I wonder if Xiong Yang still has the picture. If she still keeps it wrapped in a torn shirt stuffed into the sling holding her grandchild to her back. If she unwraps the shirt at night, like a precious gift, to reveal a wallet-size picture of a woman, my wife, reclining on a rock on a Sydney beach on a cold, windswept winter's day in 1996. I wonder if the picture makes her days easier to bear.

I met Xiong Yang in a jungle clearing in central Laos in January last year. She was one face in a thousand, huddled along a rocky creek bed, straining to catch a glimpse of the two visiting foreign journalists—the group's first contact with the outside world in almost 30 years. News of our coming had been rumored for weeks and the truth of our mission somehow got twisted. Many believed we were Americans, representatives of a government that had left the community in 1973 and had now returned to pluck its members from their jungle nightmare. They kneeled as one before us: men, women, children, the maimed and the mutilated. A woman, possibly in her 40s, crawled across the stony ground toward me and kissed my feet. She raised her head and, for a second, we locked eyes. I will never forget that moment. She seemed to me the saddest person I had ever glimpsed.

That was my first encounter with Xiong Yang. She is a member of the Hmong, a hill-tribe folk originally from the steppes of Tibet and Mongolia who had fled to Laos in the 19th century to escape persecution by the Han. In the mountains of Laos, they hoped, they would find the "Hmong kingdom," a mythical place of peace and plenty. For centuries, Hmong women embroidered pictogram stories about it in the quilts that the tribe used to record their history and their dreams. Instead, they found only more war—first against the French, and then with the communists. During the Vietnam War, the Hmong helped rescue downed U.S. pilots and disrupted North Vietnamese supplies and troop movements. In 1973, when the war was lost and the U.S. pulled out, many Hmong managed to flee across the Mekong River to Thailand; the rest—militiamen and their families—melted deeper into the jungle, and disappeared.

I and photographer Philip Blenkinsop, both of us Australian, had come to interview the survivors of this lost tribe. In my notebooks and in Phil's photos, we now had proof that the Hmong still lived, that their continued presence in the jungle was not, as Laos' government publicly insisted, a lie. Here in the jungle, hidden from view, a war still raged as Lao troops continued to hunt the Hmong. My head reeled from accounts of an infant son beheaded, a wife disemboweled, a blind sister raped and mutilated. I returned to my banana-leaf hut to collect my thoughts, to escape, for a moment, the hell I had walked into.

Xiong Yang blocked my path.

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