Chapter One: The mountain tribes from Laos - Before the story was ours

Before there was Norwynd. Before there was my families little Sunday markets or any of my siblings and parents stepping foot on Australian soil. Before any of it, there was people living high in the mountains of Laos, growing what the land would give them, keeping their own calendar of rain and dry season, and asking very little of the wider world.

This is where our story actually begins, not with us, but with the Hmong people. We think it matters to start here, even though none of us were alive for it. It's the ground everything else was built on.

The Hmong people had lived across the mountains of Laos, Vietnam, and southern China for generations, mostly as farmers and highlanders, largely removed from the politics of the lowland cities. That changed when the wider world's war found its way into those hills. During the Vietnam War, the United States ran a campaign in Laos so quiet it became known as the Secret War, and the Hmong people, led in part by General Vang Pao, were recruited into it. Whole villages of men and boys were drawn into a conflict that was never declared, never officially admitted to for almost twenty years.

When the war ended in 1975 and the Americans withdrew, the communist government that took power in Laos did not forget who had fought against them. Hmong families who had once been allies to the western nations became targets in the eyes of the Laos communist parties. The Hmong people were chased out of Laos and many lost dear families and friends along the way. Villages were abandoned overnight. Families who had lived in the same hills for generations had only days, sometimes hours, to decide whether to stay and risk everything, or leave and risk everything else.

Tens of thousands chose to leave. They walked for days through jungle, many of them crossing the Mekong River with nothing but what could be carried, children on backs, the elderly leaning on whoever was strongest that day. Not everyone made the crossing. Families were split in the chaos, some forever, some only finding each other again years later in a camp roll call or, sometimes, never.

On the other side of that river was Thailand, and a string of camps that would become temporary homes for tens of thousands of Hmong refugees, places like Ban Vinai, Nong Khai, and Nam Phong. What began as a few crowded buildings on an old air base grew into something closer to towns, holding tens of thousands of people who had nowhere else to go and no real say in what came next.

This is the world our grandparents, and later our parents, were born into or grew up inside. Not a single dramatic escape, but years, sometimes a full childhood, spent waiting in a place that was never meant to be permanent, for a decision made by governments thousands of kilometres away about which country, if any, would take them in.

We're telling this part of the story first, ahead of any photograph or personal memory, because we think it's owed. So much of what came after, the quiet ways our parents raised us, the value they placed on having enough, the way they never wasted anything, the way "home" was never something they took for granted, comes directly from this history. It isn't backstory. It's the root system.