Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees 9781593321178, 9781593320607

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The New Americans Recent Immigration and American Society

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Edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut

A Series from LFB Scholarly

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Kinship Networks Among HmongAmerican Refugees

Copyright © 2004. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Julie Keown-Bomar

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC New York 2004

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keown-Bomar, Julie, 1966Kinship networks among Hmong-American refugees / Julie KeownBomar. p. cm. -- (The new Americans) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59332-060-4 (alk. paper) 1. Refugees--United States--Social networks. 2. Hmong Americans-Social networks. 3. Kinship--United States. 4. Hmong (Asian people) I. Title. II. Series: New Americans (LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC) HV640.5.H58K46 2004 305.895'942073--dc22

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2004012669

ISBN 1-59332-060-4 Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

ix

Chapter 1: Doing Kinship

1

Chapter 2: Hmong History and Culture

33

Chapter 3: Rupture and Resilience

59

Chapter 4: We Know the Way To Be Human

79

Chapter 5: Gender, the Family and Change

111

Chapter 6: Lessons for the Future

151

References

175

Index

191

v

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgements

In writing this book, I was made ever more aware that no one goes through life without the help of others. I owe my deepest gratitude to the men and women who participated in this project by sharing their time and experiences with me. If not for their abundant generosity, this book could not have been written. And, as inadequate as it is, I offer my utmost respect and appreciation to the living and the deceased who sacrificed to save their families from death and persecution. I am grateful for the guidance and support provided by the director and staff members of the Hmong-American Community Association in Menomonie, Wisconsin. I am indebted to Stephen Vang, Ken Her, Kaying Lo, Kao Xiong, and Chao Lor for their astute insights and their willingness to answer my never-ending questions. The members of the Hmong Stout Student Organization at University of Wisconsin Stout provided me with many laughs and fond memories, and a sense that many capable leaders are up-and-coming. A grant provided by The University of Wisconsin System for Race and Ethnicity supported the research phase of this project. The Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota provided fellowship assistance when I needed it most. I don’t know what I would have done without the editorial support provided by Kathleen Barlow, Timothy Dunnigan, Ellen MesserDavidow, Tracy Hiatt Grice, Susan Thurin, and my mother, Betty Pearson. Not only did they read critically and carefully, but they helped me believe in what I was doing. I am grateful to Arthur Kneeland who helped me with some of the tiresome transcribing, and to Edwin Joseph who furnished his map making expertise. Many wonderful friends and family members put up with my stressed out phases, listened to ideas and worries, and celebrated my successes. I appreciate my husband, Chuck, for being there, “come hell or high water,” and my daughters, Hailey and Maia, for their lightness vii

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

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of being. Carol Kline and Bretta Chaplinski are indispensable for their companionship and good humor. My Grandmother, Ruth Pearson has given me more than any grandchild could ever hope for. Lastly, I want to thank to my parents, Betty Pearson and Duane Keown, and my brother, Tim Keown for their love and encouragement.

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Copyright © 2004. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Preface

The nascent profile of the twenty-first century is already marked by dramatic global events that have uprooted people from their homes, their countries, and their families. As long as war, plague, civil strife, environmental disaster, and ethnic and religious intolerance persist, so will the movement of refugees. Working with refugees is not a task that falls solely on the shoulders of officials at the United Nations or international relief workers. Indeed citizens, from the smallest rural communities in Wisconsin, to the busiest barrios of Los Angeles are encountering refugees as neighbors, co-workers, and increasingly, as community leaders. Since the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, many Americans have expressed increased anxiety toward immigrants and refugees, the United State’s role in world affairs, and how best to manage the consequences of intervention. At this critical time, it is all the more important to listen to voices of people caught in the midst of uncontrollable and turbulent geopolitical events. How do displaced people cope with the challenges of relocation and adaptation? What kind of approaches help people help themselves? To answer these questions, the reader is presented with perspectives of Hmong-American refugees who have been coping with the repercussions of war for over twenty-five years. In the 1960s, as part of the fight to control Indochina, the United States recruited Hmong from the mountainous regions of Laos. Eventually, Hmong became the primary anti-communist force in the region, although their contributions in this military campaign were hidden from the public until some thirty years later. Hmong in Laos suffered an enormous loss of life because of their alliance with the United States. After the withdrawal of the United States from the Vietnam War, Hmong were subjected to a campaign of genocide by communist Laos and Vietnam. Seeking sanctuary, tens of thousands ix

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

x

Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

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undertook the perilous exodus out of Laos to refugee camps in Thailand. Eventually, most Hmong refugees chose to resettle in a third country rather than risk returning to Laos. Despite Hmong refugees’ remarkable journeys to new geographical and cultural settings, their connection to their culture and to each other is an integral part of who they are now. Hmong have developed a recognized schema of relatedness that allows them to build a network of people on whom they can depend, even in the most trying of circumstances. Their experiences provide valuable insights for creating cultural responsive policies and institutions to better serve uprooted people and the communities in which they reside.

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

CHAPTER 1

Doing Kinship

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The Wedding What a day for a wedding! An icy blizzard engulfed the town, and the temperature had plummeted to a numbing 21 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice and sleet from the night before made traveling anywhere treacherous. I gathered my daughters, the gift, and some pop, and set out for the wedding. My own status as an invited outsider with two small children in tow made me self-conscious. Participant observation would be easier said than done. This wedding, as are most, was not without some bits of controversy. I knew the complicated family situation was the result of a bitter divorce between the father and mother of the bride. Although I didn’t know what to expect at this wedding, I was attuned to the potential for conflict. The weather wasn’t helping. With the blizzard raging, relatives from out of town might not make the ceremonies (the wedding negotiation and the wedding dinner) and a small crowd could have already affected the bridewealth negotiations the night before. Although some Hmong leaders have recommended that the fee paid to the bride’s family be abolished, most families in the United States practice this custom because it is valued by individuals, family and community and because it symbolizes many things: the status of the respective families, the personal integrity of the individual bride, the new relationship between family groups, how much the bride’s family values her, and the sanctity and security of marriage. The bridewealth may even be seen as an insurance policy to assure the wife will be highly valued and well treated by her husband’s family. As I approached the row of duplexes, I searched for a parking space and started watching for people who looked like they were going to a wedding. Chia, my friend and the bride’s sister-in-law, said it was 1

