In 1979, Yua See Yang and his family joined a worldwide diaspora of Hmong refugees after Communists overtook their Laotian homeland. Resettled in Providence, Yang discovered that his hill-tribe existence of plowing fields by hoe and scythe had little relevance in an urban environment.

Yang shed his hand-stitched garb for machine-made clothes. He traversed the city’s streets by bicycle. He prayed for Jesus, even as he clung to animist beliefs. He bought a bag of garden soil at the supermarket, believing it was rice. And more than once, he cried for the pastoral life he left behind.

Now 73 years old, Yang is moving his family to an 80-acre farm in Oklahoma, to join other relatives.

Their departure marks a small but stepped-up outward migration of Hmong (pronounced “mong”) in Rhode Island, whose peak population of about 4,000 who were resettled or born here since the 1980s has declined to 2,000 or fewer in the past decade or so.

“I want to do my old traditional way of life,” Yang says. He yearns for an uncluttered, peaceful landscape, and more temperate weather. He plans to raise cattle and crops.

Since last year, 18 families — approximately 120 people — have left Rhode Island, for North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, according to Pao Thao, executive director of the Hmong United Association of Rhode Island. In southern states, some have purchased chicken farms or found factory and professional jobs. Many are reuniting with family in the country’s largest Hmong communities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, Michigan and North Carolina.

“Eighteen families is a lot, when you have about a hundred [Hmong] families” in the state, Thao says. “In Hmong traditions, the fewer people we have, the more problems.”

In a close-knit society still largely controlled by male leadership, the departures affect traditions such as clan decision-making, arranged marriages, New Year’s celebrations and funerals.

Thao says traditional marriages are more difficult to arrange, leading to frowned-upon intermarriage. Some clans, including his own, are forgoing individual New Year’s celebrations. Funeral planners sometimes look to other states for players of the qeej (pronounced “cane” or “kang”), a difficult to master instrument that leads a soul into its next world.

Though outward migration has been ongoing since the Hmong first arrived from Thai refugee camps in the late 1970s, Thao, the Hmong United director, says Rhode Island’s high cost of living is driving people out in greater numbers. As one family moves, another follows.

“They can’t afford the property taxes. They can’t buy houses,” Thao says. Some families are moving because “they’ve heard of cheaper car taxes, insurance and housing.”

Toua Kue, refugee case manager for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence’s social ministry, confirms that “about a hundred” or so Hmong have recently moved to other states, to reunite with their families and for cheaper cost-of-living, and, for some, a return to farming.

Teachers at The Genesis Center in Providence, a school for immigrants and refugees, say many of their Hmong students have moved in the past year, and Joan Ritchie, owner of the Peaceable Kingdom ethnic crafts store in Providence, notes that the supply of popular Hmong crafts has “dried up.”

Leonard Lardaro, economics professor at the University of Rhode Island, says the Hmong departures reflect a larger pattern in Rhode Island of people being driven out by cost-of-living issues and a slowing labor market.

“The aggregate of both our population and our working-age population have been declining for well over a year,” says Lardaro. “So it’s not unreasonable to assume that the declining population of the Hmong is just part of this whole picture — although it’s a much larger percentage of their total. They just can’t afford it.”

Despite these departures, the Hmong remain a vibrant community; one that has fascinated historians, folklorists and documentary-makers.

Their exquisite textile arts are sold at crafts fairs and exhibited at museums and public spaces. Hmong dancers perform at ethnic heritage festivals. Hmong community gardeners sell Asian produce at farmers markets.

They have become homeowners and citizens. Second-generation Hmong have completed college and graduate school, and embarked on professional careers — including a Rhode Island woman who became the first Hmong law school graduate in America. And, spanning the cultural gap, a Hmong rock band called The Crickets, believed to be the first of its kind in the country, started in Rhode Island.

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THE HMONG are an agrarian hill-tribe people whose presence in Laos dates to the 1860s. Their difficult history includes involvement in the U.S. secret war in Laos, during the Vietnam War — a war that disrupted Hmong society and scattered their population across the globe. Traditionally farmers and rice-growers, most practiced animism, a belief that the spiritual world and the physical world co-exist, and engaged shamans to commune with those spirits. (About 30 percent have converted to Christianity.) Clans form the backbone of Hmong social structure: people from the same clan are related — a Yang is related to a Yang, no matter where they live.

No written Hmong language existed until the 1940s, and for centuries women have recorded Hmong history through embroidered story cloths known as Paj Ntaub (pronounced pan dow).

It was the secret war in Laos that left its most destructive imprint.

In the 1960s, the CIA forged an agreement with Hmong military leaders and the royal Lao government to fight communism in Laos. Young males, some as young as 12 or 13, and their elders fought alongside U.S. troops.

When the United States abandoned its efforts and the Communist Pathet Lao announced plans to “wipe out” the Hmong (an ethnic minority in Laos) in the early 1970s, people fled across the Mekong River into Thailand, to the sanctuary of United Nations refugee camps. During those desperate flights across the river, many babies died of accidental overdoses when they were fed opium to keep them quiet.

