Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom - The Quest for Legitimization in French Indochina, 1850–1960 Mai Na M. Lee

Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom 

The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960
Mai Na M. Lee

New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies
Alfred W. McCoy, R. Anderson Sutton, and Thongchai Winichakul, Series Editors

A pioneering, landmark history of the Hmong people and their complex relations with Southeast Asian states and the French in the colonial era

Countering notions that Hmong history begins and ends with the “Secret War” in Laos of the 1960's and 1970's, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom reveals how the Hmong experience of modernity is grounded in their sense of their own ancient past, when this now-stateless people had their own king and kingdom, and illuminates their political choices over the course of a century in a highly contested region of Asia.

In China, Vietnam, and Laos, the Hmong continuously negotiated with these states and with the French to maintain political autonomy in a world of shifting boundaries, emerging nation-states, and contentious nationalist movements and ideologies. Often divided by clan rivalries, the Hmong placed their hope in finding a leader who could unify them and recover their sovereignty. In a compelling analysis of Hmong society and leadership throughout the French colonial period, Mai Na M. Lee identifies two kinds of leaders—political brokers who allied strategically with Southeast Asian governments and with the French, and messianic resistance leaders who claimed the Mandate of Heaven. The continuous rise and fall of such leaders led to cycles of collaboration and rebellion. After World War II, the powerful Hmong Ly clan and their allies sided with the French and the new monarchy in Laos, but the rival Hmong Lo clan and their supporters allied with Communist coalitions.

Lee argues that the leadership struggles between Hmong clans destabilized French rule and hastened its demise. Martialing an impressive array of oral interviews conducted in the United States, France, and Southeast Asia, augmented with French archival documents, she demonstrates how, at the margins of empire, minorities such as the Hmong sway the direction of history.

Mai Na M. Lee is an associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She was born in Laos and came to the United States when she was a teenager. She was the first Hmong in the United States to earn a PhD in history.

Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850- 1960, by Mai Na M. Lee. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. 430 pages.

Reviewed by Nengher N. Vang 

Hmong Studies Journal - Volume 16, 10 pages 

Abstract 

This article provides a book review of Mai Na M. Lee’s Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960. Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom. It highlights the contribution of the book to the historiography of the Hmong and provides a critical assessment of the dichotomous analytical framework that Lee uses to analyze the rivalry between Hmong messianic leaders and Hmong political brokers and the competition between the Ly and Lo clans for paramountcy in French Indochina. 

Keywords: Hmong, Laos, French Indochina, Messianism 

Most studies on the Hmong—from the earliest studies of the Hmong in Southeast Asia by Christian missionaries to studies in the 1980s and the 1990s focusing on Hmong refugees’ resettlement and struggle with social and economic adaptation in America to the more critical race studies of Hmong Americans in the 2000s—are still written by non-Hmong scholars who lack proficiency in the Hmong language. In the last decade, however, a growing number of Hmong scholars have begun to research and write about their own people, culture, and history. “It is essential,” wrote Hmong American writer Mai Neng Moua in her introduction to Bamboo Among the Oaks, 1 “for the Hmong and other communities of color to express themselves—to write our stories in our own voices and to create our own images of ourselves. When we do not, others write our stories for us, and we are in danger of accepting the images others have painted of us” (7). Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom is an example of attempts by a growing number of Hmong scholars—that is, scholars of Hmong ancestry—to answer Moua’s call to research and write their own stories or histories for themselves. Written by historian Mai Na M. Lee, an associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom is a welcome addition to the still limited but growing number of studies on the Hmong by Hmong scholars.

 Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom explores the Hmong aspirations and their struggle for political recognition or legitimacy in French Indochina from 1850-1960. It interrogates why the Hmong, a people who has long aspired for sovereignty, ultimately settled for autonomy and ended up allying themselves with different powers and states under French colonial rule in Indochina. Lee argues that “while the Hmong yearn for independence, the legitimacy of their leaders has rested largely on outside patronage. The desire to restore sovereignty is, therefore, the impetus behind the attraction, as well as the submission,” to the different powers and states. “The lack of clan consensus, linguistic and cultural group disparities, and geographic divisions,” however, prevented the Hmong from realizing their most cherished dream---the dream of sovereignty—and forming political unity under a king or ruler. There exists, therefore, no Hmong king in French Indochina but “only clan leaders who vie for outside legitimation.” The competition among the Hmong for outside legitimation further resulted in two types of chiefs: “the prophet or messianic leader who rejects the state and proclaims the Mandate of Heaven; and the secular political broker who, with state backing, achieves paramountcy as the supreme chief or ethnic representatives of the Hmong” (12).

