Xia Lee , 56

After a year of hiding in the jungles of Laos in 1977: “We made our way to a Laotian village and couldn’t take the starvation anymore, so we worked for farmers in the village. We farmed from early dawn, enduring the hot sun, until nightfall for one pound of grain and one potato stalk for the whole family. We steamed the bitter red roots mixed with the potato roots to have something to fill our stomachs. The wheat was barely grown when the communists came again. We ran back into the jungles for another year, reliving what we had tried to escape.

In 1979, one of my brothers from America sent us 40 inner tube tires and told us to head for Thailand. He had people waiting at the Thai border to help us. The communists were getting suspicious of the disappearing number of Hmong in the village. Since my husband was a leader in the village, we had to get out of there before they came looking for my husband.

In November, we started the journey to the Thai border. Just one day into the trip, the communists caught up to us and killed both our Laotian guides and one whole Hmong family. We had to change our destination.

We turned back around and came upon a mountainous region of Laos. I’d never seen so many corpses in my life. It was a death zone. There were corpses of women, men, children and even infants who were still suckling on their dead mothers’ breasts. Some had been there so long, only skeletons remained. It was a sad, dark, quiet walk, which seemed to take an eternity.

Once in a while, our hunger distracted us from the reality. We reached for leaves, tree branches, anything that reminded us of food. There was constant gunfire at any given time, so we never slept well. When we cooked, we used a blanket to cover the pot on the fire to keep the smoke from rising up and to keep anyone from noticing our location. There was no rice. We had no shoes. The calluses on my feet were an inch thick and filled with cuts, fungus and dirt. We were at the mountainous terrain for four months. When we tried again to make our way to the border, two children from our group died from opium overdoses while on their mother’s back. Another had a fever and died. We didn’t have anything to cover the bodies with, so we used large leaves to wrap them and left their bodies in crevices and underneath tree stumps.

In our fourth week, we reached the Mekong River. We had not had anything to eat or drink for five days straight. In desperation my husband urinated so the children could drink, to keep them from dying. The urine was thick and red because we also did not have anything to drink. Our strength was almost drained from this long, physical voyage. We finally found the people who were supposed to help us escape. They told us the ones with babies had to go last and the ones without would go first. They lied to us. As we were blowing up our inner tubes, we looked and saw they were already in the water crossing. Some of them had children, and the children started crying from the cold current. The communists heard the cries and began shooting the people still on shore. We quickly jumped into the water and swam. As we looked back, the people who were on shore fell like a fence being blown down by wind. There was nothing we could do.

I was tied to my husband and youngest daughter. My two older daughters were tied to my relatives. As we were swimming and being shot at, I heard my middle daughter crying, “My mother, father, help me!”

She became separated from the group she was tied to.

I couldn’t see her; she was too far back. I couldn’t do anything.”

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Excerpt from Xia Lee's story, written and photographed by Kou Vang