
Billion dollar Powerball winner highlights little-known lu Mein community in West Coast
Fox News
Cheng "Charlie" Saephan has brought attention to his lu Mein culture, a southeast Asian ethnic group, after winning the $1.3 billion Powerball in Oregon.
"I am born in Laos, but I am not Laotian," Saephan told a news conference Monday at Oregon Lottery headquarters, where his identity as one of the jackpot's winners was revealed. "I am Iu Mien."
During the Vietnam War, the CIA and U.S. military recruited Iu Mien in neighboring Laos, many of them subsistence farmers, to engage in guerrilla warfare and to provide intelligence and surveillance to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail that the North Vietnamese used to send troops and weapons through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam.
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