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

scheduled for 11 a.m., but it would be on “Hmong time.” So, I shouldn’t worry too much about getting there promptly. By 11:30 people were arriving from all directions, and we had to park several blocks away. We made our way to the brown duplex with the flapping storm door while keeping the 30-40 mile per hour icy wind from blowing our skirts up. As we entered the home, a pile of shoes prompted me to remove my daughters’ shoes. Chia told us not to bother with the shoes because we would “never find them again” and, besides, they had covered all of the carpet in the entire house with plastic sheets and duct tape. The house was decorated in white and red streamers and puffy three-dimensional wedding bells. Chia looked exhausted from helping with the prior night’s wedding negotiations from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. and the preparations for the ceremony today. She was on No Doze™ to make it through the whole day of cooking food, serving and cleaning up on less than two hour’s sleep. Because her mother-in-law was divorced, much of the responsibility for organizing the wedding negotiations and ceremony fell on her husband, the eldest son and, thus, on her as well. The wife of the eldest son has many obligations to her husband’s family. As in many Hmong-American homes, family pictures were placed prominently on a wall in the living room. Snapshots of people in Laos or Thailand, photos of family members dressed in Hmong clothing and jewelry, and aging military portraits of those who fought in the war all were arranged around a large decorative fan. Children’s school projects covered many other walls in the home. Smaller pictures in framed collages sat on the tops of countertops and dressers. The eldest daughters’ bedroom was adorned with pictures of sleek Asian models they had clipped from magazines. Women were bustling around in both kitchens of the duplex preparing for the big dinner to follow. Descending to the basement to check on my daughters, I found one room filled with teenagers talking and younger children playing and another set aside for adult men to socialize. In the living/dining room men in dark business suits sat at tables arranged in an L-shape and waited for the ceremony to begin. These relatives had come to support the bride, Nao, and her family. This was a Christian Hmong wedding and Chia pointed out some of the church leaders and other members who had come to support the family.

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Doing Kinship

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Facing the short leg of the L-shape were the bride and groom, her mother, and the pastor from the local Hmong church. People began to cluster in the living/dining area. A church elder opened with a short greeting welcoming people to the ceremony and then led them in a round of Christian hymns sung in Hmong. After another man said a few words to open the ceremonies, the mother of the bride, Zoua, dressed in a formal purple skirt and blouse with gold embroidery, began to speak to everyone in the room, thanking them for supporting her family. She expressed gratitude to all those who had helped nurture Nao, including one very important guest, a friend of the family and a “distant relative,” whom she had tracked down through a complex web of acquaintances and relatives. Zoua became overwhelmed with emotion as she began her obligatory marriage speech to Nao, which she laced with tribute to people who helped her raise her daughter. Zoua told the wedding party, some twenty years ago, while trying to get to Thailand, she became too sick to continue carrying three-year old Nao. She explained how the special guest, only 14 years old at the time of their exodus out of Laos, had lost his family and was roaming the jungle when he came upon Zoua’s group. He carried her toddler through the jungle, and swam the Mekong River with her on his back. Zoua said she would not be giving her daughter away in marriage had it not been for this man. Zoua’s formal monologue was unusual and intense, and the sober faces in the room listened respectfully with eyes cast downward. Zoua was on her own in this ceremony, without the support of the bride’s father or any of his patri-clan. As Zoua’s voice broke with emotion, sobs infusing her words, her daughter reached to put her arm around her and cried herself. Later Chia explained the family’s unusual situation and why the divorce had caused many problems that were particularly evident at this occasion. While it is normal for tears to flow because the bride is leaving her family and joining a new one, the bride’s mother had to represent her ex-husband in this ceremony and this created distress. The divorce left harsh feelings on both sides. Zoua initiated the divorce because she was not getting the respect, authority and financial support she deserved as the senior wife in a plural marriage. After residing for a time with her husband and his new wife, Zoua became fed up with the

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

way she was being treated and asked for a divorce. The ex-husband, who lives about an hour away, had been invited to all of the weddings held for his children from this wife, but he had not attended any so far. The eldest son says he hates to identify his patri-clan name because the father and his kinsmen never attend the events held for his first family. The father is angry because his ex-wife initiated the divorce and yet has custody of the children. The outcome is different from what many Hmong would have experienced in Laos. Divorce was rare among the Hmong of Laos, and if it did occur, the children most likely would have remained with the father’s kinsmen and they would have been supported accordingly. Zoua’s financial situation is poor by any standard. Doing everything she can to scrape by, she tends a big garden in the summer and sells the produce at the local farmer’s market. To get by she has depended at various times on social security, her income from agricultural jobs in the summer, food stamps, and child support. Five of her twelve children are married and out of the house now. She and the remaining seven school-age children live in a duplex side by side with her brother. Not only is she stressed by financial hardship and divorce, but she must carry many of the family obligations without a large extended family to support her. What family she has is dispersed across many states. Nao and her fiancé, Tou, live in California where they have dated since middle school. Because Nao has a Master’s degree and her educational status is valued, her mother intended to negotiate a generous bridewealth payment, but circumstances developed which limited the marriage options. Zoua wanted Nao to come to her home in Wisconsin so the young man would ask for her hand in marriage from her mother, formally, in the proper way. Nao would be “taken responsibly,” the bridewealth would be higher, and she would be more respected by her in-laws. Nao booked a plane ticket from California to Wisconsin, but became ill and had to reschedule. In the interim, while Nao was visiting her in-laws to be, they planned a catch hand marriage.1 Although culturally acceptable, this kind of action pressures 1

Hmong marriages can be of difference types: mutual consent, elopement, arranged marriage, forced negotiations (because of pregnancy), or bride capture. Those marriages that entail haste and obligation are called catch hand marriages.

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Doing Kinship

5

the kin groups to abruptly commence the marriage process and is not as well thought of as the aforementioned custom. When the suitor’s kinsmen called Nao’s family to let them know she was fine and that they wished to start the marriage process, Nao’s mother was very upset at this course of actions. Feeling manipulated by the groom’s kinsmen, Zoua called relatives in California to fetch her daughter before it was too late but they either didn’t want to get involved or weren’t available. Additionally, the groom’s kinsmen bought plane tickets to come to the Wisconsin wedding in the middle of winter. Zoua wanted the wedding to be held in the summer so that more of the people who helped raise Nao could attend. The more people who support the bride the better her chances for a high bridewealth. This is why my presence at the wedding was not a problem for anyone. Even though I didn’t personally know Nao, I was counted as a bride supporter. What are we to make of this experience? In the social sciences, the answer to this question depends on which theoretical domain the interpreter inhabits. From my travels in different theoretical domains, I will sketch three readings of this ritual scene. Then I will present my own reading, one that incorporates essential elements from the others. The first interpretation focuses on the nature of any given society. Drawing from his belief in the existence of social facts, the structure of society, and the functionality of ritual, the interpreter asks: is a wedding one of the mechanisms holding Hmong society together? The social interpreter attempts to describe the system of rules and beliefs and then show how it binds these actors together. Social norms, collective understandings, and the organization of the kinship system are considered important units of analysis that can yield answers about the nature of Hmong society and why people do what they do. This notion of structure (norms, values, collective behaviors) leads the interpreter to focus on the formal aspects of the wedding; those aspects of it that seem consistent and fixed. Once these pieces are assembled, the meaning of the ritual is found in the group cohesion it promotes through the creation of marriage alliances. But another interpreter might object: Don’t individuals have a role in this human drama? Hasn’t Hmong culture changed over time? How do we account for these changes and the varied motivations of the

