The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (36 page)

The
txiv neeb
placed a bundle of spirit-money—Lia’s expired life-visa, which he would attempt to renew—on the shoulder of her polo shirt. A Lee cousin waved a live brown chicken in the air. It would be sacrificed for Lia’s
hu plig
, her soul-calling: a version of the same ceremony that had installed her soul in her body when she was an infant. After it was boiled, the chicken would be examined to find out if Lia’s soul had returned. Tight feet, firm eyes, an upcurled tongue, and a translucent cranium would be good auspices. Of these, the most important sign was the feet. A toe which did not match its mates—which, like a Hmong who failed to conform to the group ethic, did not fit gracefully into its community—would signal disharmony and disequilibrium. The cousin chanted to the chicken:

Lia was surrounded by her entire family and by more than twenty of her relatives. Their solicitude converged on her motionless form like sunlight focused by a magnifying glass until it burns. Dee Korda had once said, “Lia knew how to love and how to let people love her.” Whatever else she had lost, Lia still knew how to be loved.

Foua kissed Lia’s nose and said, “You look very happy!”

One of the cousin’s sons took the chicken to the kitchen, quickly sliced its neck, and shook the spurting blood into a plastic garbage bag.

Lia’s pig—a bigger, browner one—was carried into the living room, its trotters bound with twine. Because Lia was a girl, her pig was male; their soul-bond would be a kind of marriage. It lay, snorting and struggling, on its plastic tarp. The
txiv neeb
tied a cord around its neck, then wrapped it around the integral unit of Foua and Lia, linking Lia’s soul to her mother’s as well as to the pig’s. He walked the circuit from pig to Foua-and-Lia many times, shaking his rattle loudly so that Lia’s soul, wherever it was, would hear it. Then he beat his gong, again and again, to summon his familiar spirits. Finally, he tossed the polished halves of a water-buffalo horn on the floor to divine whether the spirits had heard him. When both horns landed flat side up, the answer was no; when one horn landed flat side up and one horn landed flat side down, the answer was ambiguous; finally, when both horns landed flat side down, he knew that his spirits had all heard their master’s call.

The pig had to be paid for the great gift it was about to give Lia. So the
txiv neeb
took a thick sheaf of spirit-money from the floor next to the altar and placed it next to the pig. Squatting low, he spoke quietly to the pig, explaining that it would be well rewarded for its work and that at the end of the year its soul would be set free from its obligations. He threw the divination horns again to see if the pig had accepted. When they told him yes, he thanked the pig, unwound the cord from the pig’s neck and from Foua-and-Lia, and brandished his saber to cut Lia’s sickness away. Then he took one of the cups from the altar, poured some water in his mouth, and spat it out, as Shee Yee had done, making a trilling noise.

Prrrrrr.

Prrrrrr.

“These are waters of gold and silver,” he said. “They will wash the sickness clean.”

Prrrrrr.

From the kitchen came the sound of a knife being sharpened.

Two men lifted the pig onto a pair of folding chairs. Three men held it down. A Lee relative stuck it in the neck. It bellowed and thrashed. Another relative held a stainless steel bowl to catch the blood, but a good deal spattered on the plastic tarp, the carpet, and our bare feet. The
txiv neeb
took the pig’s spirit-money and held it in the torrent. The blood would indelibly mark the money as belonging to the pig. Calling his familiar spirits, each by name, the
txiv neeb
touched Lia’s back with a finger bell he had moistened with the bloody spirit-money. She, too, would now be marked, and any
dabs
who wished her ill would be barred from touching her.

The
txiv neeb
washed away more sickness.

Prrrrrr.

Then he took the spirit-money from Lia’s shoulder and placed it on the flank of the sacrificed pig.

With the blood of the pig on her back, Lia could go anywhere in the world—even hundreds of miles away—and still be recognized as the child who needed healing. Since she no longer needed to be within sight of the
txiv neeb
, Foua carried her into the bedroom, laid her tenderly on the double bed, cushioned her legs with the blue blanket the family had brought from Laos, and turned on an electric fan. Lia’s gaze, whatever it saw, was focused upward. Her glossy hair floated in the breeze.

Now the
txiv neeb
was ready for the most dangerous part of his mission. Standing in front of the bench, he flipped part of his cloth headdress over his face, completely blocking his sight. When the veil was down, he was blind to this world but able to perceive the realm of the unseen. The veil—along with the incense, the mesmeric iteration of the gong and rattle, and the
txiv neeb
’s own repetitive movements—also helped him enter his ecstatic trance. In Laos he might have used opium, but it was not a necessity. When his familiar spirits were present, he could enter an altered state at will.

The
txiv neeb
sat on Shee Yee’s winged horse, crossing and uncrossing his feet on the carpet, doing a rhythmic tap dance as the rattle he held in his right hand and the finger bell he wore on his left hand echoed the sound of his horse’s harness bells. Meanwhile, his assistant, a young man who wore black aviator sunglasses, beat the gong to tell the spirits that the journey was beginning. After a little more than half an hour, the assistant placed his hands around the
txiv neeb
’s waist. In a single movement, without missing a beat, the
txiv neeb
rose to his feet and jumped backwards onto the bench. All his familiar spirits were in attendance. Without their aid, his body would have been too heavy for such a leap.

At this point, the
txiv neeb
was risking his life. During his trance, his own soul traveled far from his body, and if he fell before his soul returned, he would die. No one, not even the greatest
txiv neeb
in the world, could help him. Even if he did not fall, he might encounter
dabs
on his journey who wanted him dead, and it would take all his might and guile to fight them off.

The
txiv neeb
started to gallop. Sometimes he was on top of the horse, sometimes on the ground. Sometimes he
was
the horse, neighing and whinnying. He chanted loudly in a minor key, singing ancient incantations that were part Hmong and part Chinese. Even the Lees could not understand him, but they knew he was speaking to his familiar spirits and negotiating with
dabs
for the release of Lia’s captive soul.

The front door had been shut for some time, and the room was very hot and close. The air was thick with incense. The gong clanged. The rattle jangled. Someone poured water on the joints of the bench to cool them down. Now the horse was flying up the staircase to the sky. Now the door in the sky was opening. Now the
txiv neeb
was outside Nyong’s home. Now he was climbing the mountain to Shee Yee’s cave.

While the
txiv neeb
was on his journey, the cousin who had waved the chicken in the air—the soul-caller—opened the front door and stood facing the street. A small table at his feet held the sacrificed chicken, some rice, an egg, and a burning joss stick. In his right hand he held a pair of divination horns, and in his left hand he held a rattle. From time to time he tossed one or the other on the ground, judging the success of his work by the disposition of the horns or the lay of the metal disks.

he chanted to Lia’s soul.

Inside the apartment, the spirit-money was burned and sent to the realm of the unseen. The gong sounded. The
txiv neeb’s
horse galloped faster and faster. The soul-caller looked out toward East 12th Street and chanted:

According to a folktale collected by anthropologist Robert Cooper and his colleagues, the Hmong language once had a written form, and many important things about life and about the journey between death and rebirth were written down in a great book. Unfortunately, the book was eaten by cows and rats. After its disappearance, no text was equal to the task of representing a culture as rich as that of the Hmong, and the Hmong language was therefore spoken but not written.

So matters remained until the end of the nineteenth century. Since then, more than two dozen Hmong writing systems have been devised by missionaries and linguists, based on Chinese characters as well as on Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and Russian alphabets. There is also a fascinating eighty-one-symbol writing system called Pahawh Hmong—it looks a little like Sanskrit—that was developed in 1959 by Shong Lue Yang, a messianic Hmong leader who was not previously literate in any language. It is used by the Chao Fa, the resistance group that, in reduced numbers, is still waging a guerrilla war against the communist regime in Laos.

To represent the Hmong words in this book, I have used the writing system most generally accepted by both the Hmong people and by linguists: the Romanized Popular Alphabet. RPA, as it is usually called, was devised in 1953 in Laos by three missionary linguists, Linwood Barney, William Smalley, and Yves Bertrais. It represents all the sounds of the Hmong language with Roman letters, using no diacritical marks—a godsend for typists. RPA can be exasperating if you expect it to be phonetic. (For example,
txiv neeb—
a Hmong shaman—is, improbably enough, pronounced “tsi neng.” What happened to the
v
? What happened to the
b?
Where did the
ng
come from?) However, if you view it as a kind of code, it is remarkably ingenious and not nearly as difficult as it looks.

The Hmong language is monosyllabic (except for compound words) and, like many Asian languages, tonal. That is, a word’s meaning depends not only on its vowel and consonant sounds but on its pitch and on whether the voice rises, falls, or stays on the same level. The most unusual aspect of RPA is that these tones are represented by a word’s final consonant. (Words spoken with a mid-tone that neither rises nor falls are the exception: they are spelled without a final consonant.) Most Hmong words end in vowel sounds, so final consonants are always tonal markers and are never pronounced.

For example,
dab—
a spirit—is pronounced “da.” (The final
b
indicates the tone, in this case high and level. Because tones are hard to master without hearing them, I am ignoring them in my suggested pronunciations of the other words and phrases here.)
Paj ntaub—
literally, “flower cloth,” an intricately worked textile—is pronounced “pa ndow.”
Qaug dab peg—
literally, “the spirit catches you and you fall down,” the Hmong term for epilepsy—is pronounced “kow da pay.”

There are many other aspects of RPA pronunciation, most of them too complex to describe here. I will mention just three. One is that
x
sounds like
s
. Another is that a double vowel represents a nasal sound, like the
ng
in “sing.” (These two oddities, along with the fact that the final consonants aren’t sounded, explain why
txiv neeb
is pronounced “tsi neng.”) A third is that
w
is a vowel, pronounced something like a French
u
. For example, the unlikely-looking word
txwv—
a children’s game resembling jacks—is pronounced, roughly, “tsu.”

In order to make their own names reasonably easy for Americans to pronounce, the Hmong in the United States do not use RPA for proper nouns. Capitalized words are pronounced more or less the way they are spelled. For example, the word “Hmong,” which in RPA would be spelled
Hmooh
, is simply pronounced “Mong,” with an almost inaudible aspiration at the beginning of the word. “Lia Lee,” which in RPA would be spelled Liab Lis, is pronounced just as you would expect: “Leea Lee.”

There are two principal groups of Hmong living in Laos and Thailand, the White Hmong and the Blue Hmong. (White and blue are the colors favored for each group’s traditional skirts.) Their dialects are similar but vary slightly in pronunciation. I have used White Hmong spellings in this book.

I have quoted conversations with Hmong people in this book in the forms in which I heard them. That is to say, English-speaking Hmong are quoted verbatim, and non-English-speaking Hmong are quoted in the words my interpreter, May Ying Xiong, used as she translated their comments sentence by sentence. This has the paradoxical effect that highly educated Hmong such as Jonas Vangay and Blia Yao Moua, because of the grammatical idiosyncrasies of their English, seem to speak less “perfectly” than, say, Nao Kao Lee and Foua Yang, whose speech is filtered through an American-educated, and therefore grammatically conventional, interpreter. However, the alternatives—messing up May Ying’s translations or cleaning up the speech of English-speaking Hmong—seemed to me far worse. The first was out of the question, and the second would rob the reader of the rich texture of English underlain by Hmong, French, and other languages, as well as removing him or her one further step from my own experience as a listener.