Hmong Quotes

If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means “to speak of all kinds of things.” It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are; that no event occurs in isolation; that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point; and that the storyteller is likely to be rather long-winded.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.

The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story

Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.

You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.

It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.

Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might each have an easier one apart; love is the reason why you choose a life with someone, and you don't turn back although your heart cries sometimes and your children see you cry and you wish out loud that things were easier. Love is getting up each day and fighting the same fight only to sleep that night in the same bed beside the same person because long ago, when you were younger and you did not see so clearly, you had chosen them.

Patience is the road to wisdom.

I told her we will not become the birds or the bees. We will become Hmong, and we will build a strong home that we will never leave and can always return to. We will not be lost and looking our whole lives through.

The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.” So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.

Cultural humility” acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures—their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine—to the patient’s bedside, and that these may not necessarily be superior.

It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce—the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.

I'll meet some people who'll treat me mean and I'll just pray that I'll never be like them. And then I'll meet some very nice people and I will take a little bit of them and make myself a better person.

I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.

I learned that what made our parents sad was not so much the hardness of the life they had to lead in America, or the hardness of the lives they had led to get to America, but the hardness of OUR lives in America. It was always about the children.

So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn: Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest.

Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there.

Time had been something we feared, but with the babies the things that held time together - the years, the months, the weeks, the days - melted and flowed toward the future.

Once we are, we will always be.

I wanted to bubble over the top and douse the confusing fire that burned in my belly. Or else I wanted to turn the stove off. I wanted to sit cool on the burners of life, lid on, and steady.

We Americans often say that marriage is hard work. I'm not sure that the Hmong would understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard work -- I'm quite certain they would agree with those statements - but how does marriage become hard work? Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. A recent survey of young American women found that what women are seeking these days in a husband - more than anything else - is a man who will "inspire" them, which is, by any measure, a tall order. As a point of comparison, young women of the same age, surveyed back in the 1920s, were more likely to choose a partner based on qualities such as "decency" or "honesty," or his ability to provide for a family. But that's not enough anymore. Now we want to be INSPIRED by our spouses! Daily! Step to it, honey!

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one. This is especially true, I think, when the apposition is cultural.

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days.

When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.

We do not see the world as it is. We see it as we are.

Emotions are captive to reality

Lasting change cannot be forced, only inspired

In English, his voice lost its strength. The steadiness was gone; it was quiet and hesitant. Did all Hmong people lose the strength of their voices in English? I hoped not.

Hmong tradition dictated that only a son could find the guides who would lead the spirits of his mother or father to the land of the ancestors.

You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass.

We'd better go," I say. "It's time for you to make Hmong babies." Toua pulls free from my grasp. "You little--" "Go. Further the great Flower Clan. The mountainous homeland will sing from your victorious loins." "You're disgusting!

In Laos, a baby was never apart from its mother, sleeping in her arms all night and riding on her back all day. Small children were rarely abused; it was believed that a dab who witnessed mistreatment might take the child, assuming it was not wanted. The Hmong who live in the United States have continued to be unusually attentive parents. A study conducted at the University of Minnesota found Hmong infants in the first month of life to be less irritable and more securely attached to their mothers than Caucasian infants, a difference the researcher attributed to the fact that the Hmong mothers were, without exception, more sensitive, more accepting, and more responsive, as well as “exquisitely attuned” to their children’s signals. Another study, conducted in Portland, Oregon, found that Hmong mothers held and touched their babies far more frequently than Caucasian mothers. In a third study, conducted at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minnesota, a group of Hmong mothers of toddlers surpassed a group of Caucasian mothers of similar socioeconomic status in every one of fourteen categories selected from the Egeland Mother-Child Rating Scale, ranging from “Speed of Responsiveness to Fussing and Crying” to “Delight.

Coldness settles again in my stomach. I do not want a nice Hmong girl. I want a nice Egyptian boy who teaches me about colors and makes me appreciate poetry. I want the nice Egyptian boy who stops in the middle of the day to say "Thank you, God. For everything.

It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more.