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actors? She would approach this wedding as if it were a card game.2 The outcome is dependent partly on the cards one is dealt (in any given situation) and partly on the players’ skills and resources (wealth, social connections, and individual competence). Individual strategies vary depending on the game and the context. In this case, we see individuals developing strategies during the course of the courtship and marriage process. Many levels of play and a hierarchy of players make this a problematic game. The actors are actively maneuvering to secure the best outcome for themselves and their team. The interpreter adjusts the analytical lens to account for forms of inequality and a social structure that is “both constitutive of and constituted by action” of real people (Knauft 1996:127). The third paradigm rests on the uncertainty of interpretation. Is it even possible to analyze the data objectively because all interpretations are subjective? Who determines the meaning of a ritual for the actors involved? Perhaps what is meaningful to a social scientist has more to do with the academic discipline that shaped him than with any “truths” about Hmong culture. Instead of focusing on the regularities of the phenomena observed, the new breed of interpreter focuses on the discontinuities, exceptions, and ambiguities. Instead of producing a neutral or authoritative interpretation, the objective becomes the study of interpretation. What is the meaning of the ritual? From this point of view, no definitive understanding of culture exists apart from particular contexts (personal, social, and temporal) and kinship and ritual have no meaning apart from their uses. As I try to absorb and analyze what I have learned about Hmong kinship, the wedding experience reappears in my mind’s eye. I can still feel the warmth of the crowded room, hear the mother’s sobs, see the symbols of family and community, and smell the cooking food. This Hmong-American ritual concretizes kinship in perception and emotion—obligation, pain, joy, stress, togetherness, and hope for the future. It stands as a revealing snapshot of Hmong culture, with splashes of success and stress spread across time and space. I synthesize useful elements of the three theoretical frameworks, as well as gender analysis, to assist me as I interpret this wedding. This wedding was what Fernandez (1986: ix) calls a “revelatory incident,” a scene where cultural “tropes are actually at play and where 2

I take this approach from Pierre Bourdieu’s essay on marital strategies (1976).

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images are actually argued by recognizable human agents, and where the figurative actually does something to these human agents, to their relationship with others, and to their relation to their world as the figurative helps them define that relationship and that world.” This ritual was one of those electric moments in human relationships marked by deep meaning. In particular, for the Hmong-Americans in attendance, it demonstrated how they can manage their relationships in contexts marked by loss, disruption, adaptation, and emerging possibilities. The essence of Hmong-American kinship was revealed in the kinds of social relationships established among a transplanted people. A critical analysis of how kinship has affected the Hmong refugee experience requires exploring the discourse of Hmong kinship, focusing on the lived experience of refugees and the complexities of their relationships in the United States, and building an interpretation that reflects the complexities and ambiguities of social life as well as our attempts to understand it. In writing about Hmong-American kinship, I am fortunate to be able to draw on several rich theoretical frameworks that I combine to help interpret the varied meanings and potentials of Hmong kinship. The collective norms and practices surrounding marriage partially constitute the socially constructed, systematic schema that Hmong people recognize as kinship. A wedding is a significant rite of passage that is intrinsically cultural; it defines shared codes of meaning in a social venue. At the wedding I attended, ritual customs carried from Laos (and perhaps China before that) were reenacted by Hmong refugees thousands of miles away. The wedding was conducted in the Hmong language, the food was mild in flavor (a Hmong custom meant to soothe the couple’s relationship), and the behaviors of respect between old and young, man and woman, and newly allied kin groups were observed. At the same time, participants tried to make the wedding “American” because they knew that the bride did not want a Hmong wedding, but a romantic, Americanized celebration. Accordingly, they decorated with bells and streamers and purchased a large, colorful wedding cake. Cultural vitality depends upon such rituals because they communicate to the participants and to others in the larger society what it means to be Hmong and American. Children who attend these rituals gain knowledge and skills for their adult roles.

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

Moreover, this wedding illustrated a people’s and a family’s ability to cope with change and to maintain a sense of identity in the process. Clearly, understanding the social parameters and ramifications of this ritual contribute to a better understanding of how and why Hmong culture is adaptive and durable. For the primary actors involved, this is a highly significant ritual because their daily life and identity become different from that day forward. This wedding was scripted because the participants followed certain formalized, stylized conventions but it was also improvised. People had to adjust the ritual to family upheaval and cultural change. Circumstances had combined to make this bride’s family less of a commanding presence at this wedding: financially, socially, emotionally, and physically. One must understand individual motivations and strategies and the current context in order to interpret the meaning(s) of the ritual. Anna Tsing (1993:120) says people never just accept the rules of authority in society—it is always a “complex, messy, and culturally rich process of negotiation.” Too much emphasis on kinship structure masks the contradictions and instabilities inherent in any social organization or practice. Borrowing from themes in contemporary kinship studies, I see the wedding story as one that explains small practices and local events, rather than large-scale or universal concepts. By presenting many voices and perspectives I hope to blend these “mini-narratives” into a larger interpretation that emphasizes kinship process and negotiation. Rather than building an authoritative account of Hmong-American kinship, I see my interpretation as temporal, contextual, and subjective.

Frames of Reference in Kinship Studies Given the current critique of received wisdom in anthropology, it seems necessary to define parameters before tracing the substructures of kinship studies in anthropology. In all human societies some people consider themselves to be more closely related to each other than they are to other people. This understanding then becomes the basis for organizing many interactions and relationships in the course of daily life. Kinship thus emerges as a construction, a schema of human relationships that has consequences in distributing rights, duties and roles. It also encodes relations of power and dependency and assigns

Keown-Bomar, Julie. Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004. ProQuest

Doing Kinship

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social values to various kinship categories. This interpretation is very open and unfettered in contrast to definitions provided by countless anthropologists writing before me, but this definition allows for the incorporation of current approaches that have found biological relatedness, family, marriage, household, and other terms to be restrictive as well as ethnocentric (Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako 1997). Incorporating the ethnographic evidence, and thus, the culturally specific reasons people see themselves as related, forces scholars to be more mindful of their analytical tools. Ethnographic and linguistic research have shown that some cultures do not make the nature vs. nurture distinction in reckoning kinship ties. To use the term kinship cross-culturally it must be sufficiently comprehensive so that it includes both “natural kinship” as defined by genetic ties, as well as “nurture kinship,” the social construction of kinship ties. Biology may or may not be used by people to define their relatedness. They may use analogies that overlay social or natural ties as defined within their own unique cultural system. The change in how scholars constitute kinship reflects this new data, as well as the reorientation and reflexivity of cultural anthropologists over the last two decades. Scholars working in kinship studies today emphasize how people define and interpret their relatedness and how they develop life strategies based on these notions.

