Simple Greatness: The Story of My Hmong Father

How is the gospel real to you? This was a question that I was asked in college.

As part of a campus ministry, I heard the word “gospel” thrown around a lot, but as for how it was real to me, that wasn’t as easy to explain. The short answer was that the gospel is real to me because it’s how God saved me. The truth of the gospel is alive to me because by it God made me alive. But as I looked closer at God’s work in my life, I began to notice a “tangible remnant” of Jesus’s love for me. It’s embedded deep in my story as a Hmong-American. Let me explain.

If you’re familiar with the Twin Cities of Minnesota, you’ve heard about a people group called the Hmong (the H is silent). We are a group of war refugees that immigrated to the Midwest in the late 1970s and early 80s, because of the Vietnam War. In the Twin Cities metro, there are over 66,000 Hmong people — the largest concentration of Hmong in the United States.

The Hmong are an agricultural people group, known as the “hill tribe,” originating from the mountains of Laos. Some historians even trace them back to western China. Many of the Hmong people were persecuted by the surrounding Laotians and Thais because of their independent way of life and unwillingness to conform to the dominant society. In fact, the reason the Hmong people lived among the mountains is because they wanted to be independent, even though it’s a harder agricultural lifestyle when compared to the fertile low land.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government allied with the Hmong because of the Hmong’s strong anti-communist views. Hmong men were trained to conduct hit-and-run tactics against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), guard secret U.S. radar stations and bases, and rescue American pilots shot down over Laos and Vietnam. A promise was made that anyone who fought with the Americans would get a free pass to the States if the war was lost and the Hmong no longer had a home. Many of the young Hmong men joined up and started fighting against the communists, that is, the NVA and local Laotian communist groups.

My father was one of these men.

My father and his brothers were recruited by the CIA and trained in guerrilla warfare. They were paid a small wage and given weapons to fight for the United States.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the American troops moved out of Vietnam and all of South East Asia, including the villages of their Hmong allies in northern Laos. Left completely vulnerable to the communists, many Hmong people were hunted down and killed. The communist soldiers invaded one village after another, killing the children, raping the women, and torturing the men to death. Many were sent to “re-education camps” and were never heard from again.

Some Hmong people were given asylum in the States, but the majority of them where left behind to fend for themselves. To escape this genocide, the Hmong people started fleeing west towards Thailand. Parents carried their children into hiding and slowly made their way through dense jungle, until they came to the Mekong River (the Mississippi River of Southeast Asia). Crossing the Mekong River had to be done at night, in the dark, with makeshift floatation devices from bamboo. Many Hmong people drowned on this river because of enemy attacks, the strong current, and harsh conditions. (Both my parents lost their spouses at the Mekong crossing and were widowed when they met each other in Thailand.) If they crossed the river, then they would be able to settle in the refugee camps in Thailand. That is where my siblings and I were born, and where I spent the first five years of my life.

Since my father fought for the United States, it was easier for him to get a pass to the country. I still remember going through customs and getting my picture taken for my residential alien card. I was entering a brand-new world. It wasn’t until about seven years ago that my grandmother told me the whole history of my father back in Laos.

He never talked about it, but my father, in the midst of intense hardship, was a leader in his village. He had a commanding presence and was highly respected by the other men. He would have been considered as something similar to a mayor.

But when the opportunity came for him to move his family to America, he left it all. Away from his work, away from his comfort, away from his high social status — my father walked away from it all to live in a country whose language he didn’t speak and whose culture he didn’t know. He abandoned his authority, and the respect he had won, to welcome jobs and endure insults sadly typical for a middle-aged immigrant in America who doesn’t speak English.

And he did it so that his children would have a better life. I didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know the extent of the danger around me. But my father became nothing so that my siblings and I could live in peace.

My father has worked hard to provide for us, but even more than that, he has fought for our family as our spiritual leader. When I was in high school, I remember waking up early one morning to find him kneeling in his dirty work clothes, praying for each of his children by name. That image has stayed with me since, and I would learn that he and my mother repeated this routine everyday before he left for a long day of work.