Conquergood considered his relationship with the Hmong to be a form of barter, “a productive and mutually invigorating dialog, with neither side dominating or winning out.” In his opinion, the physicians and nurses at Ban Vinai failed to win the cooperation of the camp inhabitants because they considered the relationship one-sided, with the Westerners holding all the knowledge. As long as they persisted in this view, Conquergood believed that what the medical establishment was offering would continue to be rejected, since the Hmong would view it not as a gift but as a form of coercion.

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.

A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, “It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If anyone thinks that a gospel-preaching church would bring them over and not tell them about the Lord, they’re out of their mind.

When the Americans left Laos in 1975, they took the most influential, the biggest believers and fighters for democracy with them, and they left my family and thousands of others behind to wait for a fight that would end for so many in death. A third of the Hmong died in the war with the Americans. Another third were slaughtered in its aftermath. From

The mouth tastes food, the heart tastes words.

her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with

He was young, and it didn’t matter that he already had a wife and two girls—the lonely women in the camp were still willing to become his second wife. Only

After Minnesota experienced a rash of Hmong gang rapes, animal sacrifices, and one child murder, as well as a particularly shocking mass slaying of Minnesota hunters, a local talk radio host suggested that the Hmong “either assimilate or hit the road.” The Baltimore Sun somberly reported his “hateful words,” adding with sadness that no one had ever “dared to blurt out [such sentiments] publicly.

This wasn’t the first time Maureen encountered fellow white people who assumed she shared their racial fears. She recalls with overwhelming fondness her years teaching at Sacramento High, the public charter school whose students were all from working-class backgrounds and mostly African American, with a small percentage of Hmong and Latinx kids. “These were the best students of my career,” she said. “If I gave the students something to read, they read it in three days. I would sometimes plan a lesson [unit] to go on for four or five weeks, and they were done in two weeks and wanted to write the paper because they were excited.” Yet the most frequent question Maureen received from her white friends about the school and its students was “Are you scared?” Her response: “Scared of what? Don’t be scared of Black kids. Be scared for them.

The LA Times was practically lactating with cultural understanding about the Hmong’s canine murder, titling the article: “Hmong’s Sacrifice of Puppy Reopens Cultural Wounds.” It seems that Americans were creating “cultural wounds” by complaining about the Hmong clubbing Fido to death. How about the puppy’s wounds? Could we get an article on that? Hello, PETA? Stop hassling that kid for eating a hamburger—I got a real story for you!

Your soul is like your shadow," she said. "Sometimes it just wanders off like a butterfly and that is when you are sad and that's when you get sick, and if it comes back to you, that is when you are happy and you are well again.

Filipino Americans, on average, have a low poverty rate of 6.7 percent—more than 3 percentage points lower than white Americans. But Cambodian, Laotian, Pakistani, and Thai Americans have a poverty rate of around 18 percent. Bangladeshi and Hmong Americans have poverty rates between 26 and 28 percent, matching or surpassing that of blacks and Hispanic Americans.1 Pacific Islanders have the highest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the US.2

Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn't have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn't be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn't be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick). In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one, in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller subspecialties, with less and less truck between bailiwicks. The Hmong carried holism to its ultima Thule. As my web of cross-references grew more and more thickly interlaced, I concluded that the Hmong preoccupation with medical issues was nothing less than a preocupation with life. (And death. And life after death).

Reasoning being you’re the same inside . . . and that’s why you were able to fall in love and love so deeply despite your differences in nature. Ultimately, the reason you two cannot be together is also why you two are so perfect together.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.” During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with ten-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of origin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.

After they returned home, a txiv neeb performed the ritual chant that accompanied his journey to the realm of the unseen. During the chant, the cow’s severed head was sitting on the Lees’ front stoop, welcoming Lia’s soul. When I asked the Lees whether any American passersby might have been surprised by this sight, Foua said, “No, I don’t think they would be surprised, because it wasn’t the whole cow on the doorstep, only the head.” Nao Kao added, “Also, Americans would think it was okay because we had the receipt for the cow.

And while [we] do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries in, say, Baltimore. The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice...Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different -- but equally critical piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two. ...Two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating causes of "life envy": the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives - as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, "Are you certain this is what you really wanted?" And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.

My parents knew that I was not speaking much at school, but they both knew that I was learning English. They had seen me write letters to Grandma in California. They had noticed when I laughed at the funny parts of Tom & Jerry. But the thing that gave me away most was my anger. Whenever I got angry, I spoke in English, unless I was angry at them, in which case I would want them to know everything I was saying, so I would try my best at being angry in Hmong: “Dawb is a lazy bum, and you never ask her to do anything. You always ask me because I do it. I make it too easy for you! You are being unfair! You are parents, and you are not doing your job well!” I

In Minneapolis, tires were slashed and windows smashed. A high school student getting off a bus was hit in the face and told to “go back to China.” A woman was kicked in the thighs, face, and kidneys, and her purse, which contained the family’s entire savings of $400, was stolen; afterwards, she forbade her children to play outdoors, and her husband, who had once commanded a fifty-man unit in the Armée Clandestine, stayed home to guard the family’s belongings. In Providence, children walking home from school were beaten. In Missoula, teenagers were stoned. In Milwaukee, garden plots were vandalized and a car was set on fire. In Eureka, California, two burning crosses were placed on a family’s front lawn. In a random act of violence near Springfield, Illinois, a twelve-year-old boy was shot and killed by three men who forced his family’s car off Interstate 55 and demanded money. His father told a reporter, “In a war, you know who your enemies are. Here, you don’t know if the person walking up to you will hurt you.

Also, although the great majority of the letters I’ve received from Hmong readers have been positive, most of the negative ones have criticized me for telling a story that was not mine to tell. I am no lover of identity politics; I believe that anyone should be allowed to write about anyone. Still, I would have harbored the same proprietary resentment had I been they. It was exactly how I felt thirty years ago, when women’s voices were harder to hear because men were drowning them out. Now that young Hmong writers are starting to publish—including Mai Neng Moua, who edited a landmark literary anthology called Bamboo Among the Oaks, and Kao Kalia Yang, who wrote a fierce, sad memoir called The Latehomecomer—I am happy to shut up and listen. I hope The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is settling into its proper place not as the book about the Hmong but as a book about communication and miscommunication across cultures.

When you add in the US immigration processes encouraging a “brain drain” of elites from countries like China and India, the vast majority of the “academic success” we see when we think of Asian Americans is only available to wealthy, highly skilled immigrants who already have a high level of education, and their offspring—while only 17 percent of Pacific Islanders, 14 percent of Cambodian Americans, and 13 percent of Laotian and Hmong Americans have four-year college degrees,4 compared to 22 percent of black Americans and 15 percent of Hispanic Americans.5 The stereotype that Asian Americans naturally excel at math and science also discourages Asian American students from pursuing careers in the arts and humanities and keeps those who do pursue those careers from being taken seriously in their fields. A 2009 census report showed that under 15 percent of Asian American degree holders majored in the arts and humanities, less than any other racial or ethnic group in America.6

My parents tried their best at English, but their best was not catching up with Dawb’s and mine. We were picking up the language faster, and so we became the interpreters and translators for our family dealings with American people. In the beginning, we just did it because it was easier and because we did not want to see them struggle over easy things. They were working hard for the more important things in our lives. Later, we realized so many other cousins and friends were doing the same. I

Every Hmong has a different version of what is commonly called “The Promise”: a written or oral contract, made by CIA personnel in Laos, that if they fought for the Americans, the Americans would aid them if the Pathet Lao won the war. After risking their lives to rescue downed American pilots, seeing their villages flattened by incidental American bombs, and being forced to flee their country because they had supported the “American War,” the Hmong expected a hero’s welcome here. According to many of them, the first betrayal came when the American airlifts rescued only the officers from Long Tieng, leaving nearly everyone else behind. The second betrayal came in the Thai camps, when the Hmong who wanted to come to the United States were not all automatically admitted. The third betrayal came when they arrived here and found they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits. The fourth betrayal came when Americans condemned them for what the Hmong call “eating welfare.” The fifth betrayal came when the Americans announced that the welfare would stop.