Hmong Conceptualizations of Kinship As I have mentioned, in anthropology today, terms such as family and kinship must be used in a broad conceptual manner to be inclusive of the many cross-cultural variations we know to exist. Much controversy surrounds the use of the terms kinship, household, and family in anthropology, consequently culturally specific clarification is warranted.3 I will briefly delineate Hmong understandings of relatedness and explain the family and kin configurations that result from peoples’ interpretations of their connectedness. 3

On the topic whether or not the term family can be applied cross-culturally, and for discussions of the debate over its use in anthropology, see Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Sylvia Yanagisako (1997).

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

Across time and geographical space, the essence of Hmong kinship remains a distinct set of socially recognized ties created by descent and marriage. Networks of relatives kindle obligation, power, and well being in Hmong society. Generation and gender influence how people interpret their roles in family and kin networks, but a shared understanding exists regarding how people are related and the importance of these ties in terms of personhood and social status. Tracing degrees of relatedness through both descent and marriage is an important step in the process of establishing social relationships wherever and whenever Hmong people come into contact. Hmong kinship terms are evoked in many social instances and it is proper to call all people by a kin term, but the degree of closeness and obligation depends largely on lineage and marriage ties, as I will explain. The broadest strokes of kinship are drawn by patri-clan affiliation. Patri-clan (xeem) is a kin category and is a broad classifier. Hmong recognize that by sharing a common surname, they fall into a collective kin category, which carries with it certain obligations, customs, and taboos. For example, it is said that a Hmong individual can seek out others with his or her last name and always find food and shelter. Additionally, if an individual or family group has no close relatives living in the vicinity, Hmong people in their community from the same xeem may be called on for assistance, even though they may not be close relatives. It is forbidden for Hmong to marry someone from the same xeem since a woman and a man with the same last name are reckoned as brother-sister (nus-muag) (Leepreecha 2001). Typically, after marriage women retain the surname of their father but the marriage ceremony signifies they are taken in as members of their husband’s kin group. Typically, a person’s xeem affiliation comes from their father. Children may be adopted into the xeem of their stepfather if their mother remarries, but I don’t believe this is common. It is customary for children to retain membership in the xeem of their biological father even if their father dies and/or their mother remarries. Hmong always try to find a kinship connection when they meet each other. Hmong recognize relatedness based on genealogical relationships to a certain degree, but other markers of descent relatedness such as shared rituals and patri-clan affiliation will come into play. The male members of a lineage become important figures in determining these relationships within the patrilineal kin categories but women are important in terms of establishing connections between kin

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groups. Gary Yia Lee (1999b), a Hmong anthropologist, notes that if two men are not of the same patri-clan, they may ask questions to determine whether their wives or mothers are of the same patri-clan so a relationship may be made through them. If the women are from different patri-clans, they may determine the relatedness of a broader scale, namely that they are both Hmong. Although patri-clan identification is acknowledged, membership in the same lineage or sub-lineage carries much more weight in Hmong society.4 In terms of kinship structure, lineage and sub-lineage are kin groupings. Group implies something more tangible than category. Hmong within the same lineage group share a common identifier (surname), and other common characteristics, such as shared ritual practices and similar ways of constructing graves for their dead. In the case where individuals find they perform certain rituals the same way, “then they are people that share the same spirit” (Leepreecha 2001:62). If lineage is shared, members may also share known ancestors, which would designate even closer relatedness based on descent. Direct descent is pertinent when Hmong people are calculating how closely they are related by determining commonly held, known ancestors on the father’s side. Men who share the same surname may use the kin term kwvtij (brothers and cousins of the same xeem) to refer to each other, but if men are agnates (members the same lineage or same sub-lineage) kwvtij takes on a more obligatory meaning.5 They may refer to themselves as members of the same original household (tsev neeg) or as a cluster of brothers (ib cuab kwvtij). In all likelihood they consider themselves close relatives because they are direct descendents of the same ancestor. In some instances, a sub-lineage group may form an active community with shared interests. The term pawg neeg is a group that shares decision-making, resources, and responsibilities. In Laos, members of a pawg neeg may live together in

4

Gary Yia Lee (1999b) and Prasit Leepreecha (2001) refer to lineage as subclan and sub-lineage as lineage in their writings. 5 Kwvtij (cousin/brother) can refer to younger and older brothers, relatives in one’s paternal lineage or members of one’s patri-clan depending on the context.

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a village or in nearby villages and they would have a group leader or spokesman. In terms of affinal relationships, marriage binds kin groups together, evokes mutual reciprocity, and codifies conduct between spouses, in-laws and patri-clan groups. For men, their relationships to their brethren (kwvtij) are deemed basic and constructive throughout their lives but their relationships with their wives’ relatives (neejtsa) are also critical. Neejtsa are relatives related by marriage and when a woman marries into her husband’s family she is supposed to call her own family neejtsa and her husband’s side kwvtij. Women’s standing and identification within kin groups can and does change. Hmong women use the word kwvtij infrequently, but Hmong men I spoke with referred to their kwvtij repeatedly. It is common to hear men refer to kin from their father’s side as my kwvtij, whereas married women may refer to these relatives as our kwvtij. Donnelly (1994:81) discusses the importance of male relatedness in everyday life and suggests that men in Laos saw their nuclear family as secondary “to the more important family of related men who worked together and stuck together through life.” I am reluctant to generalize about Hmong-American men in such a way mainly because of generational differences, but I am confident that the men I spoke with do regard their relatives and their role in kinship networks differently than women subjects in this study. Men are understood to be the political representatives in family and kin networks. Through gender socialization, Hmong men and women come away with different connections and different ways of speaking about their kinship networks. Women rely on various relatives depending on their status and experiences within kin networks. Women I spoke with discussed a wider array of relatives they depended on, including their family of origin, their husband, their children, and/or their in-laws and husband’s extended family. Younger women occasionally turn to friends for support and assistance. Women agreed the culturally acceptable pattern was to identify with and rely on their husband’s family first, but how this ideal was practiced depended on the individual. Family and household are difficult concepts to explain within any cultural domain, and are even more difficult to apply cross-culturally. Even in Western societies, family must be explained in context. For example, in one instance, family may mean only parents and their children who live in the same household. In another instance, family