The message of the gospel is that we need a Savior. We’ve turned away from God in our sin and deserve his wrath. But Jesus, though he was rich, became poor for us so that we, in his poverty, might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). He left his status so that we might know a new one: righteous, forgiven, at peace with God.

So how is this real to me? How do I stay alive to the gospel’s wonder?

Everyday I see glimmers of the gospel’s light in my father. He is a simple man in American terms. He still doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t have an education. He works hard with his hands to earn a living. But for three decades, he has preached the gospel to me with his words, and exemplified it with his life. He laid his life down for my siblings and me, which as Jesus says, is the way that he loves, and the greatest kind of all (John 15:12–13).

The Great Story and the Single Verse

In my neck of the Christian woods, words like narrative, meta-narrative, story, storyline, biblical theology, and big picture abound. I would like to sound a note that may encourage some who, like me, may wonder how this language works to build faith in the human heart.

First, I affirm the common-sense hermeneutical principle that in any message, or essay or poem or novel or scene from a movie or conversation or psalm or gospel or epistle or chapter or verse, it is the parts that give existence to the whole, and the whole that gives meaning to the parts. 

The word “boy,” does not have much meaning. “The boy in the corner,” has more meaning. “Feed the boy in the corner,” has even more. “Feed the boy in the corner with the word of God,” makes the meaning clearer. Without this “whole” (sentence) the meaning of the “part” (feed) would not be clear. And yet it is parts that create the whole. Both parts and whole are crucial for meaning to be transferred from one mind to another.

So I rejoice at every effort to see the big picture of the Bible. The whole story. The narrative from creation to consummation. The clearer the whole, the clearer the parts. And the more clearly we see the parts, the more accurately we will construe the whole.

But here’s the note I want to sound. Not only should the particulars of the Bible be seen in relation to the larger storyline of the Bible, but we should also realize that the story exists to reveal the particulars of God and his ways. And those particular glories of God are seen and enjoyed not mainly by gazing over the whole dazzling landscape of redemptive history, but by focusing on some particular thing God did or said inside the story.

For example, Isaiah 41:10 is a particular promise that has sustained me hundreds of times. (“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”) I would argue that the whole of Isaiah exists so that I might have that kind of faith-sustaining personal encounter with its particular parts.

Yes, Isaiah is a magnificent whole, and, yes, it fits magnificently into redemptive history for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. But if its particulars do not stun us and gladden us and strengthen our faith and increase our hope and intensify our worship, the big picture will have been in vain. I think, in God’s design, the prophecy of Isaiah exists as a whole, and in its relation to the history of redemption so that its particular promises might be known and loved and trusted by me a Gentile, because of the mystery of Christ.

In profound ways, the whole Bible — the whole of redemptive history — exists to create a place and time and meaning where particular, individual, finite humans can encounter its stunning parts. The parts make up the whole, and so serve the whole. They would have no meaning and no beauty without the whole. But it is just as important to say that the whole exists to give place and time and meaning to the parts so that the parts can be known and experienced and enjoyed.

Most of us simply cannot hold the “whole” — the whole Bible, the whole book, or even the whole chapter — in our minds fully enough or steadily enough to feel our joy rising from its fullness. We read it. We gaze on the grand landscape. But it is this particular promise, this particular act of God, this particular warning, this particular turn of providence, that penetrates most deeply and awakens faith and joy and hope.

A beatitude, a line from Romans 12, a promise in Psalm 23, a warning in Hebrews 3, a miracle in Mark 1 — these are the places where our hearts are broken with contrition or leap with joy.

I recognize that people differ in which aspects of God’s glory move them. Some can hold in their minds a large, sweeping terrain of wonder. I don’t have that gift. Jesus manifests himself to me in the particulars. Granted, these particulars would have no wonder or glory if they were not part of something vastly greater. But it is this particular promise at this particular point in history, this particular time in this particular place that does its Christ-exalting work.

One implication of this for pastors would be that we love both. The big picture and the small brushstrokes. And as we open the whole counsel of God, and the whole story of redemption, let us glory in the brightness of the whole, and make the parts glow like a white-hot filament in a light bulb.