From the refugee camps, the Hmong were resettled in other countries, including the United States, France, Australia, and French Guyana.

More recently, those Hmong left behind fled to a non-U.N. sanctioned refugee camp known as Wat Tham Krabok.

Two years ago, political pressure led the United States to accept refugees from Wat Tham Krabok.

One hundred of those refugees came to Rhode Island.

STRINGS LOOP like rope bridges across the ceiling of Yang’s South Providence home, providing “a walkway for the spirits.”

Two tiny altars jut from the dining room wall, signifying Yang’s status as a shaman. Scallop-trimmed bamboo leaves, dotted with feathers, cover the altars, set with cups, incense and the split horns of a buffalo.

In Laos, Yang rose at 4 a.m. and walked to terraced fields to grow rice and vegetables. He also raised chickens, pigs, and cows.

But in the 1960s, the CIA conscripted Yang to fight alongside U.S. troops.

“I became a C-2,” or the equivalent of a corporal, Yang says. He and his fellow soldiers used heavy, outmoded French weapons, and later, the M-16. “We called it the black rifle.” Yang says he helped save two American pilots whose plane was shot down, and he and fellow soldiers found bones and teeth of U.S. servicemen that they turned over to American authorities.

One day, a grenade hit Yang, lacerating the flesh on his back. It took him almost two months to heal.

After U.S. troops withdrew, Yang and his family fled to a Thai refugee camp. Through international relief agencies, Yang arrived in Chicago in 1979. Six months later, he joined other Yang clan members in Rhode Island.

His new life perplexed him. So much was unfamiliar.

Yang wondered, “Why is there so much snow, coming from the sky?”

“The hardest part is that I cannot read or write English. It was hard for me to do a lot of things,” Yang says through an interpreter. Because at that time he did not know how to drive, “at first, I started with a bicycle for a few years.” The pell-mell pace of life here created emotional distance within his own clan.

His first wife died, and, according to tradition, the family sacrificed nearly a dozen cows (at a Fall River slaughterhouse) and held a two-day funeral — an abbreviated version of the usual four-day ritual. They brought in a qeej player from New Jersey and held a feast, and again according to tradition, played cards and drank whiskey.

But in many ways, Yang adapted.

Yang’s job at a box factory and his son’s job at a technology company provided enough money to buy a house in South Providence. He and his second wife raised corn, melons, lettuce and bok choy at two community gardens.

Yang still holds to traditions, serving as a marriage broker and dispute-settler, and shamanistic healer.

PAINTED WINDOW SHADES hanging at the Genesis school on Potters Avenue in Providence depict Hmong villages with straw-roofed houses, set against the mountains. Some show sprawling refugee camps. One painting depicts a village home next to a bomb shelter, with an airplane dropping bombs overhead during the secret war.

But most of the students who did them are gone.

Last year, adult Hmong refugees — mostly new arrivals from Wat Tham Krabok in Thailand — filled Classroom 8 at the Genesis Center. This year, only a few Hmong students remain, says Judy Alexander, who teaches beginning literacy in the English as a Second Other Language program. Alexander learned most had left for Minnesota.

“I miss them,” says Alexander. “They’d been with me for two years, winter and summer. It’s been really like an extended family. It’s difficult to see them go,” even though she hopes that the departures represent a “moving on and up.” Of those 15 adult students, “none of them had ever picked up a paint brush — ever,” Alexander says. The goal of the program, funded by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, was to include English-language learning in the class, “but there were times when maybe an hour went by, and you couldn’t hear anything but the sound of paint brushes tapping against the paper,” Alexander adds.

Some of the paintings will be displayed at an Atrium Gallery exhibit in Providence this month. Barbara Shema, a volunteer art teacher, says that when she realized that 9 out of the 15 people who created the paintings had moved out of state, “I just started crying,” she says. “We no longer have contact with them.”

MOVING BOXES fill the first floor of May Moua’s Providence home, signaling her family’s imminent departure to Georgia, where two of her sons have bought a house.

An animated, 54-year-old woman, Moua says that Rhode Island “is good for the rich,” but for working-class people like her — she works as a house cleaner — and her husband, “you can’t pay the bills, you can’t pay the taxes . . . the property is so expensive.”

After hit-and-run drivers struck their sons’ cars several times, their insurance has skyrocketed to thousands per year, Moua says. In Georgia, her sons “pay $700 a month. Much cheaper.”

Two of their nine children will stay in Rhode Island to finish college. Five will move with Moua and her husband, to join the two sons.

Moua says she and her husband and one child arrived in Rhode Island more than 20 years ago from Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand. Three weeks later, Moua went to work in a jewelry factory. Her husband found a job in East Providence.

Moua also sold Paj Ntaub at New England fairs and festivals for hundreds of dollars for a large cloth.

