By Chris Moua
On September 24th of this year, a segment on the Yellow Rain was aired by the NPR show Radiolab, and because of the controversy of the piece, the original audio file has been amended. Among it’s guests were Eng Yang, a Hmong veteran, survivor, and documenter of the Hmong genocide for the Thai government, and his neice, Kao Kalia Yang, an award winning Hmong American writer, who served as a translator for Eng. Radiolab’s primary objective was to investigate “a mysterious substance that fell from the sky”, that was believed to be a chemical weapon utilized during the Cold War. It was killing animals, crops, and people throughout the jungle of Laos. However, as the interview proceeded, the hosts and the other two guests, Matt Meselson and Thomas Seeley, both scientists, settled at the matter that it was bee defecation that was the main cause of the so-called “Yellow Rain”, not chemical weapons dropped off by enemy planes. As the interview with Eng continued, his story and first hand experience in the matter was callously questioned and, in the audio, one could even hear one of the hosts claim that Eng’s experience was “hearsay”. The interview abruptly ends with Kao Kalia sobbing, saying, “He [Eng] agreed to do this interview because you were interested. What happened to the Hmong happened, and the world has been uninterested for the last twenty years…..We can play the semantics game, we can, but I’m not interested, my uncle is not interested…. I, I think the interview is done.”
