Today, for example, few music recordings
are done on audio cassettes. Most are done on DVDs
through live presentation clips – often with dancing
girls in the background and the singer singing/lipsing
in front of them in large public parks, beaches or rice
fields. Many DVDs are now Karaoke music. This visual
presentation is clearly influenced by Thai music
performances during the last twenty years, sometimes
with beautiful sets and expensive costumes for the
singer and dancers.
In general, young Hmong
dancing girls are used, but recently Lao girls have
appeared in Hmong costumes to accompany Hmong singers.
This seems to indicate that Hmong music productions
have gone from mono-ethnic transnationalism to
poly-ethnic crossing-over. The question is whether this
is done because Lao dancing girls are better looking and
exotic, thus having more sexual appeal, or whether Hmong
music production has gone multicultural in order to
obtain a wider audience, to reach out to a wider market.
A few attempts have been made to record Hmong
traditional dry singing with modern music – a change
from “dry” to “mixed” as it were, but this has not been
met with a lot of commercial success. On the whole, the
most successful is still the soft melodies lamenting
about the heartaches of love and the homeland.
A trend in the past few
years has been the production of a large number of
videos on Hmong traditional “dry“ signing by company
producers or amateurs (returnees from America who pay
village singers and record their songs on video, then
edit and package them for sale). They pair up a male
and female singer in a competing match to see who could
sing the best poetic retort to whom – usually composed
mentally on the spot about love and hate between men and
women. This competition signing is then recorded on
video tapes without much editing and processed for
sale. The singers may get paid a few hundred dollars
each, but the producers would make a much bigger
profit. Every year, four to five of these video
cassettes appear on the market and are usually snapped
up by elderly Hmong - who love the tradition and
understand the poetic language used by the singers.
2. Documentaries
Documentaries are
another very popular genre. In the 1960s, there were
documentaries on the Hmong and the civil war in Laos by
the BBC (“Disappearing World”), NBC (news reports),
anthropologists or the American CIA (“Return to Padong”).
Others were made about Hmong refugees after their
arrival in the US (eg. “Becoming America” and “The Best
Place to Live”). But the first documentaries produced
by the Hmong themselves in their own language did not
appear until the early 1990s, starting with videos on
the first few visits to China by American Hmong in
search of their imagined lost relatives and the distant
homeland of their oral history.
This was followed by other documentaries on encounters
between American Hmong and other Hmong in Burma, Vietnam
and Laos.
A series of two tapes was made on an international
conference in China in 1993 involving Hmong from the
West and their Miao counterparts in China.
This is the first time Hmong from different countries
were able to come together to share ideas and culture,
and the videos held wide appeal to other Hmong in the
diaspora who could not join them.
The early
documentaries, mostly made by Su Thao of ST Universal
Video in Fresno, California, are not simply about the
life and exotic culture of other Hmong communities in
Asia. They often show the Hmong producer or some other
visitors from America in full engagement with the
locals, comparing culture, history and life
experiences. In some videos, such as those on American
Hmong visiting Hmong in China, the visitors even show
their hosts, often assembled in large numbers in some
open air venue, how aspects of Lao/American Hmong
culture differ from those of the hosts.
They share these differences by singing, playing music
and showing each other how to toss balls between boys
and girls during New Year – the latter having been lost
to the Hmong in China.
So a sort of cultural exchange and reinvention took
place between the two groups.
Later, other Hmong
produced documentaries about the Hmong diasporic
community in French Guyana who, after arriving from Thai
refugee camps in the late 1970s, have taken up
commercial agriculture, fish breeding and hunting for
game – a favorite pastime of the Hmong which is no
longer available for those in urban centers in the US,
France or Australia. Again, although the intention of
these documentaries on the Hmong in French Guyana, may
be to educate other Hmong about this community, the
nostalgia for the old homeland in Laos is a recurrent
theme. At the beginning of one such video, a young man
was shown walking through one of the settlements singing
a traditional Hmong song about life in a new land and
the sorrow of parting with loved ones left in Laos –
with images of Laos flashing back and forth on the TV
screen to emphasize the point.
After the opening
up of Laos to visitors from the West, many documentaries
have also been made there, about the old civil war with
interviews of those involved, about places where the
Hmong in America used to live, and about Hmong life, New
Year celebrations and bull fights - another Hmong
favorite not found in the West.
Again, the primary aim seems to be the dissemination of
images that appeal to the nostalgia of those in the
diaspora, not to mention many zoomed images of young
girls in their colorful costumes. This tendency to focus
on young women may make one wonder whether the producer
wishes to admire Hmong costumes or whether homeland
girls are also shown to tickle the sense of diasporic
male viewers. Perhaps, it is both. After all, these
videos are commercial products designed to have the
maximum appeal to their global consumers.
Since 1997, a
number of documentaries produced by Hmong ABC in
Minnesota, has tried to make a serious contribution to
the education of Hmong viewers about their national
history and their role in the Lao civil war.
The producer, Yuepheng Xiong, made a number of visits to
China and joined Hmong history summer schools run by
Miao academics. In one video, he was able to show the
alleged tomb of the first Hmong King, Chi Yu, and to
trace the Hmong migration route to Vietnam and Laos. A
university-educated man, he strongly believes in the
actual existence of a true Hmong homeland, not just an
imagined one, and has attempted to locate this in areas
where the Hmong are believed to have lived. He also
organizes tours to these historical places in China,
and has already made two video documentaries along this
theme.
What he tries to do may be termed attempts at recovering
“omitted” or missing history as discussed by Eisenstein
(1994).
While Yuepheng
tries to educate the Hmong about a Hmong historical
homeland, another group which calls itself “The Fact
Finding Commission” (FCC) based in Oroville, California,
has issued two videos, one in 2002 and a second in
2004, which push the Hmong diasporic nostalgia, feeling
of oppression and guilt over the edge. These videos not
only touch the Hmong’s heart strings, but also the
international community and media, resulting in the
issue they covered being taken up by Amnesty
International, the BBC, Time Magazine and even the ABC
in Australia. These FCC videos were made by Hmong
guides with Western journalists who went secretly to
areas occupied by remnants of the so-called Hmong CIA
“secret army” during the Lao civil war.