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many refer to a wide group of relatives who rarely see each other, let alone depend on one another, as in the phrase, “family reunion.” The Hmong terms, tsev neeg (house people) and yim (household or family) work in much the same way.6 Contextual description shows just how elastic tsev neeg groups are in Hmong society. Tsev neeg refers to those people who are related through an original household. As such, tsev neeg may refer to a group of related individuals that live together, work together to make a living, raise children, conduct social rituals, and take care of each other. It may include several generations (grandparents, married sons, their wives, and their children) linked by descent or marriage. Perhaps, several households think of themselves as tsev neeg, as in the case of married sons and their wives and children who live outside the patrilocal residence, but consider themselves members of the original tsev neeg. In other words, the members of the tsev neeg do not have to be co-residential. Tsev neeg members may be quite dispersed and even reside in different countries, but they will be consulted for important tsev neeg decisions or for other kinds of support, such as immigration sponsorship. I think it is useful to collapse the Western notions of family, extended family, and household when conceptualizing the tsev neeg social unit. When I use the word “family” and “household” in this text, I am referring to the Hmong tsev neeg or yim. Through this study I have found family relations inextricably linked to wider kinship networks, thus I use kinship as an overarching rubric, but discuss tsev neeg relations as well. Hmong conceptualizations of kinship are largely about formally recognized ties between people. Shared descent and shared practices (nurturance, material support, and spiritual recognition) can be important elements of Hmong kinship, but these conceptualizations of kinship are secondary to the formal notion of social relatedness. Hmong look after their family and kin relationships and those who do not know how to maintain these relationships are marginalized in Hmong communities. A hypothetical example may help to illustrate what I mean by establishing and maintaining relatedness. By all accounts, if an unmarried Hmong man and woman co-habited and raised their biological children together, they would be outside the 6

In most conversations, the terms tsev neeg and yim are used interchangeably.

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bounds of Hmong society. Their union is illegitimate due to the absence of a prescribed social ritual linking their extended families together. The Hmong marriage ritual unites two families in a formal relationship, which is cemented both materially and spiritually. Hmong people note that bridewealth “makes a relationship” and they are referring to both the relationship between the bride and groom and the relationship between the respective kin groups. In families that practice ancestor worship, the new wife is formally accepted into the spiritual world of the husband’s ancestors – her soul is welcomed to her new family’s spiritual circle. In the case of an unmarried Hmong couple and their children, their relatedness as a family and as members of kin groups is incomplete even though they may live together, care for one another, and be the biological and social parents of their children. Their children may be referred to as orphans, and the couple and their respective families may be shamed and stigmatized in the Hmong community. Unlike other cultural understandings of kinship, the Hmong notion of being related is about socially established ties, not necessarily descent, genetic relatedness, or nurturance.

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Travels in Kinship Studies Kinship is at the heart of anthropology, but its definition has undergone many transformations in the discipline. By tracing these trajectories, one can see how each theoretical school offers unique analytical tools. The following discussion offers a brief historical synopsis of specific theoretical frameworks and an illustration of how I, and others, have reformulated these tools to better understand uprooted peoples. The role of kinship in identity formation and social behavior received extensive attention from such anthropologists as Meyer Fortes (1971), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1950), and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1951) who worked in the first half of the twentieth century, but have been accorded far less attention by contemporary anthropologists. These early structural-functionalist anthropologists regarded kinship as basic to social organization in nonwestern societies and characterized lineage as one of the primary ways to analyze social structure. They believed that descent groups (based on lineage) had fundamental economic, social, and political functions. Kinship systems were thought to derive their form from their function in a particular structure. It was common

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for anthropologists to presuppose that a kinship system organized by rules of descent allowed for the survival of a particular group of interrelated people by making sure that resources--and, material wealth, and labor--were kept in the group. Earlier scholars believed that by studying the kinship units that constituted the society they could formulate a body of theory that explained social stability and the reproduction of social relations. Underlying these assumptions were essentialist ideas about men’s and women’s roles in sexual reproduction, family life, and concepts of relatedness that critics have since argued were based on European models. Kinship studies tended to focus on what Meyer Fortes called the “politico-jural” (i.e. the public domain) and to ignore domestic life. Critics charge that imbalance was rooted in anthropology’s orthodoxies, the domestic/public dichotomy, and the devaluation of women.7 Additionally, one of the criticisms launched against structural-functionalist understandings of kinship is that the theorists failed to see the larger social and economic forces that affected human relationships. Kinship scholars today do not see kinship structure as a monolithic force that determines individual behavior. Many would agree it should be regarded as providing “inherent conditions which promote certain kinds of behavior in certain contexts and at the same time make others less likely while at the same time it is constructed and reproduced through behavior” (Bastug 1998:96). Social theorists Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Anthony Giddens (1984) and anthropologists Sherry Ortner (1984) and Marshall Sahlins (1985) have helped contemporary kinship scholars develop frameworks that avoid creating a single-factor model of behavior. Scholars have become sophisticated in their analysis of changing economic, political, social, and ideological contexts and the resulting influence on human relationships. My task is to ask questions about how people use their relationships to practical ends in specific contexts, how they organize themselves, and how they create meaning and order in their lives as diasporic people. Within the field of kinship studies this is a new endeavor that requires blending and improving 7

For discussions of these issues, see L. Tilly and J. Scott 1978, Sylvia Yanagisako 1979, Rayna Rapp 1979, Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier 1987, and Stephen Gudeman 1995.

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existing frameworks to yield a fuller understanding of the significance of kinship in the lives of uprooted people. War, exodus and migration created situations that threatened the survival of Hmong people physically and culturally. Ties with people and places were broken and reassembled. In terms of anthropological interest, this framework makes it possible to think about the ways in which kinship encodes meaning for a people who migrate across different cultural domains. Studies of people in transition highlight the dual nature of culture— how it can change over time and according to context as well as provide the continuity of structure and meaning that enables people to consult and act. I join many contemporary scholars who are interested in everyday experiences, understandings and strategies of agency, and inequality. Since a list of noteworthy figures would be lengthy, I mention three influential works by anthropologists that contributed to important epistemological shifts in the field of kinship: from structural causality to people-driven strategies of process and negotiation; from deterministic to culturally defined concepts; and from androcentric to gendered interpretation. In Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, Margery Wolf (1972) demonstrates the value of incorporating women’s voices in ethnography. Indeed, by considering women’s points of view about the family, she comes to a completely different conclusion about patrilineality and patrilocality than scholars before her. Contrary to popular stereotypes of Asian families, which claim the group always comes before the individual, Wolf finds that the successful Taiwanese woman is a rugged individualist who depends on herself and her relationships with the outside community while seeming to depend on her father, her husband, and her son. Wolf offers a look at gendered strategies, illustrates the ways in which women are able to assert relative degrees of control in their lives, and demonstrates that there may be multiple models for constructing kinship. Carol Stack’s (1974) All Our Kin, an ethnography about AfricanAmerican women in an urban area, illustrates how economic, ideological and social forces oppress families and how women in turn respond with resourceful networking strategies. Kinship for Stack becomes a “strategic site for social action and resistance to the disenfranchisements of a racist society” (Peletz 2001:420). A landmark study that discredits the “culture of poverty” myth (i.e. behavior breeds

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poverty), it shows how families adapted to their poverty conditions by forming highly complex support networks composed of family and friends. In “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” Gayle Rubin (1975) offers an eloquent critique of earlier structural and essentialist models, then shifts the theoretical paradigm in two ways. She points out how social structures are cultural productions, and coins the term “sex-gender system” as a unit of analysis and focus of social change. Rubin postulates the feminist view that no social arrangement of human sexuality rests solely on biology. By identifying the nature of structural domination of women by men through mechanisms of the kinship system (marital exogamy and alliance), she shows how men and women are placed in asymmetrical roles; men are the “givers” and women are the “gifts.” This structural relationship is one that leads to men having disproportionate power over women. Recent approaches by Schneider (1984) and Yanagisako and Collier (1987) have fostered additional theoretical and empirical innovations by emphasizing the subjective, relativistic, and symbolic interpretation of kinship. Culture is viewed as more fragmentary, contested and negotiated. As a result of this subjective positioning, no society is seen as timeless, harmonious, and undifferentiated, but as set in a certain historical and situational context and composed of diverse individuals and groups with different interests (McGee and Warms 1996). Deconstructionist interpretations provide us with an opportunity to look at texts, categories, and social theories with a different, more critical perspective. Definitive interpretations of cultural phenomena are forsaken and replaced by various readings set in certain social, personal and historical contexts. This theoretical framework signals a repositioning away from the earlier emphasis on social cohesion and it assails many of the distinctions upon which early anthropological studies were based. In fact, Schneider (1984) uproots kinship from the “natural facts” (biology) and the “social facts” (structural functionalism) by stating that kinship consists of a set of symbols that have an intrinsic substance and meaning that has nothing to do with an external reality or biological relationships (Vernon 1980). Similar critiques of modern kinship theory by scholars Jane Collier and Sylvia

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Yanagisako (1987) have sparked controversy because they have advocated dismissing kinship as an analytical category in anthropology altogether. These scholars have called into question the basic assumptions of kinship and whether or not it is appropriate to distinguish kinship as a separate cultural domain. Wary of kinship models that purport to classify all kinship systems, Yanigisako and Collier (1987) and Kuper (1982) are in favor of taking a more “circuitous route” to understanding how people conceptualize relatedness via gender or the body (Carsten 2000:5). Too much emphasis on kinship structure masks individual agency and the many forms human relationships can take. Particularly, in times of great personal and social upheaval, it is important to focus on personal experiences that tell the complex story of how uprooted people worked with each other through the challenges of war, exodus and resettlement. Kinship is not an etic model of, and an explanation for, the dynamics of Hmong relationships during these times, but it can be instructive if we understand it as an emic resource that people use to enable their own survival and adjustment. The study of kinship in anthropology today is often wholly or partially dispatched to other academic specializations such as political anthropology, economic anthropology, or feminist anthropology. It appears that contextualizing kinship in this way has altered (if not eliminated) its usefulness as an analytical tool. Recognizing that kinship systems are gendered and culturally defined is fundamental to my interpretation, but understanding what constitutes relatedness is the theoretical bedrock of this study. My reluctance to discard kinship as an analytical tool in a post-Schneider world, stems directly from what I have learned from Hmong people about their relatedness and the centrality of these connections in terms of their personal identity and social relationships. Although some may find my theoretical eclecticism dubious, I am confident that they would find my reliance on native understandings of relatedness reassuring. At least for Hmong people, there exists a recognizable domain of relationships where obligations and expectations between people are greater. My conclusion that social cohesion can result from the way Hmong people interpret and act on their ties to one another is not presumptive theoretical positioning; it is what I learned from the subjects of this study, participant observation, and secondary research.

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In the case of Hmong-American refugees, kinship should be looked upon as a dynamic and contested system but also a cultural institution through which Hmong-American people maintain commonly held values, norms, and cultural practices that set them apart from other cultural groups. Kinship, in any case, is not neutral. Kinship strategies affect people differently and often inequitably. I agree with Michael Peletz (2001) that kinship plays an ambivalent role in human experience. It creates the “simultaneous experience of powerful, contradictory emotions or attitudes toward a single phenomenon” depending on the position of the individual (Peletz 2001:414). Actors are always in the process of defining and negotiating social relationships and, in some cases, rejecting group membership all together. In this ethnography, I present personal stories of ambivalence towards family and kin. In summary, I borrow heavily from several theoretical frameworks so that I might better evaluate how relationships and responsibilities are organized and negotiated in the context of social upheaval and transformation. Hmong-American kinship stands at an important juncture where pressures from the dominant society and relationships within the family and community meet at the personal level. Because I found kinship networks to be exceedingly important in the lives of Hmong-Americans, this study, “reiterates in a new way a very old tenet of anthropology–the centrality of kinship” (Carsten 2000:5).

Kinship and Diasporic Peoples Kinship is fundamental to our understanding of all human societies but becomes particularly relevant to the study of diasporic peoples. Why people move and how they experience resettlement often hinges on their ties to other people.8 The twentieth century was one of the most violent in human history, sending masses of refugees away from their 8

Several scholars identify the family or kin group as the strategic site for understanding immigration flows and patterns. See, for instance, Immigration and the Family: Research and Policy on U.S. Immigrants, Alan Booth et.al. (1997).

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homelands for temporary or permanent resettlement. If this century approximates the former, refugee studies will become increasingly important. For the sake of uprooted people and the countries that admit them, scholars must examine the role of human ties in the process of relocation and change. Even though most kinship scholars have moved from or completely abandoned structural-functionalist interpretations, some of the pivotal questions asked about the role of kinship in life strategies, social stability and group identity take on new significance for scholars who study transnational migration and forced relocation. The focus of structural-functionalists used to be on kinship in stable social contexts.9 The problematic today requires that we address the functions of kinship in times of instability. Nazli Kibria is one scholar who exemplifies how and why kinship is important for uprooted people. In her study of Vietnamese families living in Philadelphia, Kibria (1994:25) states, “For immigrant women and men, the immigrant family and community are sources of economic, political, and cultural resistance, vehicles for adaptation to the dominant society.” Kibria’s work in particular discusses how Vietnamese American women experience oppression and resistance as women and as family members. Noted immigration scholar, Ruben Rumbaut, believes that the family is the primary means by which immigrant groups adapt. Especially for immigrant groups with little human capital trying to adapt under often discriminatory conditions of extreme economic, cultural and social disadvantage, the likelihood of success will hinge to a large extent on the availability of strong family solidarity, centered on cohesive conjugal and parental bond, and ethnic community support” (Rumbaut 1997:28). Recent work on the sociology of the family has focused on how immigrants use cultural understandings and practices to cope with life in America, but one of the limitations of contemporary immigration 9

There is dispute as to whether colonized territories were indeed stable at the time Fortes, Meyers and Radcliffe-Brown were doing their fieldwork. It was later researchers like Kathleen Gough (1971) who pointed out the importance of the historical context to kinship forms and patterns in Africa.

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sociology is how researchers have construed “the family” and “the household.” Existing social science models of the family as a bonded social unit composed of parents and their children living in one household are challenged by Hmong perceptions of family. I point out ways in which participants use their ties in family and kinship networks to improve their welfare. By putting kinship at the center of my analysis, I create a more all-encompassing notion of relatedness that extends beyond the family and extended family, as is traditionally understood in social research, to include all kin whether related by marriage, blood, or even social familiarity. I argue that Hmong-American people use their understandings of kinship as a means to maintain cultural continuity as well as to adapt to new situations. This ethnography is an attempt to recognize how a people can navigate the task of adapting by emphasizing shared cultural frames of reference. In the case of Hmong refugees living in Western Wisconsin, kinship emerges as a useful cultural institution in the process of continuity and change.

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Ethnographic Notes Demographics Daily (2000) listed Menomonie, Wisconsin, the center of my research, as one of 141 small-sized American “dream towns.” Researchers considered such things as community vitality, support for schools, freedom from stress, low cost of living, and small town character. Townspeople often comment on the satisfying quality of life and the serene natural surroundings. The countryside is picturesque— rolling hills, crop fields, dairy farms, river ways, and wooded areas where deciduous hardwoods, oak savannah and pine abound. About 15,000 people live in and around the city proper. Primary employers are the local Swiss Miss factory, 3M company, and the University of Wisconsin-Stout. The nearest metropolitan area, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, is about one hour’s drive from Menomonie. Despite its tranquil appearance, this small town is not immune to controversy and conflict. Several years ago, the student council requested that the high school logo, a figurehead of a Great Plains Indian chief, be changed to a student-designed Mustang. The request

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factionalized the community, and in 1997, citizens voted in a special election to recall three school board members who had supported the student council’s wishes. The Indian name remains today although the figurehead logo is downplayed. The American Indian presence in Menomonie is quite small. In fact, the vast majority of the residents are Euro-American. The controversy drew national attention and is still a steaming issue among supporters of the Indian logo, who believe it represents school pride, and opponents who feel strongly that it is racist and damaging. This dispute first alerted me that there were some strong xenophobic and racist attitudes in the community. Hateful comments were made in public and private about Native Americans and about the logo opponents, who were accused of trying to change a community’s identity in their quest for “political correctness.” Menomonie is home to about 66 Hmong families whose presence does not please all long-term residents. Destructive Hmong stereotypes persist even though Hmong people have been living in Menomonie for some 29 years. On a broad range of topics from self-sufficiency to education, many non-Hmong people are misinformed about the Hmong. Fears and prejudices about Hmong people are voiced in quiet conversations in all quarters of the community. I was told Hmong people eat dogs, have children in order to increase their welfare benefits, poach the local pheasant population, do not pay taxes, receive handouts from the government, and so on. Yet, many other people fight racism in the community. Some of my co-workers make it their job to speak out against racism in the state schools. Some parents want their children to learn Hmong, and many people, including myself, attend meetings for community building across cultural and ethnic lines. Through these people and events, I have become familiar with the wide spectrum of perspectives in the community. From the beginning of my doctoral program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, my community seemed to be a logical site for field research. My graduate research experience in Inner Mongolia, China had fueled my interest in studying the experiences of ethnic minority groups, but returning to Asia for ethnographic fieldwork did not seem feasible. My husband had a promising tenure-track faculty position and we just had our first child. I also wanted to nurture the sense of belonging to a community by investing in it. I reasoned that doing research close to home could be constructive as well as manageable. I began to look for local opportunities to work on issues

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concerning Hmong people in Menomonie and nearby Wisconsin communities. This area of the mid-western United States is an ideal location to study Hmong-American life because Hmong population numbers have been growing steadily in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Much of this growth is due to secondary migration from other large Hmong communities. A poll conducted in Minnesota reports that 76 percent of Hmong respondents came to the state to rejoin family or friends (St. Paul Pioneer Press 2000).10 In 2000, the Hmong population in the United States was approximately 170,000 and according to the Refugee Services Section of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, approximately one-half of this number is American-born. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates 41,800 Hmong live in the State of Minnesota, but local Hmong leaders and government officials believe the figures are closer to 60,000 to 70,000. St. Paul, Minnesota is thought to have the most Hmong residents of any city in the world (Moua 2002). As for Wisconsin, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the number of Hmong residents to be 33,791, but state government officials believe the number is closer to 43,423. Smaller communities in Wisconsin like Wausau, La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Menomonie have sizeable concentrations of Hmong residents. Demographically and conceptually, the Minnesota and Wisconsin region, is the hub of Hmong life in the mid-west.

10

A comprehensive geographical investigation of Hmong refugee resettlement has been conducted by Ines M. Miyares (1998).

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Map of Menomonie, WI and Surrounding Area

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Map Credit: Edwin Joseph

I do not intend for Menomonie’s Hmong community to serve as a “typical” Hmong community. Differences between life in urban and rural environments make sweeping ethnic or cultural statements about Hmong in America problematical. Nor would I say that Menomonie is a complete exception—a culturally unique community of Hmong people living in the United States. This ethnography documents experiences that may echo across Hmong communities in the United States and perhaps other Hmong communities across the globe, but it is not my intent to make authoritative claims about the culture or people. The concept of “Hmong community” is not straightforward. As an ethnic group in the United States, Hmong-Americans are very mobile. People keep in touch with relatives all over the United States and the world. They travel hours across the state or region to attend family gatherings or New Year events, they shop for particular kinds of foods or clothing in the Twin Cities, and they travel to Thailand and Laos to see relatives. Intra-and international ties are unmistakable. Wherever one finds Hmong people in the world, one finds an established group of Hmong people living together. It would be rare to find one Hmong family residing in a city without other Hmong people living in the same community. In my experience, I have only heard one Hmong person express a desire to live in a place that does not have a sizeable Hmong community. These residential patterns are called ethnic enclaves in

