Becoming American follows the 12,000 mile odyssey of a Hmong tribal family from a refugee camp in Thailand to their new home in Seattle. Having maintained their cultural identity through centuries of migration through China and into Southeast Asia, the Hmong were notorious as tough guerilla fighters for the U.S. forces during the Vietnam war (they could not remain in Laos after the government fell to the Pathet Lao forces). But “becoming American” entails hardships that threaten to defeat even the proud and independent Hmong, from an increasingly hostile reception by Americans, to the difficulties of major cutbacks in Federal aid, to the enormous threat that the simplest accoutrements of modern technological society pose to these preliterate, land-bound people. (“When they come into a grocery store in the U.S., what they see is not food, but boxes and things wrapped in cellophane and in plastic,” notes one anthropologist interviewed in the film.) Focusing on one family--Hang Sou, his wife, sister-in-law, and six children--Becoming American is an extremely informative and ultimately moving documentary on the experience of thousands of Hmong trying to become American.