Missoula News

food, family and culture

Hmong in Missoula: A Snapshot

By Jessica Mayrer, 7-11-07

It’s closing time at the Missoula farmers' market and Hmong children in oversized t-shirts load icicle radishes, rhubarb and beets into black milk crates for the Missoula Food Bank.

A large portion of the weekly Food Bank donations comes from these kids, first generation Montanans working for their parents to earn a little spending cash.

Almost half of the vendors at the Missoula market are Hmong refugees from Laos. In total, there are more than 200 Hmong living in Missoula County, according to U.S. Census figures from 2000. Many emigrated here in the wake of the Vietnam War, after their ally, the United States, pulled out of Southeast Asia and the Communists took over.

Chou Moua, 61, and his family were part of that wave.

Moua’s family, and most local Hmong, relocated to Missoula aided by Jerry "Hog" Daniels, a Missoula smokejumper who worked for the CIA, after Laos fell to the Communists in 1975. The Hmong fought alongside the Americans for more than a decade. (For more on the life of Jerry Daniels, who died in 1982, click here.)

Moua himself was a captain in the Laotian Army for over 10 years, a radio contact for the American planes. He told them where to drop the bombs, he says.

Before the war, his family raised almost everything they needed, as the Hmong have traditionally done. Their culture traces back through China, Thailand, Burma and Laos. It has now taken root in Missoula.

“It is a culture of giving,” says Michael Kreisberg, a Food Bank volunteer.

When not helping his wife in the gardens, Moua works the swing shift for Stimson Lumber.

“On Friday night we work until daylight and then go to the farmers' market,” Moua says. “We rest for a couple of hours and then work again.”

They grow strawberries, lilies, gladiolas, beets, carrots and dahlias to sell at the market. Whatever food is left they donate to the Food Bank.

	Moua walks through rows of strawberry plants at his one-acre farm located on North Avenue in Missoula. Moua and his wife Say Khang work three different plots of land in the Missoula area where they grow lilies, gladiolas, dahlias, beets, carrots and strawberries, among other crops, to sell at the Missoula Farmers' Market each Saturday.

This Saturday Kreisberg runs out of milk crates, stuffing chard and garlic scrapes into plastic garbage bags. The food keeps coming. A lady in a flowered apron asks for help and more garbage bags.

Last summer nearly 12,000 pounds of fresh produce was donated by farmers at the market, says Aaron Brock, development director for the Food Bank.

The fresh vegetables donated by local growers during the summer enable the Food Bank, serving an average of 60 people a day, to provide more than just empty calories to hungry locals, Brock says. “The quality is tremendous.”

And in a time when locally grown food is a popular topic, Missoula's Hmong are at the forefront.

Often they farm multiple plots, raising a checkerboard of tomatoes, lilies and lettuce. The Moua family grows food on three properties: a one-acre parcel, which is also home, a shared plot on 7th Street and another property on 3rd. Next year Moua hopes to invite the public to his gardens to pick vegetables for themselves, and thereby expand his operation.

“We grow mostly organic food because it is important for the people,” Moua says. And his family sticks to a traditional diet. “Mainly we eat a different way from you, mainly rice,” he says. “We use what we have, what we grow.”

At home now Chou Moua talks about his children and the war. He speaks carefully, as if scanning a dictionary in his mind.

“Here it is different," he says. “They don’t want to work hard like their parents.”

The black and white photograph Moua holds tells of a very different youth, more than 40 years ago and miles away from sun-drenched customers at the Saturday market.

“Most of the man-people, even 13-years-old, they go to the service,” he says.

His father died when a grenade exploded in his hand.

	Black and white strings stretch from the front door of Moua’s home, down the hallway and into a room housing a traditional animist shrine. Moua and his wife, Say, say the strings serve as conduits for good and evil spirits to enter and leave their home.

Seven sets of black and white string run from the front door of their home and down along the ceiling into a room with a shrine. The shrine is covered with feathers, burned incense sticks and coins, all for the spirits.

Say Khang, Moua’s wife, practices a version of animism followed by many Hmong. His wife chases away the bad spirits, Moua says. The black and white strings are a roadway for the spirits.

“If you are scared, your spirit will leave from you, leave your body and make you sick,” Moua says. And he should know. He was 17 years old when he joined the Laotian Army.

Across from the shrine are a fax machine and a computer, a blend of the old world with the new.

His kids also blend the two cultures. Although they speak the Hmong language, they now have a big-screen TV and an X-Box -- and don’t want to farm. “They have a lot of fun going out,” Moua says. “They don’t want to help their parents.”

Yet it’s hard to go to the market Saturdays without seeing a sleepy-eyed teen standing over rows of fresh food, filling customers' bags and black milk crates for the Food Bank.

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