14. Help from People
The team decided that they should not take the regular path to the village but should instead go off into the forest to reach it [because they were fearful of being ambushed on tbe way by the Khua, who would blame the killing on the Hmong villagers]. While walking up to a hilltop in the forest, a bird flew and landed right in front of Chia Koua, who told the bird, "If we would meet bad people on going into the village, don't flyaway, but let me catch you. If we would meet only good people, please flyaway so that I will know." The bird then flew off at once.
Encounter with Hmong villagers
Chia Koua told everyone that they were going to meet some people, so he should go first. After they had walked on for a while, they heard the sound of people talking. They listened carefully and recognized that the language was Hmong. Chia Koua [alone] then cautiously approached the people, [who turned out to be] a group of Hmong girls wearing clothes made of hemp [an indication of poverty]. He asked the girls, "Sisters, are you digging for tubers?" [an indication of insufficient food in the village]. The girls were startled when they saw Chia Koua, but he said to them: "We are Hmong too. Since we have come, don't bother to dig for tubers any more. We will give you some money to go and buy food [in another village]. Are there any Hmong men along with you?" "Yes,' there are some," replied one of the girls. She then led Chia Koua and his soldiers to meet the Hmong men. Chia Koua told the men, "We are Hmong from Long Cheng, coming to see how miserable Hmong life is here." Chia Koua then passed out some money to them, telling them to use it to buy food for themselves rather than digging for tubers. He asked them to take the team to the leaders of the village.
As they reached the outskirts of the village they saw Vietnamese soldiers with guns walking back and forth, so the Hmong told Chia Koua and his team to hide while they went to confer with the village chief first, before coming back to get them. The Hmong villagers then went and told the village chief about the newly-arrived group. A few minutes later the chief came and led them off to hide on a jungle hilltop [away from where soldiers might pass by chance], where the team rested for three days and three nights. They gave money to the Hmong villagers to buy meat and rice supplies for them.
The Hmong also told them about Chong Lor, formerly a soldier under the French, who lived in hiding with them because the Vietnamese were seeking to arrest him. He had no wife or children. Chia Koua asked the Hmong villagers to bring Chong to him, and after the team members met him Chong happily joined them. He knew the trails well and led them directly towards Na Hai.
Crossing the river
They arrived at the Nam Ou River, which was so wide they could not cross it. Chong Lor said to team, "There is a Lao village nearby, where I will steal a canoe [Lao-style dugout hollowed from a single log] darkness, so we can cross the river." After a while Chong came back with a canoe and they divided up into three groups to avoid swamping it. Chong Lor paddled the first load to the other bank of the river, and came back for the second load which included Chia Koua. Tou Lee was in the third load. When [the second load] reached the middle of the river it was overtaken by two other boats' paddled by Lao communist soldiers. These two boats quickly came alongside them, the one upstream, the other moving ahead of them. The Lao communist soldiers were getting ready to fire on them until they saw the two groups of Chia Koua's other soldiers aiming guns at them from both banks of the river. Since the Lao were in the water, too, they no longer dared shoot at Chia Koua's boat. Instead, their canoe was allowed to cross the river freely and Chong Lor was allowed to return safely to pick up the last load without intervention. [The Lao soldiers sat quietly in their canoes, watching but making no attempt to interfere.] The Lao communist soldiers did send a message to the Hmong communists in the village of Hang Yu, to inform them of some passing spies [as it turned out later].
The Hmong begin to believe
Time went by, and Chia Koua arrived with his team at a Hmong village of about one hundred families. Chong Lor and the four people Chia Koua had accompanied there all had some acquaintances in that village, so Chia Koua directed Chong Lor, Chon Vang, and Wang Yi Chang [the latter two men from Na Hai Village] to go into the village and make contact with the leaders while the rest of the team waited, hiding in the forest outside.
The Hmong leaders came out to talk to them. Once they had met one another and Chia Koua saw that only Hmong people came, he said to them, "We came here because of Mother of Writing, who created the Pahawh for Hmong people to learn, and we came to teach it to the Hmong." Chia Koua laid out the Pahawh in front of them and suddenly the Hmong remembered that their ancestors, who had lived in China, had followed God down to Laos.
The Hmong were happy when they realized that Pahawh was a script different from any other nation's script. [They knew of the Lao-based Hmong writing developed by the communists, but did not like it.] One of them told Chia Koua, "A long time ago our ancestors came to this country from China. They came to follow God, and left all their relatives behind, but could not reach God and had to stop here to farm. God has probably appeared in your area, then."
Ancestors followed God
They told how one of their ancestors [in China] had a virgin daughter who was pregnant for nine years without delivering the baby. When the Chinese heard that God would come down to the Hmong, they ordered all pregnant women killed [assuming God would be born a human being.] Knowing of the imminent danger, the ancestors took the pregnant girl and fled southward. They arrived at a rice field where they saw a hut with a banana stalk down the hill from it. They spent the night there, and the girl told them all that God was going to appear. If she was gone the next morning they should go out and see whether or not the banana stalk had produce three flowers [whereas a banana stalk normally produces only one flower]. If it had, God had already come, and they should check the direction in which the bamboo and the trees had been flattened, following along in that direction to find God. If the banana stalk had not produce three flowers, God had gone back.
The next morning the girl had disappeared, and when the Hmong checked the banana tree they saw that it had produced exactly three flowers. Looking farther down the slope they saw trees and grass flattened down to make a swath as wide
as a road. They followed that swath [for many years, stopping periodically to grow crops] and arrived in this country where new trees had grown up [after all these years]
to be as big as the former trees [so that they could no longer find the swath which had been knocked down], so they could not reach God. That is why their ancestors had settled in this part of the country, and had been living in the area ever since.
The Hmong in that village believed Chia Koua and wanted to study the Pahawh. [But first]' they told fifty of their young men who were communist soldiers to arm themselves and accompany Chi a Koua to Na Hai. The villagers asked [Chia Koua's] soldiers to come back and get them as soon as they had finished establishing themselves in Na Hai. Not long after the fifty soldiers had left with Chia Koua's team, the communist officials in Hang Yu Village sent Hmong and Khmu' soldiers to check on whether any American spies had appeared anywhere around there. The villagers [as they recounted to Chia Koua later] told the soldiers that a group had just passed through their village but they did not seem to be American spies, just a group of young Hmong boys. They asked the soldiers not to go after them. They also told the soldiers [openly] about the reasons why Chia Koua's team had come there [to teach the Pahawh Hmong and about Shong Lue]. After listening to the story, the communist soldiers decided to kill a chicken [or two]and [perform a ceremony to] look at the omens in the [way the] feet [responded to being placed in hot water] so as to make sure which side was the more powerful. They did so and found that their side was weaker. So they went back and reported to the officers in Hang Yu Village that there had been some, spies, but they had already gone so far on that they could no longer be reached.
