The theme of the episode was the pursuit of truth – obsessively asking questions until you can arrive at pure, unquestionable facts. (You can listen to the full episode; the specific segment on Yellow Rain can be found here.) I absolutely love Radiolab. Listening to the show on long walks in the city can be the highlight of my day; I've been to live performances that were stunning – I'm a huge fan.
Anyway – this segment discussed something called Yellow Rain. Here are the "unquestionable" facts: In the 1970s, the U.S. withdrew from the Vietnam War, and the Lao communist government (the Pathet Lao) began persecuting the Hmong people, since they had supported the U.S. during the war.
Entire villages were slaughtered. Houses were burned, crops were destroyed, men, women and children killed. During this time, the Hmong began reporting incidents of sticky "yellow rain" falling onto their villages from low-flying planes and helicopters. It coated everything – leaves, rooftops, rocks – with sticky bright yellow substance. After the "rainfall," cows, chickens, and pigs died. People reported horrible stomach pains; worse symptoms included vomiting, seizures, blindness, and death.
|Evidence of wood affected by 'yellow rain.' Source|
Here's where the truth branches:
One side (the Hmong's):The Hmong took leaves in for lab testing. Affected by yellow rain, the leaves were deep and dark with bright yellow spots. The U.S. scientists found traces of T2-mycotoxin (capable of permeating through human skin), as well as pollen, which is crazy, because it meant that if the pollen containing the poisons did not land on a person, winds would disperse the pollen and ensure that it ultimately would.
The U.S. blamed Russia for these attacks, and used yellow rain as an excuse to start their own chemical warfare by building bombs in Arkansas.
The other side (the professors', and what seemed to be Radiolab's):A Harvard biologist, Matthew Meselson, claims that what the villagers were experiencing was nothing more than bee feces. Yup, bee feces. Very interestingly, bees hibernate during the winter, and they don't poop until mid-winter, when it's warmer. At that time, the swarm of bees flies outside, about a hundred feet in the air, and then just lets everything go in a mass defecation – which can feel like "light rain." (I hope I never get caught in this.)
The professor proved that this indeed does happen in Southeast Asia, even though the bees there don't hibernate; and upon reanalysis of the lab samples, they couldn't find traces of the initial toxins. Which leads to this conclusion: the Hmong people mistook the yellow rain as chemical warfare, and the U.S. potentially seized this story as an excuse to start building their own weapons.
|Bee droppings that resemble yellow rain. Source: Wikipedia|
I'm not a scientist. I don't have access to the lab results or resources for analyzing all the pieces of evidence. Radiolab does – but in this episode, they don't use them. Instead of delving into all the facts and findings that could prove whether or not yellow rain was indeed toxin-laced-polin, they take the few facts that they do know from what seemed a cursory conversation with Professor Meselson, and persistently question the interviewee (Eng Yang, a hmong refugee) about his beliefs, asking him over and over if he was so sure that his people weren't just experiencing bee defecation.
You could tell Eng and his niece, the translator, were shocked by these questions. They felt so tangential in comparison to the real issues in the episode – the Hmong genocide. Apparently, Eng and his niece had been given the impression that Radiolab had wanted to hear the untold story about that genocide (which was important to them because until now, people had "been uninterested in the story of the Hmong"), when in reality, it seemed like Radiolab just wanted Eng to admit that his beliefs were based on myths. I felt tricked for them. It was painful to listen to.
And Robert Krulwich, who I love, made the comment that the translator had been monopolozing the entire story to bias it in favor of the Hmong. (And at the end of the interview, when the niece asked for a copy of the interview, he said "you'll need a court order for that – wtf?)
I came across this comment from a Hmong person who had also listened to this episode, which I think words what happened very eloquently:
In every episode, you introduce your guests by offering a brief description of their credentials, you never once mentioned the fact that Kalia (the niece and translator) is an accomplished writer who was the first Hmong American to pen a memoir of her experience nor do you ever offer her uncle's (the interviewee) biography. It was clear to me as someone who could understand him that he is an intelligent man whose opinions mattered as much as the Ivy league educated scientists you regularly feature on your show....
Secondly, Hmong people are farmers by nature, our entire lives were once rooted in the cycle of nature, we are attune to the changing tides of the jungle and weather, we know which plants can poison us and which can heal us. We are not ignorant - we know the difference between bee pollen and weapons of war so to portray us as if we are a community in need of education and correction is arrogant at best.I haven't done enough research to formulate an opinion on whether or not it was chemical warfare or just a political tool. (It's a super complicated issue – it would probably take me weeks to go through all the data.) I just feel like this entire episode was missing the point, and instead focusing on a fact that is only a single thread of the story, they only shave the surface of research for the purpose of cross-examining a survivor and refugee, and overlook a serious part of history.