Opening a suitcase packed with story cloths, Moua displays a mural-sized depiction of Hmong fleeing from Pathet Lao soldiers, crossing the Mekong into Thai refugee camps, and an exodus to American cities symbolized by skyscrapers and a TV set. Others depict traditional rural scenes, and another shows Jesus and the Resurrection.

But Moua’s Paj Ntaub skills are becoming a rarity in Rhode Island. Though she has passed on those skills to her daughters, “they are too busy studying” to do needlecraft, she says. After Moua leaves, only a few older women who do Paj Ntaub will remain.

Ritchie, of the Kingdom, reports a decline in the number of experts who sew Paj Ntaub. Those embroideries captured a ready market, but the supply has “dried up,” and her store has not sold any since the late 1990s.

“I miss the luxury of having so much of this exquisitely beautiful textile art,” Ritchie says. “We were so fortunate to be in this place and time when it was being locally produced.”

As for Moua’s new life in Georgia, she says she has visited that state once.

“It was okay,” Moua says, “but I like it here better.” But Moua hopes to find a job, once again sell her handicrafts, and grow herbs for traditional medicines in Georgia’s rich soil.

CHIA VANG, 25, left the Hmong community in Rhode Island for North Carolina three years ago. She says she got priced out.

In a phone interview, Vang says she spent all but two years in Rhode Island after arriving from a refugee camp at age 6.

A University of Rhode Island graduate who majored in human development and family studies, Vang worked two part-time jobs, one at the Miriam Hospital’s neuro-psychology department, and as a medical interpreter.

“I loved it. I grew up there, so I have a lot of memories,” Vang says.

Then the cost of living grew out of hand.

“I got into two accidents — minor bumper collisions,” says Vang. Those sent her insurance rates soaring.

She also tired of crowded roads, inhospitable urban neighborhoods, and high house prices. She noticed that assimilation pressures were affecting the shrinking Hmong community, including marriage traditions.

Marriage within a clan is strictly forbidden, Vang says, “and when a large Hmong population leaves, you have smaller clans or very few clans of different last names . . . it’s hard finding that ideal spouse and people tend to date outside of their race, and in the Hmong community they frown on that.”

Though no one in Vang’s immediate family in Rhode Island has intermarried, she knows of some young Hmong men and women from Providence who have dated or lived with non-Hmong boyfriends or girlfriends.

“ , we consider that married, whether the dowry is paid or not,” Vang says. If a son or daughter dates outside the Hmong culture, “this has already brought shame and guilt, or the popular term of ‘losing face’ to their family name.’ ”

With Rhode Island cost-of-living on the rise, three years ago Vang decided to move. She considered other Hmong communities in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and North Carolina, finally settling on the North Carolina countryside for “a fresh start.”

“We all moved down,” Vang says. “My mom, my brother, his wife and three kids, and my sister, my youngest sister and myself, all from Rhode Island. I love it down here. I bought a house. I started out with eight acres, but then I divided the other five to my brother-in-law and sister, so I’m down to three.” (Her Total cost for 8.6 acres, pool and house: $195,000).

And, she says, “the weather’s awesome.”

Van says her aunt and uncle, who live in Connecticut but worship at the Hmong Evangelical Church in Providence, will join the family.

TONG YANG, executive director of the United Hmong Association of North Carolina, estimates that there are 15,000 to 18,000 Hmong living in that state. Most represent secondary migration.

“There were probably 100 families who settled here originally,” from Thai refugee camps, Yang says. Thousands more moved to North Carolina in the late 1990s, from California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Rhode Island.

“During that time, the job opportunity here is still booming . . . And many people found the climate here is more favorable — kind of close to what they would have in Laos.”

But shortly after the new arrivals came, factories, furniture and fiber-optics manufacturers began outsourcing to other parts of the world, which Yang says “hit the Hmong community pretty hard. Many are not educated and don’t have the skills to switch to another industry.”

Now, he says, the economic climate has improved.

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, weeks after his first interview with the Journal, Yua See Yang, the 73-year-old former farmer, visited his new home in rural Oklahoma. He liked what he saw.

“Everywhere along the road, there are cows, farms everywhere,” Yang says. “They have warm weather there. It is nice.”

Besides the one-story brown farmhouse, there are barns for hay and for the 29 cows and bull that he and his son bought, and an underground bunker for when tornadoes swirl across the flatlands.

In the coming weeks, Yang and his family will rent a 24-foot trailer and pack their clothes and furniture, his spirit altars and their family portraits, then head for Oklahoma.

Asked what he will miss, Yang says, “Here we were close to the ocean and a variety of seafoods.” In Providence, “we have a nice water system. All the Hmong say Providence has the best drinking water.” Yang will also miss his relatives, but says, “I just need to move on.”

Yang intends to bless the fields at his new Oklahoma farm, instructing “the bad spirits to go away, and the good spirits” to protect his land. With his ax and hoe — two of the few possessions he brought from Laos — Yang will return to “the old way” of rural living.

“Here, you don’t see the stars so much,” Yang says. “Over there, we have clear skies.”

Sources: www.learningboutthehmong.com; www.laofamily.org; www.hmongnet.org.