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Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women . By Nancy D. Donnelly. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Pp. viii, 224. Photographs, Bibliography, Index.

Nobody, surely, could ever have wished upon tens of thousands of mostly preliterate, Southeast Asian slash-and-burn farming folk a forced migration from the highlands of Laos — among the least-urbanized nations of the world — to the cities of late twentieth century North America. But this has been the fate of some 100,000 or more Hmong and it has, among other things, generated a massive scholarly literature on the trials and tribulations, hopes and fears, successes and failures of these Hmong mountaineers as they have attempted to adapt to North American life. (The Online Computer Library Center's "Worldcat" lists, for example, 107 works on Hmong in California, 106 on these people in Minnesota, 52 on Hmong in Wisconsin and 23 on them in Washington State.) Nancy Donnelly's Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women is a worthy member of this genre of scholarship. Donnelly, a professional anthropologist, has done her homework on the ethnographic record of Hmong in Laos and North Thailand and refers extensively to works by, inter alia, Lemoine, Yang, Geddes, Cooper and Tapp. Consequently she is able to provide a useful background survey of "Hmong Society in Laos", the title of her second chapter, wherein she skilfully weaves together data from the aforementioned sources with the reminiscences of her Hmong informants in North America. The data Donnelly provides on daily life in a highland swidden farming community, on the structure of the traditional Hmong household, gender hierarchy and relations, child-bearing and children and on the importance of needlework for Hmong women all provide the essential backdrop against which the reader is to measure the degree of change — and of continuity — evidenced by Hmong refugee communities in North America. Most of Donnelly's book focuses on her record and interpretation of experiences with Hmong families living in Seattle, Washington. Following a transitional chapter in which she turns from traditional Hmong life in Laos to the far-from-traditional situation created for these people in upland Laos itself, by evangelizing Christianity and, even more importantly, by the Laotian War, Donnelly discusses the arrival of Hmong refugee families and the subsequent establishment of a Hmong community in Seattle, especially during the period 1980-85. The scene for Chapter Three, "The Hmong in Seattle", is set by the plaintive song of a Hmong refugee (pp. 59-60). Some extracts: