"phong Koob" <whiteyebrow@hotmail.com> Thu, 22 Apr 1999 07:38:43 PDT I am a tiger. I come from the mountain ranges of Laos; Where opium poppies and dirt road villages dot the mountainside, Where people rise up to the sound of roosters, Where rooster crow because they are not locked up in multi-complex hen houses where day and night are control by a hand switch, Where grandma's and grandpa's watch the children because they are too old to work in the fields, Where children roast grasshoppers and beetles for snacks, Where men carry axes and rifles and theirs wives carry baskets and hoes, Where people fear the dark and strange growls in the night, Where men talk of tiger sightings and tiger attacks but of which, none has seen. I am a tiger. I come from the tragic mountains of Laos; Where old men, young men and boys rise to the sound of war, stirred by the callings of flamboyant leaders with their many wives and their U.S. dollars, Where 12 year old boys carried military rifles as tall as them, Where men fought secret wars with their northern neighbors for U.S. idealism, Where they died, unknown, unheard and unreported by the American press, Where indigenous farmers are taught good and evil by CIA personnel with their McCarthy propaganda. I am the tiger. I come from a land; Where the girls keep their skin white and marry men with wealth and power because they are tired of their fathers' rice fields, Where the adults are more afraid of ghosts than the children, Where the funeral rites last a whole week and the funeral drums can be heard throughout the whole village, Where mourning is encourage as a public display of sorrow and each family member take their turn at the coffin, Where the dead goes not to Heaven nor to Hell, Where shamans decorated their altars with pig chin bones, Incense and paper money, Where food and wine and clothing are given To accompany the dead on their journey to the ancestral land, Where the dead are dressed in their best clothes And their shoe are crisis-crossed So they can not come back to haunt the living, Where the children are not baptized And their parents do not teach them morality, Where homosexuality is unheard of And sin is unknown. I am the tiger. I use to live in a place Where men and women, young and old, giggle at the sight of long legged strangers, Where a dead man's wife is usually given to his unmarried brother, Where every answer to a young man's crisis is to get him a wife, Where young girls are consider "soft" and girls 18 years or older are consider "rough," Where marriages are usually forced or prearranged but the song verses are full of love and romance, Where men eat before the women and children at ceremonial gatherings, Where men get out their home made rice wine and drink long into the night, Where women sat around in circles and chatter about their sons and daughters, Where children play hide and seek in the dirt streets in their worn out clothes, Where men tell hunting stories to each other with each successive story more spectacular than the previous, Where the old men tell of their encounters with goblins and tigers and ghosts as if it were their passage rite, Where a woman's right is to scorn her husband for drinking too much, Where people think the world is flat and that the rainbow is a dragon rising up to drink water during rain showers, Where the people think Americans are cannibals and yet consider them semi-divine because of their white skin. I am a Hmong tiger. I've live through the tragic war in Laos; Where people caught up in a war beyond them Sided with the idealistic and wealthy Americans and French countries whose politicians determine their policies through polls and 30 second television ads, Where souls can not reincarnate because there are no wombs to receive them, Where dead bodies lay untouched in some deep ravine Where even flies do not bother with them because there are too many to choose from, Where mothers and fathers put their beloved children on top of their bags and carry them on their backs, Where people are shot like duck while crossing the Mekong river, Where once free independent people are now forced to lived in refugees camps with nothing to do but wait for their daily rations from the Red Cross and other western humanitarian agencies, Where hundreds of thousands of people fled the war torn mountains of Laos only to end up the black ghettos of Detroit. I am a Hmong Tiger. And I have come a long way. Now I live in a country; Where refugee teenagers think they are Americans but all they know are the public housing ghettos, the American slag of Ebonics and public assistance, Where the poor live in small communities of reddish-brown houses in the side of town where the streets are filled with pot holes as if they are blown up by land mines or bombs, Where the rich live in luxurious communities with court streets that curve and blocks that do not intersect, Where refugee parents that have succeeded in the American dream do not speak to their children in their native tongue, Where the rich Americanized refugees are embarrassed to associate with their less successful fellow countrymen, Where the children of the rich have a flawless American voice but still have flat noses and yellow skin, Where the parents pay their children to do the dishes because they saw it done by their American sponsors, Where the teenagers wear wide leg jeans and bandanas on their heads and talk with hands and body jesters like Rap artists in music videos with big and irritable egos, whose whole livelihood depends on being cool and outrageous, Where teenagers roam about in packs and take collections outside Amoco gas stations to buy cigarettes and beers, dressed in self-fashion uniforms complete with hand signals and all like the small gorilla units their fathers were in back in the days of the war in Laos. I am thee Hmong Tiger. I came from the tragic mountains of Laos. I now live in America; Where parents are taught to consider their children as their best friends, Where children play solider in the living room on their nitendos instead of the backyard or near by woods, Where grandma's and grandpa's are sent to nursing homes because they are too old to care for themselves, Where they do not make food offering to the death on the first of every year or on any days at all because the dead have plenty in the kingdom of God, Where children are expected to leave home when they turn 18, Where high power celebrities raise thousands of dollars for environmental and idealistic causes on some distant part of the world while beggars with signs of "Will Work For Food" stand outside the convention halls, Where people still go hungry every night searching through dumpster and sleeping on park benches as if they were in Ethiopia or some poor third world country, while ADM praise itself for being a supermarket to the world, Where the people battle over immaterial social issues like abortions and euthanasia and the death penalty and complicate them with biblical theology and moral philosophies, Where ethics and morality is a complete disciplines in itself but the people are not any more moral than the bush men of Africa. I am thee Hmong Tiger, Radiant and yellow, I use to lay in some quiet spot in the jungles of Laos and wait for some fresh meat to come by, I would kill it and take it home to my family; for my children, my wife, my mother and my father. Such were the times on the mountains of Laos. -koobphong lee