On Nov 29, 2004, at 5:19 PM, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
On Nov 29, 2004, at 4:46 PM, Dave Land wrote:
On Nov 29, 2004, at 2:55 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
There may have been racial slurs flying along with the bullets. I mean, if I
was being hunted down by a psychopath cambodian sharpshooter in the woods, I
think I might use a few choice words like " You crazy fu&*in' Cambodian!
Stop shooting at me!" as the bullets are flying by.
How would you would know that he was Cambodian? How would you know he wasn't Vietnamese? Laotian? Thai? Hmong?
I can't imagine that I'd even think to bring up his ethnicity. I might say "You crazy fu&*in' psychopath! Stop shooting at me!" Or I might shut the hell up and hide, rather than give him a nice, loud target to shoot at.
He's Hmong.
I understand that it is particularly galling to the Hmong to be called Cambodian, Vietnamese, Lao, Thai, and so forth, because they are an *ethnic* group that has been mistreated in all of those countries (and, in the view of some, the USA besides). Doubly so when geographically- and ethnically-illiterate Americans can't even get the country they escaped from right. How many times can you be called Cambodian when you are, in fact, a Hmong from Thailand, then be told something like "I don't care where you came from, Chinaman, why don't you go back there" before you wig out?
I am married to a woman of Japanese descent who experienced relatively little racial prejudice in her own life, but has a huge chip on her shoulder at being called Chinese, Korean, etc. It really rubs her the wrong way that white people think that Asians "arr rook arike," as she says.
What you probably don't know, because you don't live there (I used to until earlier this year) is that in north/central Wisconsin the Hmong community is facing a lot of problems, not the lest of which is ethnic bias.
Actually, the troubles of the Hmong in the Upper Midwest got quite a bit of national attention some years ago, but especially among those of us in California. Many Hmong in the rest of the country got there via resettlement from California's central valley, where there is still a large and tight-knit Hmong community. In fact, the Hmong hunter in question was among the first wave of Hmong refugees who arrived in California in the 1980s and eventually moved to St. Paul from Stockton, CA.
However it faces other challenges; of the gang activity that exists among youth in Wausau (and it is shocking to realize there IS such activity in such a small town), a significant minority of gang members are Hmong -- disproportionate to the general population.
I've ceased being shocked to learn that there is gang activity in small towns -- the Crips and Bloods are apparently quite active in Kansas, I read. That's the problem with disfranchisement: it tends to correlate to (note: I do not claim causality) a disproportionate level of criminal activity among the disfranchised.
So I *can* see how the other hunters could have tossed some slurs around, and that this guy felt -- or was! threatened; contrarily I can also see this guy being somewhat around the bend and simply going on a shooting spree, figuring he'd never get caught.
The part of my brain that still relies on stereotypes has no problem at all imagining a bunch of white hunters brandishing their weapons and shouting racial epithets at this guy, who (my stereotype brain assumes) that they blame for the fact that they can't get good jobs and their taxes are so high.
Regardless of how mentally stable Chai Soua Vang may have been at the outset, I'm guessing that after having to escape from his home country to California, then moving from one possibly inhospitable place to another, he had had enough, and went (as you say) around the bend out there in the woods.
Or, as Pheng Lo, a social-services director in California's Central valley who knew Vang said, "In the jungle, when people have guns, people have different attitudes."
Dave
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