Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat Keith Quincy

Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat

Author: Keith Quincy

Publisher: Eastern Washington University Press

Publication Date: 01 May, 2000

ISBN: 9780910055611

Pages: xiii, 597

Subjects: Political science, History, Social science

Available as: , Trade Cloth, 978-0-910055-61-1 Trade Paper, 978-0-9628648-4-1

Description:

"In Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat, Keith Quincy exposes, with damning clarity, what has been long excluded from the official record of America's military involvement in Southeast Asia: the secret war in Laos and its tragic consequences for the Hmong people and their culture. Exploited for the geographical location of their ancestral lands by the French, Americans, Vietnamese, and Chinese; callously manipulated by the same groups because of the non-aggressive, agrarian structure of their tribal units; by the early '80s virtually the entire Hmong society had fled to Thailand and the United States, making them a people, a culture, a whole way of being, in exile. Keith Quincy's landmark work shows us the how and why of this terrible outcome, lest we forget that when the fighting stops the devastations of war go on."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

PW Publishers Weekly

Review Source: Publishers Weekly

Review Date: 2000-06-26

The 13-year covert, American-run war against North Vietnam and the Communist Pathet Lao in Laos ended in 1973. Quincy's dense but rewarding studyÄwhich takes its title from a messianic Hmong farmer who led an armed rebellion against the French in the early 1920sÄgives a detailed history of political upheavals and wars in the region, beginning in the 14th century, but the focus is on the upland Hmong tribespeople who were U.S. allies for the Laotian campaign. Several other well-researched books have covered much of the same territory in depth. Quincy, chair of the department of government at Eastern Washington University, adds more voices to that research, using hundreds of interviews he conducted with the Hmong (many of whom now live in the U.S.) in the 1980s and 1990s to bring the corruption and brutality among the group's leadership further to light. (One researcher involved with the project has received death threats.) By 1977, more than 100,000 Laotian refugees, not all of whom were Hmong, had crowded into camps on the Thai border. Some remained for 15 years, Quincy argues, because agents of the exiled Hmong leadership "were able to persuade, cajole, and intimidate most refugees to forego resettlement... to provide guerrillas for the Neo Hom resistance, the magnet for financial contributions." This well-written narrative clearly shows that the secret war's biggest losers were the Hmong, who did most of the fightingÄand dyingÄagainst the North Vietnamese. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved