Laotian Quotes

July 23, 1962: The United States joins thirteen other nations at Geneva in signing the “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos.” CIA and Pentagon opponents regard Kennedy’s negotiation of the Laotian agreement as surrender to the Communists. They undermine it by supporting General Phoumi’s violations of the cease-fire.

Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.

In September 1973, a former government official in Laos, Jerome Doolittle, wrote in the New York Times: The Pentagon's most recent lies about bombing Cambodia bring back a question that often occurred to me when I was press attache at the American Embassy in Vietnam, Laos. Why did we bother to lie? When I first arrived in Laos, I was instructed to answer all press questions about our massive and merciless bombing campaign in that tiny country with: "At the request of the Royal Laotian Government, The United States is conducting unarmed reconnaissance flights accompanied by armed escorts who have the right to return if fired upon." This was a lie. Every reporter to whom I told knew it was a lie. Hanoi knew it was a lie. The International Control Commission knew it was a lie. . . . After all , the lies did serve to keep something from somebody, and the somebody was us.

While in 2013 Asian Americans had the highest college graduation rate of any racial group in America by far with 53 percent, as with overall numbers of economic success, this number hides a wide disparity based on country of origin: 46 percent of second-generation Cambodian and Laotian Americans have only a high school degree or less, compared to only 6 percent of second-generation Chinese Americans.

Filipino Americans, on average, have a low poverty rate of 6.7 percent—more than 3 percentage points lower than white Americans. But Cambodian, Laotian, Pakistani, and Thai Americans have a poverty rate of around 18 percent. Bangladeshi and Hmong Americans have poverty rates between 26 and 28 percent, matching or surpassing that of blacks and Hispanic Americans.1 Pacific Islanders have the highest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the US.2

When you add in the US immigration processes encouraging a “brain drain” of elites from countries like China and India, the vast majority of the “academic success” we see when we think of Asian Americans is only available to wealthy, highly skilled immigrants who already have a high level of education, and their offspring—while only 17 percent of Pacific Islanders, 14 percent of Cambodian Americans, and 13 percent of Laotian and Hmong Americans have four-year college degrees,4 compared to 22 percent of black Americans and 15 percent of Hispanic Americans.5 The stereotype that Asian Americans naturally excel at math and science also discourages Asian American students from pursuing careers in the arts and humanities and keeps those who do pursue those careers from being taken seriously in their fields. A 2009 census report showed that under 15 percent of Asian American degree holders majored in the arts and humanities, less than any other racial or ethnic group in America.6

When you think about it, there's a whole novel behind the voice of a Haitian in Montreal, a German in Paris, a Laotian in Chicago...

whose monicker or hoodlum nickname was Holyjoe because he had read the entire Bible and could even quote parts of it. Besides, he looked right and sounded right and had once taken a prison course in psychology, and for three years on the legit had sold vacuum cleaners.” Well, I went on from there, and by the time I’d given them the whole thing, chapter and verse in clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades, they were charged up like cadmium-nickel batteries and went out into the town, among their fellow citizens, spreading the word; from door to door, on the phone, in one ear and out another mouth, it spread like the most-recently-invented Cambodian or Laotian flu, and in half an hour I was out there with them—and we were charging down the street.

The loans for new farms around Waldron were parceled out by small banks with local branches, like Chambers Bank of Danville, Arkansas, or Regions Bank in Alabama. These banks became a loan mill, churning out hundreds of loans to Laotian immigrants so they could overhaul existing farms or build new ones. The paperwork for these loans reflected the same sort of hazy math and willful blindness that characterized the wave of subprime mortgages being extended from Las Vegas to Florida. To get a loan from Chambers or Regions Bank, farmers had to submit a Farm and Home Plan that justified the amount of money they would borrow. The plan was meant to show how much money the farmers could reasonably expect to earn from their operation, balanced against the amount of income they would need to keep the farm running and support their family. If earnings from the farm were enough to support the family and cover expenses, then the loan could be approved. A review of the Farm and Home Plans submitted by a single loan officer in Arkansas named Larry Skeets reveals the sort of rigor that went into the process.7 The paperwork for Tria and Mai Xiong, for example, shows that the couple and their son planned to spend about $20,000 a year for their living expenses. That budget made their loan application look pretty feasible, leaving the family a total annual income of about $61,000 a year after expenses. Curiously, it appears that farmers Lue Her and Mai Yang also budgeted $20,000 a year in living expenses, according to loan documents, even though it was just the two of them, with no children. Strikingly, a farmer named Tou Lee also budgeted $20,000 a year in living expenses. So did Lao. All these families decided to budget their living expenses at $20,000, which was luckily just the right amount to make their farms appear profitable on paper.