These were the Hmong on the Royal Lao Government side
who could not escape to Thailand as refugees in the
1970s and 1980s, or who chose to stay on to resist the
new communist regime. From an initial group of 16,000
in 1976, there are now only about 2000 left with their
families, scattered deep in the jungles of central
northeastern Laos. The documentaries show these
recalcitrant Hmong living in rags and under the cover of
tree foliages, young men maimed and scarred by years of
fighting against Lao government and Vietnamese troops,
children suffering from malnutrition and alleged
chemical bomb poison, old soldiers crying and begging to
be saved from the atrocities of the ruling authorities,
young girls allegedly gang-raped and stabbed to death by
Lao soldiers.
Although this
representation of Hmong suffering in the hands of an
oppressive government only applies to a small number of
Hmong in Laos (there are altogether more than 400,000
living there), the videos made Hmong in the diaspora cry
tears of guilt and anger, especially in America. They
also sent many scurrying for actions. Some joined in a
“long march to freedom” in August 2004 from Minnesota to
Washington DC to give publicity to the plight of “the
Hmong in the jungles”, a journey that took two months to
complete on foot. Others organized demonstrations
against the Lao government in Washington DC, or voiced
their opposition to the US Congress passing a bill on
Normalising Trade Relations (NTR) with Laos. Educated
Hmong were called to account for themselves as to what
actions they had taken or planned to take about the
issue. The reverberation of these videos on the Hmong
diaspora continues to be felt even today.
A new documentary
entitled “Hunted Like Animals” (2006) was the latest to
be made by UN lobbyist Rebecca Summer on the plight of
the Hmong at Huai Nam Khao (White Water), Petchaboon,
Thailand. Many of the 6,000 refugees there escaped from
the jungles of Laos. Apart from the most graphic images
of young Hmong being killed by Lao government troops,
raped and disemboweled, the documentary carries
interviews of Hmong resistance women who surrendered and
were allegedly made sex slaves of Lao soldiers, after
being passed from one barrack to another. One woman
even claimed to become pregnant as a result, as she is
seen pleading for third-country resettlement and crying
her eyes out.
Thus, Hmong video
documentaries have been very powerful in terms of their
impact on Hmong identity, nostalgia, longings, and on
transnational homeland politics. Through the politicized
images of videos showing the hopeless resistance in
Laos, the Hmong sense of being oppressed, being victims
of a ruthless enemy has been well and truly aroused, and
kept going across the long distance that separates the
homeland and the diaspora.
3. Feature movies
For practical and
economic reasons, the first few Hmong video movies were
made in America in the early 1990s. Being only amateur
productions in all aspects, from directing to acting and
editing, these movies were by no means what can be
called classics. Some directors only had one camera, so
viewers could only watch actions from one angle.
Nevertheless, they fired the imagination of many Hmong
about the potential of using fiction as a way to
transmit culture, feelings and ideas in the diaspora.
Many of the movies that followed were made in Thailand
or Laos, some by Su Thao and others by then unknown
producers. A producer/director would travel from America
with a movie camera or two, then tried to get together a
cast from Hmong villages or the refugee camp at
Tamkrabork, to act for him for a pittance. He might
already have a script or might invent a story and
dialogues with the cast as they went along. As he
usually traveled on a tourist visa, the filming would
have to be completed within 2-3 months, before the
finished product was taken back for editing and
releasing to the market in America, often within 6 to 8
months.
Today, they have become
more sophisticated in technical production, scripting
and acting. I recently met an American Hmong producer
in Bangkok International Airport on his way back to the
US from a 3 month sting in Laos. He said that he had
made 3 movies and 2 music tapes within this short
period, making me wonder about their quality. He had
his own actors and singers, and other producers had
theirs. According to him, a producer/director would
guard jealously his cast and celebrities and forbid them
to sign up with another producer.
Most of these Hmong
movies try to do a hurried or compressed translation of
Hmong culture in celluloid form. There are movies about
the effects of polygamy and gambling or drug addiction.
Like movies made in Hollywood and elsewhere, a favorite
theme is love and its many tribulations. However, the
most common theme is the Lao civil war and its impact on
the Hmong, how they suffered in the jungles of Laos, how
they escaped to Thailand and to the West, but leaving
behind relatives, wives and children.
Some movies show middle-aged men going back to Thailand
or Laos to look for the families they left behind in
their rush to seek asylum in a distant country. Other
films such as “Niam As Kaj” may touch on the problems
experienced by “mail-order” brides – naïve young women
who left the homeland or refugee camps to marry a man
who is already established in a Western country without
knowing each other well.
There has also been a few
good comedies. A very successful series called Dr Tom,
made by Mr Nkaj Muas who is based in California, is a
parody of a failed diasporic conman who returns to the
homeland to live out his sexual fantasies with
submissive and money-hungry young girls in Laos,
sometimes aided and abetted by his older domineering
wife in America. So far, six parts of this series have
been made, filmed mostly in Thailand. Another very
successful and well-made movie in 2003 by KeyStar
Productions is called “Suav Cwj Ntas Ob Tog Plam” by
Director Tsav Npis Thoj based in Minnesota, USA.
Although he is not a professional, his story and the
sophistication of his photography, mixed with beautiful
images of rustic mountain sceneries and Hmong life
together with a truly nostalgic music score – all
combine to touch all the senses of the viewers. Hmong
movies have thus encompassed the whole range from
serious dramas, melodramas to comedies. Some have been
flops, but many have been well received, although the
quality of acting and production for most still needs
much improvement.
To the critical mind,
some of the movies are not well made at all, especially
the fiction movies. In some scenes, you even see the
tripod of the camera and other movie-making equipments
left on the ground behind or in front of the actors.
Sometimes, you can hear the amateur director telling the
actors what to do. Some of the story lines are hard to
believe and the acting may be so laid back or over-done
(especially in the comedies) that it is difficult to sit
through the entire film without feeling bored or
embarrassed. One has to take them with a grain of salt
and, as my mother would say: “just enjoy, do not think
too much”. I have watched movies with other Hmong and
our reactions are sometimes so very different. While
they laugh their head off at some scenes, I cringe with
embarrassment at the exaggerated and terrible acting or
dialogues when some equally amateur actress speaks as if
she is reading from the script, or when a family works
on the farm all dressed in brand-new Hmong costumes that
have probably just been made, so unlike a real farming
family.
Globalizing Hmong Culture
Globalization is
social and economic change that permeates communities in
different parts of the globe, due to an increased
connectivity among societies and their elements as a
result of global economic infiltration and
transculturation or the merging and converging of
cultures, the rapid improvement in transport and
communication that greatly facilitate international
cultural and economic exchanges. The term is thus
applied to change in social, cultural, and economic
contexts (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/globalisation).
Globalization is sometimes used to emphasize the erosion
of the nation state or national boundaries, and the
emergence of the “global village”.
In this paper, I will use
the term to refer to the process whereby aspects of
Hmong culture come to be spread and shared by Hmong
communities in different parts of the world through the
production, marketing and consumption of audio music
cassettes, videos, compact disks and DVDs without being
hindered by political boundaries or geographical space.
It also can also be seen as the imitation and
appropriation of music and other forms of media from
other cultures around the world by Hmong artists and
producers, and the impact of this global media
influences on Hmong culture. Thus, globalization here
means global changes to both process and contents of
Hmong media across national borders and into different
local groups. Not only have these media products become
globalize, but also has the technology which helps with
their consumption in the most remote Hmong villages in
China, Vietnam, Laos or Thailand – wherever there is
electricity supply.
In 1998, for instance, I
and my wife visited relatives in a Hmong village in
northern Thailand where we were surprised to see that
nearly 40 per cent of the households had a VCR machine
and TV set. Ten years ago, this would be unthinkable.
Early in 2004, we sent a video about our life and family
in Australia to these relatives. The response (by
mobile phone) was that we should not send videos
anymore, because most of them now only have DVD
players. As most Hmong film producers catch up with the
latest development in recording technology, they release
their products mainly in the form of DVDs, forcing
consumers in other countries to adapt to these changing
technological demands. With the construction of roads
and the use of media communications, the social and
geographical isolation of Hmong communities world-wide
has finally been broken. Without this technology and the
capacity of consumers to afford its usage, this process
of Hmong cultural globalization would not have been
possible during the last 25 years. The Hmong now can
reach out to each other – often without having to leave
their own home, thanks to the wonder of modern
inventions and the Hmong’s own ability to exploit them.
Production
Almost all the Hmong
videos are produced in America, although they may be
taped in Thailand, Laos or China. Most producers
started as amateurs, refugees with an itch to share
their nostalgia or to achieve an artistic ambition,
people who like traveling and video-taping their
journeys to educate and entertain others. Most of them
make one video and disappear from the scene. Only less
than half a dozen of them continue to make travelogues,
music videos or movies over a number of years,
especially Su Thao who started in 1990 with his own
company and professional editing/recording studio –
which he sometimes hires out to other Hmong video
producers. On the whole, most only work from their own
homes.
There is a Hmong music
recording studio in Vientiane, Laos, operated by a music
teacher in the Lao National School of Music who is a
Hmong. As many singers and actors are based in Laos or
Thailand, he is often called upon to record their work.
When he has time, he may write enough songs to fill a
cassette, then pay a singer or two to work with him to
record a master tape. He will then sell the master for
$US1,000 to a visiting Hmong entrepreneur or producer
from America who takes it back for duplication and
packaging for distribution. The whole process from
recording to marketing may take up to a year. It is not
unusual for a singer to record his or her own songs and
sell the master tape, or handle the sale of the
duplicated tapes directly, if more money can be made in
this way.
On the whole, however,
the production of videos is done by an individual media
entrepreneur or a company, especially in regard to
movies and documentaries. Payments received by singers
and actors are often very low – from a few hundred US
dollars to $US1,000. Some of the best leading actresses
command no more than $2,000 per movie - anymore than
that and no one can afford to hire them. Many of the
extras in movies work without payments. In competition
singing of traditional Hmong songs, the artists are paid
a few hundred American dollars by the video producer who
then owns the copyright to the recording of their
songs.
Many
of the music CDs and feature movies are designed to
entertain, although videos that promote modern music can
also be seen as attempts at a new cultural invention to
bring the Hmong in line with, or at least as part of the
digitised global music community. The production of
music tapes and feature movies is also driven by a
strong profit motive for many producers, by a desire to
make additional money to supplement their incomes from
their normal lines of work (Schein, 2004, personal
communication). In other ways,
Hmong media producers may also be driven
by a desire to salvage and reinforce Hmong arts and
culture in the face of constant bombardment from
American music and movies which some may consider
irrelevant to the ethno-specific needs and consumer
tastes of the Hmong.
Thus, Hmong video
consumption may be said to be a reaction to cultural
alienation in an unfamiliar environment, and to cultural
deprivation – the inability to keep or practise one’s
culture due to loss of social memories or local legal
prohibitions relating to certain ethnic practices such
as ritual animal sacrifices or bull fights. This then
leads some Hmong to make videos in order to reinvent, to
reproduce their culture in the form of inoffensive media
presentations. To paraphrase Baudrillard (in “Plastic
Surgery to the Other” 1994), this reaction may be best
described as the production of one’s missing “other in
its absence”, and the need to be able “to continuously
refer back to oneself and to one's image” (body, look,
identity, and desire) because circumstances have caused
“the virtual disappearance of the other” in us.
Apart from providing alternative
entertainment, the relieving of feeling of alienation
and the reproduction of one’s culture, a major reason
for the proliferation of Hmong videos is the fact that
many Hmong in the West now have accumulated enough
capital to buy expensive video production equipment, to
travel, to pay for local assistants, singers and actors;
to hire or set up studios to process and edit their
taped images and eventually to package them for
commercial release.
Material base and capital accumulation in
the Marxist conception of the capitalist society have
allowed consumers to buy and producers to make/invent,
“constantly seeking out new forms in order to accumulate
more capital and reproduce more labour” (Woolley, 1999)
and, I may add, to be able to afford homeland nostalgia
and a large dose of cultural consumption in celluloid
form.
This access to capital
and labour together with the freedom of expression the
Hmong now enjoy in the West has enabled them to produce
documentaries, films and music clips in their own
language; and to do this without any artistic
restrictions. This would not have been possible in a
more restricted political and economic environment, or
constrained financial situations. More capital now
means more power for media production and consumption.