To buttress her arguments, Lee divides the book into two main parts. The two chapters (Chapters 2 & 3) of Part I focus on the messianic leaders, such as Xiong Tai, Xiong Mi Chang and Vue Pa Chay, who rejected the French colonial state and claimed legitimacy instead by proclaiming the Mandate of Heaven. Xiong Tai and other Hmong prophets are also mentioned, but Mi Chang and Pa Chay are the two principal messianic leaders that Lee analyzes in this work. The secular political brokers, such as Kaitong Lo Blia Yao, Lo Fay Dang, Ly Foung, and Touby Lyfoung, are the subject of investigation in the five chapters (Chapters 4-8) that form Part II of the book. It is in this second part that Lee documents at length the rise and fall of Blia Yao, the rise of Ly Foung, and especially the intense rivalry between Fay Dang and Touby during the Japanese occupation of Indochina and the First Indochina War.

Personally, however, I find the introduction and the first chapter most remarkable. It is in the first half of the first chapter that Lee lays out the research questions, the arguments, structure and scholarly contribution of the book and in the latter half that Lee articulates Hmong’s notions of “kingdom,” masculinity, clan relations, and ethnic identity to illustrate their aspiration for a king, the Hmong view of leadership, and Hmong clans as barriers to political unity. In Chapter 1, Lee discusses the influence of Chinese civilization on the Hmong, the Mandate of Heaven as a Hmong political ideology, the migration and earliest settlements of the Hmong in Laos, and the Hmong’s rebellions and alliances with the various ethnic groups, including the Tai, the Phuan, the Lao, Khmu, and the Vietnamese, within the political landscape of nineteenth century mainland Southeast Asia. In constructing the complicated history of the Hmong’s alliances with and rebellions against the various powers in China and Southeast Asia before the arrival of the French in the mid-nineteenth century, Lee also makes efforts to dispel myths held by certain Hmong individuals to satisfy their desire for Hmong kings in Hmong history and legitimize their ongoing quest and struggle for a Hmong kingdom or homeland. For example, Lee writes: “In the imaginations of some Hmong belonging to the Congress of World Hmong People, a political association, Vaj Ncuab Laug has been transformed into a Hmong king. One elderly Hmong man of the association had claimed on the Minnesota Hmong Radio that Vaj Ncuab Laug, of the Vang clan, was one of the first two Hmong kings who ruled over the kingdom of Xieng Khouang. The other was Yaj Tseem Ceeb of the Yang clan” (77). Vaj Ncuab Laug was, however, not a Hmong king but the legendary Phuan ruler of Muang Phuan (Xieng Khouang) named Noi, the great-grandfather of Chao Saykham to whom Touby Lyfoung ceded the administrative control of Xieng Khouang in 1946 after the French designated it as an autonomous Hmong zone.

The rich details and new interpretations that Lee brings to previously documented events and Lee’s documentation of lesser known but crucially important historical figures like Xiong Mi Chang and Lo Shong Ger (Blia Yao’s nephew) mark the essential contribution of Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom to the historiography of the Hmong. While Pa Chay has been widely documented, Lee’s analysis is the first attempt to understand Pa Chay’s rebellion from an indigenous or Hmong perspective. Lee concurs with the previous interpretation that Pa Chay’s rebellion was a political and economic movement—a movement that arose to confront the exploitation of the Hmong by the French colonial state and its representatives—but she adds that, for the Hmong, the rebellion was also a spiritual and moral movement. Although economic exploitation drove the movement, it did not dominate the narrative dictated by Yaj Txooj Tsawb to Father Yves Betrais and transcribed and published by Betrais in 1972 from which Lee derives the Hmong perspective of Pa Chay’s war from 1918 to 1921.

