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Conducting ethnographic research with older adult Hmong Americans about their everyday experiences with type 2 diabetes in the United States, older adult Hmong Americans with Type 2 diabetes shared a similar sentiment: The cure for type 2 diabetes is a return to Laos and Thailand, or the shovel and the dirt (meaning death itself). They had fled their home country, Laos, as refugees after 1975 because of America’s failed intervention in Southeast Asia. They waited, sometimes for years, in the refugee camps in Thailand before resettlement. Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease where the body fails to transfer blood sugar into the body’s cells for energy. There is no diabetes cure biomedically; only management through diet, exercise, and medication. So, how might cure–either through a return to a place, a home country, one lost and fled as refugees or a return through death–“be a metaphor with a slippery referent” (Venkat 2021: 21) for a refugee population who now lives in the United States empire? This project brings together interviews with older adult Hmong Americans with type 2 diabetes and ethnographic data collected during diabetes group visits, patient-provider visits, and Hmong American transnational flows in Laos and Thailand for healing, to unpack the chronic refugee’s search for a cure from chronic diabetes through a return to what the refugee lost after empire.

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