When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don't want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But you don't speak the language. You depend on other people for welfare. If they don't give you money you can't eat, and you would die of hunger. What I miss in Laos is that free spirit, doing what you want to do. You own your own fields, your own rice, your own plants, your own fruit trees. I miss that feeling of freeness. I miss having something that really belongs to me.

The adults continued having nightmares. They cried out in their sleep. In the mornings, they sat at the table and talked to us about their bad dreams: the war was around them, the land was falling to pieces, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers were coming, the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts. In their dreams, they met people who were no longer alive but who had loved them back in their old lives. There were stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night. My aunts and uncles in California farmed on a small acreage, five or ten, to add to the money they received from welfare. My aunts and uncles in Minnesota, in the summers, did “under the table” work to help make ends meet if they could, like harvesting corn or picking baby cucumbers to make pickles. And the adults kept saying: how lucky we are to be in America. I wasn’t convinced.

Even if the press were dying to report on the Hmong gang-rape spree, the police won’t tell them about it. A year before the Hmong gang rape that reminded the Times of a rape in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the police in St. Paul issued a warning about gang rapists using telephone chat lines to lure girls out of their homes. Although the warning was issued only in Hmong, St. Paul’s police department refused to confirm to the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the suspects were Hmong, finally coughing up only the information that they were “Asian.”20 And the gang rapes continue. The Star Tribune counted nearly one hundred Hmong males charged with rape or forced prostitution from 2000 to June 30, 2005. More than 80 percent of the victims were fifteen or younger. A quarter of their victims were not Hmong.21 The police say many more Hmong rapists have gone unpunished—they have no idea how many—because Hmong refuse to report rape. Reporters aren’t inclined to push the issue. The only rapes that interest the media are apocryphal gang rapes committed by white men. Was America short on Hmong? These backward hill people began pouring into the United States in the seventies as a reward for their help during the ill-fated Vietnam War. That war ended forty years ago! But the United States is still taking in thousands of Hmong “refugees” every year, so taxpayers can spend millions of dollars on English-language and cultural-assimilation classes, public housing, food stamps, healthcare, prosecutors, and prisons to accommodate all the child rapists.22 By now, there are an estimated 273,000 Hmong in the United States.23 Canada only has about eight hundred.24 Did America lose a bet? In the last few decades, America has taken in more Hmong than Czechs, Danes, French, Luxembourgers, New Zealanders, Norwegians, or Swiss. We have no room for them. We needed to make room for a culture where child rape is the norm.25 A foreign gang-rape culture that blames twelve-year-old girls for their own rapes may not be a good fit with American culture, especially now that political correctness prevents us from criticizing any “minority” group. At least when white males commit a gang rape the media never shut up about it. The Glen Ridge gang rape occurred more than a quarter century ago, and the Times still thinks the case hasn’t been adequately covered.

He didn’t need any more math credits, but this class would save him from the torture of the College of Education.

Adler studied a group of Hmong refugees from Laos who had immigrated to central California in the late 1970s and were not always able to perform their traditional religious rites during the upheaval of genocide and relocation. In Hmong culture, there is a strong belief that night-mares can be fatal; this evil expectation, or nocebo, apparently contributed to the sudden unexplained nocturnal deaths of almost two hundred Hmong immigrants (mostly young and in good health) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Once they were more assimilated and the old beliefs lost their power, the sudden deaths stopped.

After a few months went by, Dee started leaving her own baby with Foua when she took Lia to medical appointments-perhaps the first instance in the history of Child Protective Services that a foster mother has asked a legally abusive parent to baby-sit for her.

Now I only have one rule. Before I do anything I ask, Is it okay? Because I'm an American woman and they don't expect me to act like a Hmong anyway, they usually give me plenty of leeway.

In 1965, Johnson commented sanctimoniously that "the problem of Laos is the refusal of the Communist forces to honor the Geneva Accords," What he failed to mention was that his own country wasn't honoring them either; it was just doing a better job of keeping its violations secret.

Dan Murphy's diagnosis added Lia Lee to a distibguished line of epileptics that has inlcuded Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all of whom, like many Hmong shamans, experienced powerful senses of grandeur and spiritiual passion during their seizures, and powerful creative urges in their wake.

