The Hungry Season Quotes

“For as long as anyone could remember, Hmong had been seminomadic farmers with a subsistence income; the elaborate textiles that girls and women created were a form of precious wealth.”
― Lisa M. Hamilton, The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival

“For Hmong, an additional layer of punishment was how life in the camps deprived them of their self-reliance. Officially, residents of Ban Vinai were not allowed to leave the camp. In the earlier years, some men and women made informal arrangements to work off-site, mostly as farm laborers. At no point, though, were they allowed to have their own farms: that would have taken land away from Thai farmers, and it might have encouraged the refugees to stay. While camp rations were meager, the cruelty of this prohibition was not the people’s hunger; it was that since before anyone’s memories began, agriculture had been the axis on which Hmong lives spun. Practically, farming designed how they spent each day. Societally, farming was the underpinning of their financial and cultural independence. Now it was gone. As if all the bones had been removed from a body, the structure of life had been taken away.”
― Lisa M. Hamilton, The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival

“The primary country of resettlement was the United States, which, at least initially, acted out of responsibility for its allies in the failed wars of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. By the end of 1979, roughly 250,000 people from these three countries had been relocated to American cities, with over one million more to come in the following years. As the largest group of refugees ever resettled in the United States, this influx of people changed American policy: it led to the formal framework for accepting a much greater number of refugees from around the world each year; those increased numbers in turn led to xenophobia and a resulting political backlash that continues today. Even then, as the 1970s became the 1980s, Americans’ sympathy for those displaced by the wars in Southeast Asia grew thinner by the year.”
― Lisa M. Hamilton, The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival