I was hesitant to move back in part because of those experiences witnessing overt racism. I moved back to Appleton ten years ago to raise my children.
I don’t remember having any conversations with my Hmong classmates. In school, Hmong children stayed within their own group. These comments were not just made privately, but within earshot of Hmong adults and children. We moved to Appleton from a suburb of Milwaukee when I was in sixth grade, and I remember being shocked to see both adults and children make openly racist comments about their Hmong neighbors. I think things have changed significantly since I was a child. I am 37 years old and live in Appleton, which has one of the largest Hmong communities outside of Minneapolis. This next reader, Leah Olson, has a more hopeful outlook: They are part white and part Native American as well as Hmong, but how will they be known? Can I shield them from any of this pain? I shudder, realizing that I am raising three boys in this part of the U.S. Her assertion wasn’t worded as being reflective of a stereotype or a racist culture, but stated as if it were a well-known and widely accepted fact. One student even announced that Asian men had small penises.
HMONG KIDS SONG FULL
To my shock, and in full earshot of my Hmong male guest speaker, some of the students snickered audibly as we described the geek image we live with-the dorky guy who can never get laid. I had invited a distinguished Hmong activist/actor, Bee Vang, and we were in a big lecture hall with perhaps 100 college kids, trying to talk about how Asian men are stripped of masculinity in American race culture, how we are portrayed as too gay and undateworthy. This was brought home to me in a campus event I organized. Though I have tried to teach our divergent histories and racial dynamics, I am up against the diehard American tendency to type everyone by their looks. I realized that here, where no Hmong have settled, black, white, and Latino students lack tools for distinguishing among Asian Americans. Now that I have moved to Rochester, NY, however, hardly any students seemed to have even heard that Hmong people exist in the world, much less in the U.S. Local media might have generated stereotypes about Hmong males as gangsters or warriors, but at least some college students, both male and female, were also Hmong. Though my first teaching experience, in Wisconsin, had been full of challenges, I struggled less with teaching my students about the Hmong American experience. Then I got up in front of the college classroom and had a whole new education. I designed my book to convince readers of this. As I pursued field research on Hmong youth in the Upper Midwest, I became more and more convinced that Hmong were uniquely racialized both as Asian Americans, but also symbolically closer to blackness than their East Asian counterparts. Committed to social justice, I also trained in how race intersected with other hierarchies, especially gender and social class. race relations as it pertains to crime and law enforcement, immigration, and assimilation.
As an idealistic PhD student in Sociology, I made it a point to learn as much as I could about U.S. I thought Doualy’s Atlantic article was excellent, but I want to share another perspective. John Fisher College, recalls a distressing experience he had with Vang and some other students: Another reader, Pao Lee Vue, a professor at St. I asked Vang if there’s a YouTube version of his commencement speech and there is-embedded above (a text version is here). Not much of Hmong American history is light. Talking about my track record, complimenting the other graduates on theirs, and throwing in lots of jokes, I sought to be maximally inspiring-but I insisted on keeping the history of bombing in as well. The commencement committee had asked us to be light and inspiring.
In that moment my voice was kept strong by my mission-to make Hmong proud, to show through the power of my oration that we can go anywhere and excel, and that there is a lot for my fellow graduates to think about in our world marred by war and destruction. My heart was in my throat, but no one could tell. Yet there I was, born in Fresno, raised in Minnesota, educated at Brown University, and stepping up to the podium as one of the speakers for mid-year graduation, 2016. I would have said it was an impossibility: Children of refugees don’t give commencement speeches at Ivy League schools in America. This next reader, Bee Vang, grew up in both areas and is now entering adulthood with the wind at his back: The first note in our discussion on Hmong Americans focused on the cultural and racial tensions between immigrants and long-time locals in Midwestern cities such as Minneapolis and West Coast cities such as Fresno-the two biggest epicenters of Hmong Americans.