Distribution
As the producers do not
have a big budget, there is usually no advance publicity
or press conferences by movie stars or singers about
their new DVD or movie. In fact, consumers rarely get
to see the leading actors or actresses who feature in
the videos they watch. A number of famous singers at
least make a few tours across America in cities where
there are large concentrations of Hmong. Through these
concerts, the sponsors may advertise the works of these
artists or even sell them directly to concert goers. In
general, most publicity is done as trailers on videos
which are on the market. Some are advertised on-line on
the Internet, but the majority of video products may not
get any advance publicity. Some after-sale publicity
may be done on radio when a song is played and the name
of the artist is mentioned by the radio announcer. There
are Hmong radio stations in Colorado, California,
Wisconsin and Minnesota which play a lot of Hmong modern
and traditional songs over the air waves. A number of
on-line radio stations also exist. Many of the recorded
modern songs are also very popular with radio stations
that broadcast in the Hmong language in Thailand and
Laos.
The normal channel of
distribution is through Hmong stores and grocery shops
in various American cities. Once they are bought,
people will talk about the good ones from one friend to
another, from one country to the next, or friends and
relatives may send videos they enjoy as gifts to their
acquaintances in other places. As each video may cost
between $US 10 and $20, there is also a lot of illegal
copying, usually between friends and neighbours. Most
videos may carry copyright, but some do not. Very few
have dates on them, so it is impossible to know when
they are made. Some Hmong shops and video stores in
America also rent out Hmong videos to their customers
who then give publicity to them by word of mouth through
their social networks in the global Hmong community.
Other avenues of
marketing include on-line sales through a company called
United Hmong Media, stalls run by producers at major
Hmong New Year parties in California (at Fresno, for
example); or at special events like the Hmong 4th July
celebration in St.Paul, Minnesota, a two-day major
sporting event which attracts thousands of Hmong from
other States each year. Outside of the US, Hmong videos
are marketed through Hmong shops in Thailand and in
Laos, some of which may specialize in selling Hmong,
Thai and Lao media products such as DVDs, CDs, videos
and audio cassettes. A recent practice has been for
Hmong in Laos to copy and send DVDs made in America to
relatives in Australia or France to sell through their
informal network of friends, and then send back the
money to them in Laos.
Both production and
distribution are transnational in nature. Actors,
singers and producers come from different countries to
work together. Their finished products are then
distributed for consumption world-wide among the Hmong
in the diaspora, and with homeland communities in China,
Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Given that most of the
videos are produced by amateurs, many in the basement of
their homes using hired equipment, it is amazing that
these media products have managed to find their way into
the “global Hmong village” in all the countries where
they live.
If Hmong videos
contribute to the production and reproduction of Hmong
culture, what have they done? What dimensions of this
culture have been added and what is the outcome of this
cultural reinvention? There is no doubt that many
homesick Hmong living in exile have returned to Laos,
Thailand or China to try and capture those elusive
images in their dreams and longings for the homeland.
However, it is questionable whether what they imagined
is what they have captured on camera. This is true
particularly since the homeland has also changed a great
deal since 1975. The Hmong in Laos, for example, no
longer wear Hmong clothes in their every day life like
30 years ago. Hmong traditional costumes, like those
found with their owners in Western countries, have been
relegated to the depth of the family trunk to be fished
out only for display and wearing for special occasions
like weddings and the New Year. They go to work on
farms wearing ordinary Western or Lao casual clothes.
A new generation has
grown up that has assimilated a lot of the local
majority culture, and is less able to remember or follow
Hmong cultural traditions. Of course, those in the
homeland are still much better at keeping some of the
more important customs than those in Western countries
since many of them can still live together as villagers,
free from influences and impositions from other cultural
groups. But times have changed and what is put together
as video images of Hmong life and social practices may
be rather different from those experienced thirty years
ago by the Hmong in America or Australia. In other
cases, video images are mere illusions in the sense that
they only represent what happened at the time they were
put on tape. By the time the images get edited and
packaged for sale, they would be a few months or a year
out of date, no longer the reality in the homeland.
It may thus be said that the Hmong who
watch these videos are only watching a compressed and
“delayed reality”, a fake version of their culture and
the homeland, for these video images are only what
Baudrillard (in “Critical Thought”,1994) calls
“simulacra” – “an illusion of the factual”, of things
that pretend to be real but are only simulation of
reality.
To the
smart proponents of postmodernism, video media may have
thus stolen the "reality file" and substituted it with
the “murderous capacity of (its) images”, to borrow
another Baudrillard favourite phrase. To most Hmong,
however, video images of their own people in far-distant
places are seen as a real representation of their
culture. They help the viewers not only to see their
culture come alive but also to try and maintain their
native language with their children and grand-children
in the West by watching videos with narratives and
dialogues all spoken in Hmong.
These images may be
selective, according to what the producers want to keep,
but they are no less real and they help add a new
dimension to the life and culture of the diasporic
viewers by giving sense to their social position,
justifying their beliefs and traditions to their
rebellious children, confirming and bringing meanings
back to their confusing transnational life. Thus, for
the Hmong in the diaspora , these video images may be
more real than the reality of their dreary immediate
surroundings which are often devoid of familiar
cultural practices and self-presentations, and which
give them few occasions to show what it is to be
“Hmong” to their children. These ethnic videos can also
help bring reality to these children who grow up in the
West with little interest and opportunity to see the
culture of their parents in close-up and colourful
graphic images. These images not only give one pride in
one’s own ethnicity, but also can be paused and rewound
for study, duplicated and distributed to others, unlike
a one-off ceremony in real life which disappears after
it is done.
Videos , therefore, have
allowed the Hmong, on the one hand, to see their culture
put on show like others that bombard them every day on
the silver screen or in the print media. What has been
put on tapes can also be preserved to be seen again, to
fulfil one’s nostalgic longings, to be learned, changed
or improved for later generations. Schein (forthcoming)
has coined a most appropriate phrase in a new
publication called “Rewind to Home” in which she sees
Hmong videos as a borderless commodity which consumers
can rewind back and forth to watch whenever they want to
see the homeland. Moreover, they can also be used to
show Hmong culture off to members of the host country in
the absence of any real presentations that the Hmong
viewers can make of themselves.
On the other hand,
Hmong videos act as witnesses of the cultural changes
already taking place in Hmong society or at least point
at the direction of change it is heading. Although some
depict Hmong in their rural villages with the women in
full Hmong costumes doing farming work, many also show
them in America living in large cities and running
shops. There are even songs that extol the benefits of
city life and formal education. The singer and dancing
girls were dressed in suits or the latest international
fashion.
Documentaries on New Year celebrations show Hmong men in
their best Western attires and the women in evening
party dresses. They drive expensive cars and live in
two-storey brick houses in suburban America or
Thailand. Viewers thus clearly see a group of people
that have adapted and changed, that have modernized and
caught up with modern life – like many mainstream global
communities.
These cultural changes
and inventions are evident from a DVD released recently
on the 2003 Hmong New Year open-air function in Luang
Prabang, Laos. Instead of the traditional ball games
played between boys and girls, there is only a big crowd
gathering in front of an improvised stage where
well-known Hmong singers perform their best songs one
after another in front of young dancing girls. The
singing was interspersed with comedy acts designed to
mock undesirable practices like drug and opium addiction
or the fruit of laziness. The crowd loves the comedy
acts and are enthralled by the singing. The modern
songs, first made popular through videos, have become a
part of their entertainment culture. It is a modern
concert they now see, not just a traditional New Year
celebration filled with ball games.
Hmong transnational
videos which focus, among other things, on cultural
frivolities left behind in the old country, serve to
make fun of them for the enjoyment of their diasporic
viewers. This is true especially of those Hmong
movies with stories involving middle-aged men returning
from the diaspora to lure young women in the homeland to
marry them as second wives only for many of the latter
to be abandoned when the men run out of their green
dollar notes. Because of the frequent use of this
theme, these videos are sometimes seen as a vehicle to
perpetuate traditional practices that continue to
exploit homeland women by involving them in polygamous
marriages – something that the male protagonists can no
longer have access to in Western countries.
This
argument is made particularly strong in a recent paper
by Schein (2004)
called “Homeland Beauty: Transnational
Longing and Hmong American Video” in which she discusses
the first of the very popular movie series that is
already mentioned, Dr Tom, first made in 1995 in
Thailand by expatriate Hmong from America. The
protagonist is an unemployed middle-age shiftless
swindler who returns to Laos after years of living by
his wits in America and who now pretends to be rich and
single – throwing money left and right when in the
homeland, but actually borrowing and conniving from all
and sundry when back in America. Bragging his way
through the homeland, he gives himself the title of
Doctor (which is very highly regarded in Asian
societies) in order to elevate his social status and
open more doors to his womanizing and other sham
activities. One of his deceitful schemes involves
talking a poor old Hmong woman into agreeing for her
young daughter to marry him – for a few weeks before he
has to return to his first wife in America.
Schein sees this Hmong
parody as the epitome of homeland “erotics” (sexualised
longings) and gendered exploitation – bundled in a new
art form without locatedness, floating in the murky
waters of the diaspora and transfixed by the
excruciating gaze of post-modern nostalgia. She argues
that the “terrain of Hmong American politics has become
irrevocably intertwined with media texts… [which]…should
be seen as embedded in sexual cultures and in turn as
constituting and reproducing them. It is not surprising
that Hmong homeland nostalgia should be saturated with
eroticism…” (op.cit, p.2).
For Schein, the homeland
through this video has become an object of sexual
fantasies, a site for “recuperated passions”, a
“reconfigured structure of intimacy”. It has become an
ever-shifting gendered landscape of longing represented
in the form of a ripe young girl, full of feminine charm
to be lusted for and used by middle-aged Hmong visitors
with pockets full of American dollars, then left behind
to a life of tears and false promises. Although tears
are streaming down her face, she refuses to marry her
old suitor, the young man from her familiar and poor
locale. She is happy to wait for her balding and obese
but seemingly rich sugar daddy from the West even if she
has to wait for ever. Although Schein also identifies
many other roles and gives other explanations for these
Hmong videos, she may be justified in her allegory which
sees the homeland as a fresh-faced seductive woman and
the Hmong in the diaspora as old lechers longing for and
waiting to pounce on this innocent young girl.
Nevertheless, the Hmong in the West have
avidly used these videos for many years without ever
thinking of their depiction of things in the homeland as
objects of sexual desire. They only see them as
consumer items that have filled a big void in their life
as refugees. They have found them to be entertaining as
well as educational. They may contain stories about old
men trying to score with younger women, but that is also
found in many societies. These videos recreate cultural
traditions that have now been lost to the new generation
of Hmong – even those in the old country.
It does not mean that they will
perpetuate polygamous marriages and mid-life male sexual
fixations, given the law against polygamy in the
countries the Hmong now live in. If they contain images
of ageing men’s romantic longings for younger girls,
whether in a movie or a documentary, these longings have
always been accepted as an integral part of the Hmong
culture in the homeland and not a new aberration
emanating from sexually depraved Hmong males in the
West. In reality, many Hmong mores have changed since
1975 with polygamy and marriages between older men and
younger girls being actively challenged, often from
educated Hmong women. When they are imaged on videos,
these old romantic practices may look as if they are
only common to Western Hmong men because these videos
often dwell on the latter’s transnational
subjectivities, but in reality they are aimed to
ridicule such practices.
Aside from “homeland
erotics”, what these Hmong videos in general help
maintain is a love for the Hmong culture, for Hmong
villagers singing traditional courting songs, for those
Hmong in the diaspora to see traditional Hmong New Year
and religious rituals being performed unhindered in
their traditional setting in the mountains of Laos –
some of which they can no longer carry out in the West
because of law prohibiting the use of live animals for
them, or because few know how to perform them anymore.
These videos have also brought to reality Hmong folk
tales and legends that have been passed down from one
generation to another in Hmong communities across Asia.
This has helped reinforce and maintain the culture by
making these famous stories come alive in living colour
with characters played by real-life actors and
actresses.
During one of my visits
to Laos in 2002, I was waiting for a bus at Salaphukhun,
south of Luang Prabang, to return to the capital of
Vientiane. During the long evening wait, I ventured
into a shop run by a Hmong woman who has two married
sisters living in America. She invited me into the
shop’s back room and I was surprised that she has a VCR
in this outback part of the country. I was even more
surprised to see her family watching a Hmong movie that
was recently made in Thailand by Hmong American
producers. The movie is a favourite folk tale called
“Nuj Nphaib thiab Ntxawm” or “Nublai and the Heavenly
Last Princess”. The hero is an orphan – a favourite
Hmong theme - who excels in the playing of the reed
pipe, and is rewarded with the love of the beautiful
youngest daughter of the King of Heaven.
My host told me that this
was everyone’s favourite Hmong movie, because it is
based on a popular story in the Hmong oral tradition.
