THE HUNGRY SEASON

A deeply reported story of aspiration and desperation among an immigrant Hmong community in California’s Central Valley.

Agricultural journalist and photographer Hamilton’s protagonist, Ia, was born with the name Ai, meaning small, in 1964, when Laos was descending into civil war. An aid worker decided that “what sounded like ‘I’ couldn’t possibly be a person’s name,” rendering her name as the Hmong word meaning bitterness. When the Communists seized power in 1975, most of her Hmong community fled to Thailand. The Hmong remained in a refugee camp for years, long enough to experience what Hamilton calls “an additional layer of punishment”—namely, the loss of their self-reliant lives as farmers. Their economy was converted to artisanal craftwork in which the women, now doing needlework, were the breadwinners while the men were barely employed and “no longer essential.” Ia, now a mother several times over, took her chances and traveled to America, settling in Fresno in a time when “Americans’ sympathy for those displaced by the wars in Southeast Asia grew thinner by the year.” While navigating a corrupt system of patronage, Ia did something marvelous: She planted a kind of rice highly prized by Southeast Asian connoisseurs as well as Hmong people, selling it for many times the price of ordinary varieties, and created a small agricultural economy that reached back to the old country. “The rice was a medium for memory,” writes the author, “a spiritual bridge on which her heart could walk across all that longing and return to when she was with them both in person.” Though it brought money and self-sufficiency, Ia’s small—and, given climate change, always endangered—farm could not always lift her from the spiritual malaise of exile, even with her mother’s encouraging admonition in the face of hardship: “Next year you can start all over again.”

A sensitive and carefully written story that sympathetically depicts the hard lives of refugees in a strange land.