Lee may also be the first scholar to do an in-depth study of Mi Chang’s rebellion in Ha Giang, Vietnam, from 1910 to 1912. Using interrogation records kept by the French in Paris, Lee recounts in detail how Mi Chang received his call to serve the Mandate of Heaven, formed his movement, attracted several hundred followers, and gained legitimacy by possession of various skills and abilities, including miraculous healing powers and an ability to speak multiple languages and foretell future events. Mi Chang’s downfall, capture, interrogation, and imprisonment on a small island on the coast of Vietnam are also documented. More importantly, Lee is the first to conceptualize the Chinese concept of “Mandate of Heaven” as a Hmong political ideology and employ it to explain the rise and fall of both Mi Chang’s and Pa Chay’s rebellions. Both Mi Chang and Pa Chay, according to Lee, claimed legitimacy through the Mandate of Heaven, and both of their rebellions fell apart after they lost the Mandate of Heaven through not their own moral failure but the sins committed by their followers. In both cases, it was the violation of the moral dictates of Heaven by their followers through the wreaking of havoc and devastation on the populace, animals, and villages that precipitated the demise of both movements.

 Similarly, Lee deserves much praises for her ability to use the oral history interviews that she has conducted to not only add details to but also weave a complicated narrative of the rise and fall of Kaitong Lo Blia Yao, the rise of Blia Yao’s secretary, Ly Foung, and especially the acrimonious competition between Blia Yao’s son, Lo Fay Dang, and Ly Foung’s son, Touby Lyfoung, for paramountcy from the Japanese occupation of Indochina during World War II to the Secret War in Laos in the 1960s. For instance, according to historian Alfred McCoy, Lee’s advisor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history, Blia Yao, “in a rage,” fired Ly Foung and “severed all ties with the Ly clan” immediately after the tragic death of Blia Yao’s daughter and Touby’s mother, Mai Lo. Lee, however, argues that Ly Foung continued to work with Blia Yao, Mai’s father, until 1926, five years after Mai’s death. Ly Foung “could not easily relinquish the financial opportunities offered by his position,” Lee explains. “So Ly Foung went to Blia Yao’s house as usual, returning to his home in De Mua Tha only sporadically. He also continued to oversee the construction of CR7 on Blia Yao’s behalf, registering and paying workers on a regular basis. Each year he accompanied Blia Yao to Xieng Khouang as before to deliver the taxes” (219-220). Ly Foung finally resigned only after Blia Yao again blocked Ly Foung’s nomination to be a tasseng as he did in 1921, passed the medal intended for Ly Foung to his half-brother, Tsong Nou, and publically pronounced Tsong Tou, Blia Yao’s son, as his replacement at a baci ceremony following the completion of CR7 in 1925 (221).

The overemphasis on the internal rivalry between Hmong leaders and the dichotomous framework that Lee employs to depict Hmong life in French Indochina, however, marks a shortcoming of Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom. First, there is the dichotomy of the messianic leaders versus the secular political brokers, and in their rivalry, the political brokers always emerged triumphant over the messianic leaders because they had the backing of the state. Such a state-centric narrative, unfortunately, works to reify, rather than critique, the supremacy of the state as well as the French colonizers’ reports of Hmong messianic leaders like Mi Chang and Pa Chay as “mad men” and their anti-colonial struggles as dangerous and illegitimate just because they derived their legitimacy from a source other than the French empire. Moreover, the rational/irrational dichotomy fails to recognize that the relationship between the prophets and the political brokers was more complementary than Lee has considered. To gain legitimacy, they needed each other as much as they were competitors to each other. Without French colonialism and Blia Yao’s complicity in the exploitation of the Hmong as an instrument of the French, there would be no need for a Pa Chay or the need to claim legitimacy through the Mandate of Heaven by Pa Chay, Mi Chang, or anyone else. Conversely, without a Pa Chay to challenge the French colonizers’ mandate to rule over the Hmong and claim the right of the Hmong to be a sovereign people, Blia Yao could not have gained the paramountcy and amassed the riches that he did. As Lee demonstrates, although Blia Yao had inherited some of his wealth from his father, Lo Pa Tsi, he acquired a substantial portion of his riches “from money skimmed from the budget for the construction of CR7…[and] the indemnity exacted from rebels who joined Shong Ger in 1920” (178). In the end, because of the need provided by Pa Chay and Shong Ger for a Hmong political broker to the French, Blia Yao was able to emerge “victorious and wealthier than ever after Pa Chay’s rebellion” (191).

Equally a concern is the almost theatrical characterization of the Lo clan versus the Ly clan as represented by Lo Fay Dang and Touby Lyfoung, respectively. Just as there were winners and losers in the rivalry between the political brokers and the messianic leaders, there were also good guys and bad guys in the competition for paramountcy between the Lo and Ly clans. For Lee, the hero of the rivalry was undoubtedly Touby while the villain was Fay Dang. Whatever Touby was and did, Fay Dang was and did the opposite. Touby and his brothers “studied diligently,” but neither Fay Dang nor any of his brothers ever “obtained degrees of completion from the primary school” (232-233). While the Lyfoung brothers studied, Fay Day and his brothers preferred gambling and “chasing birds” (234). Despite prejudice and falling victim to beriberi disease, Touby, along with his younger brother, Tougeu, embarked on further study in Vietnam. “The brothers,” Lee writes, “left as boys; they returned as leading Hmong figures” (235). Meanwhile, the Lo brothers “squabbled over the thousands of cows, hundreds of fowl, and numerous caches of silver and gold” from their father’s estate (227) and, “[perhaps] jealous that Tsong Tou had inherited their father’s prestigious title, Fay Dang and Nhia Vu, the two brothers who had some education, did not help Tsong Tou administer the canton either” (237). As a consequence, Tsong Tou was ultimately forced to resign from his position, and by the time Fay Dang “awakened to the fact that his family had lost” the highly coveted and lucrative position to the Ly family, “it was too late.” The French had already handed over the position to Ly Foung, exacerbating the animosity that Fay Dang had for the Ly family. 

 As depicted by Lee, the gambling-addicted, jealous, and uneducated Fay Day was responsible for perpetuating the feud between the two clans from World War II to the Secret War in Laos in the 1960s. Following the loss of Tsong Tou’s position to the Ly family, Fay Dang took step after step to undermine Ly Foung and later his son, Touby. In an effort to retain his father’s position, Fay Dang, bypassing the French, asked Prince Phetsarath to intervene by presenting the Lao prince with a highly prized rhinoceros horn in 1936 (242-245). When that effort failed, Fay Dang took the opportunity of the French’s historic visit to Xieng Khouang in 1938 to once again undermine Ly Foung by constructing his own gate west of Nong Het to force the French to use both his gate and the gate that Ly Foung had constructed after being summoned by the French (245-6). In addition, just as Blia Yao once attempted to undermine Ly Foung by alleging to French authorities that Ly Foung was the mastermind behind Pa Chay and Shong Ger’s rebellion, the murder of Lia Nao Vang in 1921, and conspiring to “overthrow the newly appointed Tasseng Kue Joua Kao in order to take over the subdistrict of Phak Boun” (220-221), Fay Dang also furnished his own allegations to the Japanese against Touby. “Full of hatred for the French, who had cast his family aside, and perhaps jealous that Touby had been left with many possessions,” Lee states, “he [Fay Day] reported to the local Japanese administrator that Touby was planning a rebellion” (259). Consequently, Touby was detained and interrogated at Nong Het for three days.

Furthermore, according to Lee, Fay Dang was responsible—albeit indirectly—for the egregious sexual assault on the women of the Ly clan in Nong Khiaw. Fay Dang’s obsession with undermining Touby drove him to send Japanese soldiers to hunt down Touby and arrest his wife and children after Touby went into hiding in the jungle following his release. The Japanese soldiers that Fay Dang sent attacked and raped many women—young, old, maiden, daughters-inlaw—of the Ly clan in Nong Khiaw while they were working in the fields. The Japanese also took Ly Mao Nao, a young girl of eleven, to Nong Het to serve as a comfort woman. “For decades,” Lee writes, “the Ly men, out of shame and fear of being stigmatized, kept what had happened to their women a secret.” As if the rape was not sinister enough, Fay Dang went on to further exhort money from the Lys by exploiting their humiliation and fear. “Just two and a half decades earlier,” Lee continues, “Blia Yao had acquired a massive fortune extorting bribes from people who had sympathized with Vue Pa Chay and joined in the anti-French struggle. Now Fay Day found it convenient to employ his father’s practices against the Ly clan.” In the end, in exchange for Fay Dang’s promise to not harass them anymore, the Lys “grudgingly paid off the extortion” (265).