Now she does not have to tell the story verbally at
night to her children any more. She can just put the
tape in the VCR and everyone will be enthralled. It not
only entertains, but it brings alive a long tradition of
oral story-telling. They love to watch it, because it
is something they can see with their own eyes and can
identify with – something that shows Hmong village and
people in their traditional costumes, their rice fields
and their mountain living. It is not a story about Hmong
in America, laden with cultural longing and work
problems, surrounded by expensive cars and material
possessions – something viewers in the homeland find it
hard to connect with.
As
stated before, there has also been an increasing number
of videos that depict traditional Hmong singing often in
matching pairs with a male and a female singer who try
to outwit each other with improvised love songs.
It is not certain if the appeal of these
tapes lies in the fact that they are often very
entertaining – depending on the wittiness of the
singers, or whether they fulfill the craving need of the
diasporic Hmong for a musical tradition that is seen as
truly Hmong, not something mixed and borrowed from other
cultures. The most popular recording of this form of
competition singing came out in mid-2004, involving a
Hmong woman singer, Maiv Suav Yaj (May Shua Yang) who
was brought from Vietnam to Laos and put in a singing
match with a well-known male Hmong singer in Laos, Kum
Xyooj (Ku Xiong). The Vietnamese Hmong could sing in 12
regional varieties while the Lao Hmong could only do
with two, so she became the winner to the delight of
on-lookers and viewers.
This new emergence of
traditional Hmong music and folk tales on videos can be
seen as contributing to cultural maintenance by sharing
Hmong traditional culture in the homeland with viewers
in other countries, by putting poetry improvisation and
folk stories in moving images to make them come alive
and become more real, more relevant. In this way, the
videos allow people to see not only the lives of other
Hmong, but also their own folklores and legendary tales
in full colour. They make it easier for viewers to
engrave them in their memories, like the cultural images
which are stored on tapes and can always be retrieved
for enjoyment or learning.
In an article called
“Mapping Hmong Videos in Diasporic Space”, Sheen (2002)
attributes the hundreds of Hmong videos made in the past
20 years as resulting from Hmong refugees in America
drifting “back and forth to Asia” – with a portable
camcorder - “for some” (the producers), “and
participation in an imagined and highly
media-constructed supranational community for many more”
(the consumers). In the process, they are all engaged
in “identity exchanges” or the sharing of each other’s
perception of what the Hmong are and where is their
social positioning in their separate countries and as an
transnational ethnic entity in the world at large (Schein,
forthcoming).
These videos make those
who produce and those who use them into a borderless
virtual community bonded together across national
boundaries and time by their mutual interest and, one
may say passion for this art form. It reminds them of
who they are, where they used to be and where they are
socially, culturally and spatially located today in
relation to other cultures and peoples. It also points
to what they can become, can change into as a group
sharing common cultural values and traditions, since
culture changes constantly and so does one’s identity.
According to Woodward
(1997),
“Identity can be seen as
the interface between subjective positions and social
and cultural situations... Identity gives us an idea of
who we are and of how we relate to others and to the
world in which we live. Identity marks the ways in which
we are the same as others who share that position, and
the ways in which we are different from those who do
not.' (pp. 1-2).
That
videos and other media forms can reinforce and serve as
identity representations is clearly demonstrated in the
statement by the American singer/actor “Ice Cube” who
declares that "my music is a product of who I am and
where I came from. I'm made in America. I'm not from
Mars or nowhere else." (Best
and Kellner, 1999).
Media images are powerful
in connecting people to each other, because they are
seen as representations of individuals and cultures at
the local, national and transnational levels. They
bring into sharper focus ideas and “symbolic systems” to
provide possible answers to questions on individual and
collective identities such as “who am I?; what could I
be?; who do I want to be?” (Woodward, op.cit., p. 14).
Media images help shape the social and political
concerns of producers and consumers, as well as drive
their “social and cultural changes” (op.cit., p.1). For
the Hmong diaspora, media production and consumption
have made its members sharply aware of other Hmong in
other countries, of what they have in common in spite of
their many differences. More importantly, they make
Hmong consumers see in what ways they are different from
other people around them, other groups who are not Hmong.
Videos have brought them a more focused social
consciousness about themselves as a people, as a
transnational nation.
Gilroy (1992, p. 19),
defines black identity as an ongoing transnational
process within a region united by its historical
heritage of displacement through slavery. The Hmong
identity can be conceptualised along much the same
transnational paradigm, united by a loss of homeland to
a more powerful foe which forced them to be displaced
and scattered around the globe with only some hazy
memories to sustain them. The moving images they see on
the screen of their television sets make these memories
come alive, and help them feel that they are seeing
their own real people talking at them across great
divides of space and oceans. Viewers feel the pain of
those they see fainting at airports in Laos saying
good-bye to relatives retuning to America, crying at
funerals or sobbing in their diasporic suffering. They
experience delight seeing Hmong children laughing and
running in rice fields, young girls singing love songs
or dancing to the tune of the mournful “qeej” music or
the long flute. It makes them feel that they are in
touch with other Hmong people with whom they feel
belonged, despite the physical distance between video
viewers and the subjects they watch.
Thus, Hmong homeland
videos, one among a number of genres produced globally,
enable Hmong exiles to make vicarious visits to their
co-ethnics in other locations, to sample cultural
traditions that are missing in their present life, and
to recapture the past as part of a process of
reconstructing a new identity based on the sharing of
the same culture, language and history. These videos
thus can help to shape the group’s evolving image of
itself or national identity, an identity which can be
seen as “production which is never complete, always in
process, and always constituted within, not outside,
representation” (Hall, 1990, p. 222). The video images
may also heal the trauma of war in Laos, the bloodied
forced displacement to Thailand after 1975 in which
thousands of them had died, and the reluctant eventual
resettlement in Western countries. Many left behind
relatives, friends, personal possessions like domestic
animals, houses and land – all of which are still fresh
in their memories after 30 years. Video representation
of homeland issues enables them to reach back and feel
in touch with this recent history. By interpreting past
events from their own perspective and in their own
language, it helps them to understand these events and
to accept them. This, in turn, may make it easier for
them to let go of their guilt and nostalgia so that they
can adapt themselves to new and changing situations in
their life.
