The way to work.

• Author: McMillan, Alex Frew
• Position: Includes related article on a social worker-turned-mobile home marketer - Hmong immigrants in North Carolina

To find jobs - and a new life - the Hmong people have traveled halfway around the world to Hickory.

Yer Lo's parents died during the war. She doesn't know of what exactly. There weren't any hospitals. Even if there were, her family was constantly moving and couldn't wait around for a diagnosis.

Her brothers and uncles fought in a U.S.supported war against the North Vietnamese army and Pathet Lao Communists in Laos. In 1976, after American troops pulled out of neighboring Vietnam, her oldest brother decided it was time for the family to get out. They are Hmong, a minority Laotian ethnic group, and feared reprisals.

Lo, who was 6, spent a year in the jungle, hiding by day and traveling by night, while her family worked its way to a refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. She spent 18 months there before the United Catholic Church sponsored her family's move to Syracuse, N.Y. Her brother couldn't find work, so they moved to Green Bay, Wis. Lo lived there six years, meeting and marrying a Hmong man who moved her to La Crosse, Wis., where he got a job with The Trane Co. as a designer. But the air-conditioner maker laid him off.

He and Lo moved to North Carolina, where his relatives had land, in the summer of 1994. The couple bought an acre near the Hickory airport from his brother, bringing the related families living there to nine. He got a job designing socks for Edelweiss Manufacturing Co. in Hickory. "And that's how we ended up here," Lo, now 28, says.

It's a long, complicated journey from Laos to Neuville Industries Inc. in Hildebran, where she works as a seamer. But her story is not unique. Lured by the promise of jobs, particularly in the hosiery mills, thousands of Hmong have moved into the Hickory-Morganton area this decade. One Hmong community leader estimates 7,000 to 8,000 live in Burke and Catawba counties. They are resettling from around the country, particularly Fresno, Calif., and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which have large Hmong populations. As more move here, they encourage others to follow.

Neuville Industries' human-resource department isn't sure when the first Hmong showed up looking for jobs. But it's glad they did. In 1991 Neuville had five Asian employees. Today 120 of 600 workers in Hildebran are Asian, nearly all of them Hmong. The plant's second shift, from 3 to 11 p.m., traditionally the hardest to fill in a high-turnover industry, is now its most stable. Three-quarters of the shift's employees are Hmong.

With the unemployment rate in the Hickory-Morganton area at 2.3%, the Hmong ease a severe labor shortage. They fill the rolls at many hosiery makers in and around Hickory - Ridgeview Inc., Paul Lavitt Mills Inc., Ellis Hosiery Mills Inc., Moretz Mills Inc. A few nonhosiery employers also have large numbers. Close to 40% of the 200 employees at Spectrum Dyed Yarns Inc.'s Hickory plant are Asian.

Employers such as Neuville have had to adjust with literacy programs and a close of cultural awareness. But the price is worth paying. "If you didn't have the Hmong people here, what would the effect be?" CEO Steve Neuville asks. "Would your overall labor cost go up, and would you have to pay higher, and would you have to start shifting operations out of this area? All of those things are possible." He knows the Hmong are helping keep his company and hosiery alive. "Has the Hmong community saved an industry like this in the United States? It might have something to do with it, yeah."

Down the hall from American Dream Realty, just outside Hickory, Khue Khang sits in a cramped, drab office. He is president of the United Hmong Association, which serves the Hmong in the counties around Hickory, as well as a social worker with Lutheran Family Services. The first Hmong, a people who lived in the mountains in Laos and stem from China, moved to Marion in the late '70s, then to Morganton and to Hickory throughout the '80s. When Khang moved to Hickory in 1987, there were around 40 there, he recalls, and maybe slightly more in Morganton.

"The numbers of Hmong have been growing very fast in the '90s," he says. He estimates there are 14,000 to 15,000 in the state, half in the Hickory-Morganton area. There are smaller communities in or around Albemarle, Mount Airy and Charlotte. "In the '80s, people moved here from Minnesota, Wisconsin, places on the East Coast. In the '90s, they're moving from California." Why? "Because there are jobs here." Hmong communities revolve around clans, extended groups of families, and when a clan leader decides to move, the rest often follow. Changes in California's welfare laws sped up the influx, Khang says.

There's debate about how many Hmong are here, though...