Former slaves and natives. Eskimos and Hiroshima people, Amazonian Indians and Chiapas Indians and Chilean Indians and American Indians and Indian Indians. Australian aborigines, Guatemalans and Colombians and Brazilians and Argentineans, Nigerians, Burmese, Angolans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Afghans, Cambodians, Rwan-dans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Liberians, Borneoans, Papua New Guineans, South Africans, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, Palestinians, French Guyanese, Dutch Guyanese, Surinamese, Sierra Leonese, Malagasys, Senegalese, Maldivians, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Kenyans, Panamanians, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, Costa Ricans, Congoans, Mauritanians, Marshall Islanders, Tahitians, Gabonese, Beninese, Malians, Jamaicans, Botswanans, Burundians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Uruguayans, Nicaraguans, Ugandans, Ivory Coastians, Zambians, Guinea-Bissauans, Cameroonians, Laotians, Zaireans coming at you screaming colonialism, screaming slavery, screaming mining companies screaming banana companies oil companies screaming CIA spy among the missionaries screaming it was Kissinger who killed their father and why don’t you forgive third-world debt; Lumumba, they shouted, and Allende; on the other side, Pinochet, they said, Mobutu; contaminated milk from Nestle, they said; Agent Orange; dirty dealings by Xerox. World Bank, UN, IMF, everything run by white people. Every day in the papers another thing! Nestle and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills? Enough was enough. Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.

Jares" or The Plain of Jars. We still refer to it by the French acronym as the "PDJ." Only two roads, an east-west dirt road and another north-south unpaved track traverse the PDJ. The roads meet and cross near the geographic center. There are no substantial villages or towns on the PDJ, just a few scattered hamlets along with the encampments of competing armies and a bumpy dirt airstrip or two. The hills surrounding the plain are controlled for the most part by Hmong tribesmen. The Hmong are ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and temperamentally distinct from the lowland Laotians. The Hmong are fiercely independent, fiercely proud, and just plain fierce. They are on our side in the war, which is a good thing for us if not for them. The Hmong have little use for their Laotian countrymen and have even less tolerance for Vietnamese people, from either the North or the South.

The Vietnam Memorial, which bears 58,000 names, is 8,000 square meters. A similar memorial for the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian dead would require a 413,793 square meter wall — over 2.5 times the size of the University of Phoenix football stadium where this year’s Superbowl was held.

The United States became engaged in hostilities with North Vietnam on November 1, 1955, when President Eisenhower deployed the Military Assistance Advisory Group as advisors to train the army of South Vietnam, better known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Things escalated in 1960, which was about the same time that Cuba established diplomatic relations with Vietnam, the communist country at war with the United States. In May of 1961 President Kennedy sent 400 United States Army Special Forces personnel to South Vietnam for the purpose of training South Vietnamese troops. By November of 1963 when he was killed, President Kennedy had increased the number of military personnel from the original 400 to 900 troops for training purposes. Direct U.S. intervention started with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August of 1964. As things heated up, the number of American troops started including combat units and escalated to 16,000 troops, just before Kennedy’s death. During the early hours of April 30, 1975, the fighting ended abruptly, as South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh delivered an unconditional surrender to the Communists. Between 195,000 to 430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war and 50,000 to 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost somewhere between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war. The Communist military forces lost approximately 444,000 men. It is estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died and another 60,000 Laotians died during this war. In all 58,220 U.S. service members were killed. The last two American servicemen to die in Vietnam were killed during the evacuation of Saigon, when their helicopter crashed. After the United States pulled out of South Vietnam, the two sections of the country came together under Communist rule. Vietnam has since become Cuba’s largest trading partner next to China, and the United States has also returned to a normalized trade relationship with Vietnam.

My brothers say that I was born at the beginning of 1958, in the midst of the Laotian Civil War. In the bigger cities of Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Vientiane there were battles and debates between members of the Royal Lao Government and coalition groups of Communist revolutionaries. On the world stage, Laos had become a faraway place for the superpowers of the Cold War to test their might against each other. But on the high mountains of Phou Bia, in the province of Xieng Khuoang, in the village of Phou Khao where I was born, the Hmong continued the life we knew.

The grass around the village looked like it had been scorched by boiling water. The old people talked about airplanes that sprinkled bad rain. People were kept in the village-camp for months and then the Laotian and Vietnamese airplanes would pass overhead and many of the people would die afterwards. There was no need for guns. My mother, grandmother, and aunts did not know it, but chemical warfare was being used in the killing of the Hmong. It would be years later before U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig would state that poisonous gas had been used in Southeast Asia and the State Department could identify Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan as three places where Soviet-supervised chemical warfare attacks had taken place. The women just became afraid of the water and the grass.

It doesn’t matter that Japan once colonized Korea and parts of China and invaded the Philippines during World War II. It doesn’t matter that there’s been a long, bloody territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir or that Laotians have been systematically genociding the Hmong people since the Vietnam War. Whatever power struggle your nation had with other Asian nations—most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the Cold War—is steamrolled flat by Americans who don’t know the difference.

roughly translated 2 from the Hmong language of the Laotian mountain people, which observes: “If I know it then I can hunt it; if I do not know it then it can hunt me.

Asian Americans have been stereotyped as highly successful, suggesting that the American Dream is their reality (perhaps more so than that of other racial minorities), though the uncomfortable truth is that there are wide economic disparities among Asian Americans. Some ethnic groups, such as the Japanese, Chinese, and Indians, have been described as “outwhiting the whites” in terms of economic success, while some Southeast Asian American groups who immigrated to the United States as refugees with few resources (such as Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians) are trapped in intergenerational poverty; in fact, some of these ethnic groups lag well behind Latinx and African Americans in terms of socioeconomic status.