In addition to making
consumers feel connected through a common identity and a
shared longing for the homeland, Hmong videos have also
made viewers raise their self-esteem and pride in the
knowledge that they too can make and watch movies about
themselves and are thus no less inferior to other people
around them. Many Hmong women told me that they are no
longer restricted to watch Chinese, Thai or American
movies or even the local TV stations, some of which they
find hard to understand and enjoy. Hmong videos are easy
to watch and have expanded their range of home
entertainment. In this way, these celluloid products
have made life easier for the Hmong, and have
consolidated their sense of individual, group and
cultural worth. Although they are social constructions
based on “social imaginaries” (Pfeifer, 2003), they act
as “contestation” between sites of dominant Western
discourses and Hmong minority texts, as the acting out
of cultural politics between the viewers and the broader
community, as depictions of contention between the past,
the present and the future.
However, an issue to
consider is that “identity is interactional, not
constituted in a historical vacuum” with “a boundary
between interpretation and fabrication”, as eloquently
put by Tapp (2004, pp 21-22). At some point, there is a
need to return to “real history” and “authentic
culture”. In the course of their long migration from
China to the West, with many stops in between, the Hmong
have been influenced by many local cultures. Those in
the diaspora, for example, have adopted Lao and Thai
customs such as the baci or wrist-stringing ceremony and
other Buddhist beliefs. They play hand ball games during
New Year celebrations, which is not done by those in
China. They use the reed pipe (or “qeej”) as a major
symbol of their ethnic identity, but this musical
instrument is not found with every group of Hmong in
China, their former homeland. In the face of this
array of differences and the lack of well informed
research on Hmong cultural history, attempts to
interpret Hmong culture on videos may lead to the
possibility of producers fabricating inauthentic
“customs” and a distorted sense of identity.
Media Hegemony
Thus, a very subtle
but no less important impact of Hmong videos is the
influence that producers may have on viewers in regard
to their personal interpretation and understanding of
the homeland, its history and its culture. What viewers
see is what producers choose to give them, for only
selected images are put together in documentary
narratives, singing clips or fictional movies. The end
result may be what Gramsci (1988: 192) calls “hegemony”
or “the creation of a new ideological terrain… a reform
of consciousness”, based on the imposition of the
beliefs and values of the dominant class (producers) on
the general community (consumers) for the latter to
accept and share in the former’s social and cultural
practices.
Naficy and Teshome
(1993) discuss how the media is used by members of the
Iranian diaspora to put what they “imagine” about the
homeland into image form. The “imagined” is thus
transformed into “the imaged” – for viewing and
appreciation of the lost past and the distant homeland.
People forced into exile often have to deal with the
dichotomy of “having culture and making culture” in the
face of what I call “cultural deprivation”, loss of
their former identity and the need to reassert oneself
in order to survive as an ethnic entity. Thus, one of
the important influences of diasporic media production
has been the idea that “if I do not have culture, I
produce culture” by imagining, making up, imitating or
borrowing. This may be partly what the Hmong video
makers have done, and their idea of Hmong culture has
been adopted or at least allowed to exist in celluloid
form by the many other Hmong who consume their products
not only in the countries of exile but also back in the
homeland.
Apart from the imposition
of subjective cultural translation by video producers,
there appears to be a strong streak of patriotism and
enforced nostalgia ingrained in many Hmong videos –
whether in documentaries, music DVDs or the movie
features. Many of the taped images, the Hmong
traditional music used (whether singing or
instrumental), the narratives in the documentaries, the
dialogues and story lines of the movies (war, separation
and homeland nostalgia, inability to fit into a new
country due to language and cultural differences) – most
of them appear to be imbued with the desire of the
producers to remind the captive viewers of the homeland,
to harp back on who and what the viewers are, and above
all to appeal for those living “comfortably” in exile
not to forget “the plight” of those they have left
behind in Laos, China, Vietnam or Thailand.
Many of the modern
songs, for example, urge Hmong listeners to unite, to
work hard, to progress in life and to love each other as
a community.
Sometimes, a whole cassette may contain these songs.
In some instances, the singer may lament about the new
lonely life in distant America and how much he misses
his family and friends who stay behind in the longed-for
homeland, as in the following excerpt from a Karaoke DVD
by Ntsaim Thoj (Jai Thao):
Living alone in this
country fills my heart with sorrow
Every day I wander in
tears from one place to another
I so very much miss the
people I used to know
With the
beloved homeland I have all left behind
It is as if the producers
deliberately try to create or prolong the nostalgia for
the homeland in the Hmong diasporic consciousness, or to
make it stronger for those already suffering from it.
It is not too far-fetched to suggest that some producers
even seem to try to force their own longings and
homesickness on the viewers by stressing emotive images
for their audience such as images of traditional Hmong
costumes in a song clip, of Hmong villages and farm life
in a documentary, of old places those in the diaspora
used to live in. At New Year functions, singers may be
asked to sing about whether those in the diaspora still
miss those in the homeland, making both the singer and
the audience cry – as in the following song by Lis Lwm
(Lee Lue) at the 1998 New Year celebration in Fresno,
California:
My mother and father, how
are you doing now?
My mother and father, how
are you living today?
Do you ever think of me,
the one you left behind
Do you think about me,
you know I am still alive?
Su Thao, as already
mentioned, has made many movies, documentaries and song
videos. His company has released tapes on the Hmong
involvement in the Indochina War, starting with the
French in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the end of the
Vietnam War in 1973.
He is not a historian and he never interviewed any of
the players in these wars, but what he did was to go the
places of battle, to film where the fighting took place
and to bring back colour images of the imagined history
in other people’s mind. In 1998, while he was making a
documentary on the Lao Government’s treatment of the
Hmong in Laos after 1975 without doing a lot of
research, he told Schein (2002, p. 235) that he hoped
his project would have the desired “emotional impact” on
viewers, for “if they don’t cry” after watching it
“they are not Hmong”. The excellent 2005 travelogue
video called “Moos Theeb Moos Laim” (Muong Theng Muong
Lai), previously mentioned, also pays visit to relics of
the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu while also
occasionally urging viewers and the Hmong the
narrator/producer met during his trip to Vietnam to love
each other, not to forget their shared Hmong identity
and destiny as a transnational minority.
