Late one night this past April in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, a window in Cha Vang's split-level house shattered and a container filled with fire accelerant landed inside. Vang, his wife and three daughters, ages 12, 10 and 3, escaped the blaze, but the $400,000 house was destroyed. "If you want to terrorize a person or send a message, you slash a tire," Vang, a 39-year-old prominent Hmong-American businessman and political figure, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "To burn down a house with people sleeping in it is attempted murder."

Police believe that the incident may have been connected to two previous near-fatal attacks--a shooting and another firebombing--directed at members of the local Hmong community. The St. Paul-Minneapolis metropolitan area is home to 60,000 of the nation's roughly 200,000 Hmong (pronounced "mong"), an ethnic group from Laos who began seeking sanctuary in the United States following the Vietnam War. Vang is the son of Gen. Vang Pao, the legendary commander of the Hmong guerrillas whom the CIA recruited in the early 1960s to aid U.S. pilots shot down in Laos and bordering Vietnam and also to harry communist forces there. Today, Gen. Vang Pao, who resides near Los Angeles, is the acknowledged patriarch of his exiled countrymen. Many Hmong-Americans are convinced that agents of the communist Laotian government were behind the attack on Vang's family.

The violence in St. Paul briefly cast a light, albeit a harsh one, on what otherwise may be the most extraordinary immigrant story in this immigrant nation in a long time. No group of refugees has been less prepared for modern American life than the Hmong, and yet none has succeeded more quickly in making itself at home here. In Laos, the Hmong inhabited isolated highland hamlets and lived as subsistence farmers, some also growing opium poppies as a cash crop. Though they are an ancient people tracing their ancestry to China, where they endured more than 4,000 years as an oppressed minority before fleeing to Laos 200 years ago, the Hmong, at least as far as scholars know, did not have a written language until the 1950s. After the Vietnam War and their largely unheralded efforts on behalf of U.S. forces, the Hmong were hunted by the communists; many escaped to refugee camps in Thailand before being granted sanctuary in the United States.

"When they arrived here, the Hmong were the least westernized, most unprepared for life in the United States of all the Southeast Asian refugee groups," said Toyo Biddle, formerly of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, who during the 1980s was the primary official overseeing that transition. "What they've achieved since then is really remarkable."

Thousands of Hmong-Americans have earned college degrees. In their homeland there existed only a handful of Hmong professionals, primarily fighter pilots and military officers; today, the American Hmong community boasts scores of physicians, lawyers and university professors. Newly literate, Hmong writers are producing a growing body of literature; a compilation of their stories...