Welcome to the Well, I am Brandon Edgians.

And I'm Anson Mount.

And Anson, when was the first time you had heard of the model?

That would have been, I guess, when I got to know Sharon.

I don't think I'd ever heard that term before.

Obviously, they didn't know how to spell it.

I was not aware of the history, our history, Vietnam, none of that.

Yeah, I didn't either.

I met Sharon, and she has a whole prepared spiel because nobody, very few people know

who the mong are.

And I will save her from having to do that spiel again and i will say

without sounding too mechanical the mong are an indigenous ethnic minority that lives in

southern china along the northern border of laos th Thailand, Myanmar, mountain folk, essentially.

And a lot of them are in America now because before the Vietnam War, there was the secret war, which was mostly in Laos, and that consisted of the CIA training locals to fight the communist.

And the locals that we picked and trained were the Hmong, because they lived in a border

region.

So they made convenient allies.

And there was a tacit agreement that if we lost the war, that they can come live with

us.

And, well, we all know how that went.

So now there are a lot among here, mostly concentrated

in Minnesota, Merced, California. There's, you know, pockets here and there, Fresno. And there's a

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