There is thus an attempt
to use videos to arouse emotions, a love for one’s
ethnic group and for the past, a kind of forced
patriotism, controlled nostalgia for the “imagined”
homeland through the power of the “imaged” in the media
products consumed by those living in exile. This may
arise from a real sense of loss and the trauma of war,
the sudden forced departure from the homeland that Hmong
video producers want to share with their audience, to
bring out the desired emotional impact, and maybe to
appease the nostalgia this first generation of the Hmong
in the diaspora so acutely feel and continue to feel. By
this very appeal, producers may also be able to convince
Hmong consumers to part with their money for these video
products. This is not to say, of course, that producers
fabricate or falsify some video images in order to
fulfil their own interpretation of reality about Hmong
history and traditional culture in the homeland , so as
to captivate more consumer interest, more acceptance of
their commercialised media products by those living in
exile. Consumers longing for a homeland will perceive
their own reality in the images made by video
producers. What is in question is the fact that
producers often control the kind of images they select
for presentation – at the risk of falsifying this
reality so much longed for by the consumers.
Hmong videos, therefore,
can constitute the means by which producers exert their
dominant discourses and cultural interpretations on
viewers, as well as putting their homeland longings and
feelings into work in order to realize their artistic
dreams - and also earning some money on the side as one
of their primary motives. Making these videos is hard
work and the financial returns can be minimal, but the
satisfaction of having produced a work of art, having a
message to pass on and share can make it well worth the
trouble. For the consumers, videos help them understand
their past as interpreted by producers, or fulfill their
curiosity about places they long to see but are
separated from for political and economic reasons. The
media images feed, generate and increase the fantasies
consumers hold for these locations, for homeland objects
of subjective erotic desires and for sites of
“recuperated passions” for transnational imaginings, as
Schein (op.cit.) vividly puts it.
Those enterprising
individuals or companies who produce Hmong videos may be
primarily interested in making financial profits from
their media products. However, they may also be driven
by other factors such as: (1) attempts to satisfy their
own homeland longings and those of the video consumers;
(2) the wish to entertain and educate their fellow Hmong;
(3) the desire to consolidate and assert the identity or
existence of the Hmong in the global community; and (4)
the need to upgrade or add to Hmong culture through
preserving what is practicable and borrowing to add what
is desirable from other sources. In this way, the Hmong
culture has been reinvented, maintained, changed,
brought upto-date as it were, while such media products
also help in the expansion the Hmong cultural capital.
The current high demand
for these products have made them an integral part of
the diaspora, a part closely tied to an imagined
homeland, a vicarious journey that many viewers cannot
make in person but can share transnationally in
celluloid form from their living rooms. These ethnic
videos are thus used in place of reality for their
viewers, as substitute for the diasporic journey that is
often made in their minds – at least in so far as the
ageing first generation of Hmong exiles are concerned.
The diaspora from China has been more than a century and
many ties with that distant past were already severed,
but the memories of Laos are still fresh in the minds of
many Hmong. Many connections remain, so the nostalgia
is still very alive. With the second generation, their
future production and use of the media may be completely
different. Many young Hmong have already lost the
language they need to connect with other Hmong, and they
are not interested in the homeland so acutely longed for
by their parents. Their ties to the past and with
relatives in other countries will be virtually
non-existent and nostalgia will no longer be such an
issue.
Footnotes
I would like to thank Dr Louisa Schein, Associate
Professor in Anthropology at Rutgers University, USA,
and a pioneer in Hmong media research, for pointing
this out to me and also for her many other detailed
comments on this paper, which have greatly enhanced
the clarity of my arguments in this revised version.
See, among others:
“Hmong Tuam Tshoj” by Hmoob
Video Production 2000, Rochester, MN.
“Hmong in China 2000” by Nomad Productions, California.
For example:
“Mus Teb Chaws Nyab Laj” (Going to Vietnam, no date) by
Asia America Video Production.
“Hmoob Nyob Phab Mab Teb” (1996) by ST Universal Video,
Fresno, CA.
“China: Part 1 and 2” (1993) by ST
Universal Video Production, Fresno, CA.
“China Part 3: Nquam Toj Paj Tawg
Teb” (1993) by ST Universal Video Production, Fresno, CA
a. “Hmoob Suav Tsaa Hauv Toj Nyob
Suav Teb” (1995) by Hmoob Toj Saab Video Productions.
b. “Visit to Kunming, Yunnan” (2006) by Dr Yang Dao and
his American Hmong delegation.
c. “Moos Theeb Moos Laim” (2005) by 3 Hmong Motion
Pictures, St. Paul, MN
There are too many bull fight videos,
but two good general documentaries are “Phonsavanh and
Beyond” (2002) and “Hmoob Lub Yeej Thoj Nam Nyob Thai
Teb” (2001) – both made by Hmong ABC Publications, St.
Paul, MN. Also “New Year in Hav Rawm, Vietnam” (1993)
by ST Universal Video Production.
See
“Hmong General Vang Pao and the Secret War in Laos,
1960-1975: Part 1 and Part 2” (1997).
“Taug Txoj Lw Ntshav” (Follow the Blood Trail)” Part 1
(2005) and Part 2 (2006).
“Pleas of Freedom Fighters in Laos” (2000), “Hope
Lost” (2002), “Voices of Sorrow” (2005) and
“Starvation or Surrender” (2005).
See, for instance, “Kuv Leej Niam (My
Mother)” (2004) by Lee Moua, one of the better Hmong
director/producer based in St. Paul, Minnesota
See
for examples:
a. “Xav Muaj Tus Hlub” (no date) by Cib Xyooj and
produced by Hmoob Toj Siab Productions, Sacramento.
b. “Hlub Yog Ab Tsi? (What is Love?)” (no date) by
Hmong Original Entertainment, St. Paul, MN. This is a
collection of modern Hmong songs by American Hmong
singers dressed in the latest cowgirl outfits and with
names such as Valley, Stacy and Daisy and joined by a
guest singer from Thailand, Tshaus Hawj.
See “Hlub Kuv Haiv Hmoob (Loving My
Hmong People)”, 2005, DVD sung by Paj Muas and produced
by Apple Video Productions, California.
From a song entitled “Going Far Away
and Missing Those of You I Left Behind”, in Best 2004
Hmong Karaoke Collections produced by All Pro
Productions, Fresno, CA, USA. Songs with similar theme
can be found with nearly all Hmong singers, both modern
and traditional. The list is too long to enumerate.
From the video documentary “Hmoob Lub Neej Ib Vuag Dua”
(Hmong Life in Passing), produced by Suab Kub (Golden
Voice) Productions, St. Paul, MN, USA, 2001.
See “The Hmong of Vietnam” (1996)
by ST Universal Video Production, Fresno, CA.
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