I remember having a little bit of a feeling of awe at how differently we looked at the world. It was very foreign to me that they had the ability to stand firm in the face of an expert opinion.

All men and all women are mostly the same, most of the time,” she clarified. “Everybody knows that this is true.” The other Hmong ladies all nodded in agreement.

On November 26, 2003, nine months after my mother died, you gave birth to Max, a little boy with an American name, a little boy I didn’t think we could handle and had said maybe we should consider not having, a little boy who looked up at me with almond eyes, who smiled my smile. Max was a surprise. Nearly nine years after our youngest daughter had been born, long after we said we were done having children, long after I had tried my hand at being a father to a son and was beginning to feel I had failed, out of the blue, cloudless sky a little boy traveled into our life on the wings of my mother’s death. In 2003, I realized I had never written you a love song.

On November 26, 2003, nine months after my mother died, you gave birth to Max, a little boy with an American name, a little boy I didn’t think we could handle and had said maybe we should consider not having, a little boy who looked up at me with almond eyes, who smiled my smile. Max was a surprise. Nearly nine years after our youngest daughter had been born, long after we said we were done having children, long after I had tried my hand at being a father to a son and was beginning to feel I had failed, out of the blue, cloudless sky a little boy traveled into our life on the wings of my mother’s death. In 2003, I realized I had never written you a love song.

Every time my seven-year-old daughter puts on a pair of shorts, I remember the way we used to be. I think of my Hmong grandmother who came to this country in the autumn of her life, too old to shift with its seasons. My Hmong American mother who came to this country young enough to compromise pieces and parts of herself so that she could work and care for her children through the harshest of seasons. And I think of myself, a girl wanting desperately to celebrate spring and summer, to be strong for her mother and her grandmother, and who tried unsuccessfully in many ways to fit in. Now that Grandma is gone, my mother is an old woman, and I am a working mother myself, it is only in my memories that we get to be together the way we were then. My Asian American girl loves shorts and T-shirts, her thin legs often darkened by bruises from her runs around me, beside me, and often ahead of me. From the distance of nearly twenty years, I wish I could have told that young girl yearning to let her legs breathe free that all of our lives in America were just beginning, that where we were was only one part of our story. I wish I could have told her that her family was as good as they knew how to be to each other, and that in their own ways they were trying to help each other, not hurt. I want to tell the girl I used to be that these first years of life in America would teach her how to love across space and time, to one day stand strong in her family’s discomforts, and give her the power and the ability to declare them all: new Americans.

For Hmong, an additional layer of punishment was how life in the camps deprived them of their self-reliance. Officially, residents of Ban Vinai were not allowed to leave the camp. In the earlier years, some men and women made informal arrangements to work off-site, mostly as farm laborers. At no point, though, were they allowed to have their own farms: that would have taken land away from Thai farmers, and it might have encouraged the refugees to stay. While camp rations were meager, the cruelty of this prohibition was not the people’s hunger; it was that since before anyone’s memories began, agriculture had been the axis on which Hmong lives spun. Practically, farming designed how they spent each day. Societally, farming was the underpinning of their financial and cultural independence. Now it was gone. As if all the bones had been removed from a body, the structure of life had been taken away.

For as long as anyone could remember, Hmong had been seminomadic farmers with a subsistence income; the elaborate textiles that girls and women created were a form of precious wealth.

Most old people prefer not to go to doctor. They feel, maybe doctor just want to study me, not help my problems. They scary this. If they go one time, if they not follow appointment and do like doctor want, doctor get mad. Doctor is like earth and sky. He think, you are refugee, you know nothing.

We have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes "a family unit" to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of those big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. What you've got are two, possibly three, or maybe sometimes four people rattling around together in a giant space, each person with her own private physical and psychological domain, each person spending large amounts of the day completely separated from the others.

One additionally watches Hmong movies on YouTube or on Hmong journals also. This Hmong motion picture is for his or her Hmong folks in their own language.

