Hmong/Miao in Asia

The counterweight to almost everything else on this shelf. Nicholas Tapp and Jean Michaud assembled the most comprehensive collection of research on Hmong life in Asia, deliberately focusing on the communities that did not leave — in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos — where the great majority of Hmong people still live. Reading it after the American memoirs is genuinely disorienting in a useful way: the diaspora that dominates English-language writing is a minority of the whole. Note the title's Hmong/Miao pairing, which reflects the contested relationship between the Chinese ethnic category and the Hmong specifically. For scholars, and for readers who want to know what happened to everyone else.