Jares" or The Plain of Jars. We still refer to it by the French acronym as the "PDJ." Only two roads, an east-west dirt road and another north-south unpaved track traverse the PDJ. The roads meet and cross near the geographic center. There are no substantial villages or towns on the PDJ, just a few scattered hamlets along with the encampments of competing armies and a bumpy dirt airstrip or two. The hills surrounding the plain are controlled for the most part by Hmong tribesmen. The Hmong are ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and temperamentally distinct from the lowland Laotians. The Hmong are fiercely independent, fiercely proud, and just plain fierce. They are on our side in the war, which is a good thing for us if not for them. The Hmong have little use for their Laotian countrymen and have even less tolerance for Vietnamese people, from either the North or the South.

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Hmong are Hill tribes that live in Kingdom of Thailand. These individuals are found principally in China, Vietnam, Laos and Kingdom of Thailand. Hmong individuals have their own news channel from this one can get all the news of hmong individuals and their lives.

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It was May of 1975 when the Americans left Laos and the Communist Party took over the government. All teachers’ salaries were suspended. Genocide was declared against the Hmong for helping the Americans. I lost hold of my pens as I took up a gun to protect my family.

With each Hmong family we visited, a relative or a neighbor, we were reminded of how unpredictable life can be, how harsh it can be.

My fear of embarrassment vanished. In its place there was no pride, just an understanding of the man I had always seen exclusively as mine, now standing before his people, with his heart open, bleeding hardship and harrowing hope. The words had nothing and everything to do with my being in the big arena. There was no room for refusal, for thoughts or ideas, it was all just a moment felt, emotions bubbling forth from losses the Hmong had endured. In his song, I was no longer young. I was one with a people who had lived for a long time, traveled across many lands, a people clinging to each other for a reminder, a promise, of home, that place deep inside and far beyond where the Hmong people had hidden our hearts so that we could heal. There was nothing to be embarrassed about.

I did not want to tell my father that his song had shaken my heart, taken me to a place that I did not want to visit for fear I would never return. Now that I had heard, I could not forget the suffering and sorrow of the Hmong story.

My brothers say that I was born at the beginning of 1958, in the midst of the Laotian Civil War. In the bigger cities of Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Vientiane there were battles and debates between members of the Royal Lao Government and coalition groups of Communist revolutionaries. On the world stage, Laos had become a faraway place for the superpowers of the Cold War to test their might against each other. But on the high mountains of Phou Bia, in the province of Xieng Khuoang, in the village of Phou Khao where I was born, the Hmong continued the life we knew.

My father explained where babies came from to me. “Before babies are born they live in the sky where they race along with the clouds and can see everything—the beauty of the mountains, the courses of streams, the dirt of the paths that people take down on earth.” I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.

Threads torn, skin broken, eyes wild and empty. Hmong men were beaten. Hmong blood seeped into the Thai earth, drops and streams to be washed by the monsoon rains that fell each year.

It felt like there was a magical wall that allowed us to see other people passing in and out of the camp, but we could not cross it ourselves. We could feel the air moving all around us, but we were heavier than air. We could only wish we had the freedom of air. If we did, the wind could blow us to our homes in the mountains of Laos—at least that is what the older people in my family yearned for. I was different from the adults. I believed I was as light as air.

it is funny the things we remember on the days that people we love die.

My Uncle Eng once told me that the purpose of a story is to serve as a stop sign on the road of life; its purpose is to make audiences pause, look at both sides, check the trajectory of the horizon.

Grandma believed that the only way to keep a family together was to have many sons, many people, so that there were many different points holding on. It was easy to tear apart two hands, no matter how strongly they held, but if they had many hands, coming from all different directions, the grip would always hold, at some point, no matter what tried to sever the bond. At the very least, a tearing apart would take longer. She believed that a big family could buy time.

From the moment we arrived, I knew that my family had survived a great war to bring me to this country. I understood that the conditions in Thailand and the camps were hard for those who knew more than I did. But for me, the hardness in life began in America. We are so lucky to be in this country, the adults all said. Watching them struggle belied this fact. We are so fortunate to be young, new lives opening before us, they believed. And yet the life in school that opened before me made me feel old in a world that was struggling to be young. A silence grew inside of me because I couldn’t say that it was sometimes sad to be Hmong, even in America.