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sociological literature, a term that aptly describes the social geography of Hmong people in America and in my community. Because my goal was to make my project collaborative and useful, my first task was to seek input from Hmong community members as to what kind of questions they might like to see addressed. I did not reveal my interests, but I did let people know my areas of focus in cultural anthropology. My personal interest from the beginning was gender, but in no conversations with men or women did gender emerge as an issue of explicit concern. In these early exchanges, a keen interest in kinship and family relations did surface. Early on, I remember one man saying, “If you could help us understand problems that parents are having with their children that would be useful.” Hmong elders expressed concern that their culture was being lost and young people had little interest in learning the ways of their parents or grandparents. I talked with young Hmong people who found it a challenge to reconcile the expectations of their parents with demands from outside their homes. After more research, I learned that to study intergenerational dynamics I would need to improve my understanding of Hmong kinship. Eventually, I shaped my research around kinship in the hope that my findings would be context rich, culturally grounded, and relevant to the people with whom I collaborated. Once I had a topic to address, I went to the Executive Director of the Hmong American Community Association (HACA) to ask for his guidance and to establish a reciprocal working relationship. In many cities with larger Hmong populations, mutual assistance associations like HACA stand at the intersection between the local Hmong population and wider national and international Hmong political networks. The staff members possess expertise and leadership that, for the most part, tends to be respected by members of the Hmong community. I felt that I needed to get clearance from leaders at the community center and to be prepared to give something back. Before starting graduate school, I had worked in various positions as a program coordinator and grant writer. After explaining to the director what my training and interests were, I volunteered to help with grant writing efforts if he would lend me a hand in my research. He seemed receptive but told me about past scholars and students who had not

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been particularly good at following through with their commitments or who had written statements about the Hmong that were not true. I accepted two obligations based on our conversation: I have not committed to more tasks than I could reasonably do, and I have offered to let staff members at HACA read my work before I send it out for publication. I believe the director’s ultimate goal is to prevent the spread of more misinformation about Hmong people. Given the stereotypes that abound, I am thankful for people with this drive and sense of responsibility. Positive working relationships and many good contacts and opportunities have come to pass from this initial conversation. No one word or phrase describes my position as an ethnographer. Depending on the ethnographic context, I have been a student, researcher, educator, confidant, friend, authority figure, and naïve outsider. In some cases, people outwardly thanked me for my efforts to share information about Hmong culture with other Americans and with younger generations of Hmong-Americans. Often, I was aware of my status as an American because conversations were filled with examples of “Hmong do it this way, as opposed to Americans who do it this way.” Hmong almost always use “American” to refer to EuroAmericans. Socially constructed understandings of race and ethnicity are articulated in moments like these—non-Whites are different and ethnic, while whites are mainstream. These dialogues revealed our social positions in the nation’s racial and ethnic hierarchy. I am reminded of the powerful and deeply inequitable nature of American whiteness to be “centered and assumed” (Rothenberg 2002). At the close of one extraordinary interview, an elderly woman conscientiously thanked “my people” for the social security insurance (SSI) she receives. She had lost relatives in the war, and her sons had fought for their country with help from the CIA. She narrowly escaped the war and was forced to leave her homeland for her own safety. After recounting her experiences, she wanted to make sure I recorded her gratitude to my people and to my government for the SSI financial assistance. It was a telling and emotional moment. I felt not only humbled by her sincerity, but also complicit in a power that removes innocent grandmothers from their homelands and family. At that moment, I became acutely aware of my own social location. I realized that no matter how subordinate or egalitarian I might try to be in this ethnographic endeavor, the only reason I was interviewing Hmong in

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America was because my government had played political power games in Southeast Asia with real people’s lives. I am deeply appreciative of the openness and kindness people have demonstrated to me throughout this study. I have come away awed by the power of humans to endure horrific events, and I am indebted to those who answered my questions and tolerated my presence. Generally I have found that most people are willing to discuss a wide variety of topics even those that may be controversial or draw criticism. Polygyny, religious animal sacrifice, and marriage practices can be objectionable conversation material because of the way nonHmong people have judged many Hmong practices. I never pointedly raised controversial topics in conversations. I found that people were more willing to discuss them if they emerged in the course of conversations about cultural change, family conflict, or even discrimination. But because the media have sensationalized Hmong practices without giving attention to cultural contexts, many Hmong people are predictably reluctant to address them at all. Powerful gender roles and expectations exist in Hmong culture. My status as a woman researcher allowed participants, particularly women, to discuss gender differences and conflicts that would not have been addressed if I were male. I am also a mother, which gave me a recognized status. Parents in Hmong culture are respected as mature adults. Often, I brought my young children with me to social events, not so much to ease communications (although children are great icebreakers) but to do my share of the work, research, and parenting that my husband and I juggle. Hmong children are always present at public and private occasions where they are both seen and heard. More often than not, my husband was specifically included in invitations to events or gatherings. Because of this generous hospitality, I did not feel that I needed to isolate my life from my research. I don’t really have a field study start date because I never went away to “do field work,” as has been traditional in anthropological research. I am never out of the field, and I don’t expect my research endeavor to end unless I move away from the Midwest. I have attended weddings, wedding negotiations, church services, conferences, New Year celebrations, Fourth of July extravaganzas, potlucks, plays, and community meetings. I benefited from cooking lessons offered by

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Hmong friends; attended language classes with young Hmong adults; had lunch and coffee with women friends; participated on a list-serve about Hmong health and language issues; facilitated focus groups about Hmong culture; and advised the Hmong Stout Student Association while teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Several Hmong students invited me to their homes to talk with family members and asked me to weddings or other celebrations. My being active on campus in all things Hmong, from language classes to grant projects and conferences, opened many doors in the Hmong community. The core body of data for this study comes from informal and semi-structured personal interviews with individuals and families. The informal interviews occurred regularly during the course of my research in classrooms, in meetings, at church gatherings, and at the Hmong American Community Center. In this way I found many people who were willing to talk about their experiences, put me in touch with other people who might be helpful, tell me folktales, talk about child rearing, and teach me Hmong words and phrases. If I found a conversation to be particularly insightful, then I recorded notes afterwards and tried to make connections to other data. Sometimes these conversations allowed me to ask for a more formal interview at a later date. The primary information I use in this study comes from the semistructured, open-ended interviews I conducted with eight women and eleven men. After explaining the purpose and uses of the research and completing the consent forms, I described how this research method was more like a conversation than a survey and that I hoped they would feel welcome to speak freely on the topics or to share experiences as they felt comfortable. I began each interview with standard questions: name, age, length of time in the United States and living arrangements. I then proceeded with open-ended questions about the exodus from Laos and Thailand, sponsorship, the exchange of goods and services, socializing, family roles and responsibilities, and cultural change. These questions were designed to elicit the various strategies Hmong individuals and families used to cope with cultural change, adaptation, and adversity. Although I often steered the conversations, I also encouraged participants to speak openly about the topics that arose in the conversation and to ask me questions if they so desired. With an individual’s permission, I tape recorded interviews and also wrote notes during the conversation. To protect the people who participated in this

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research, I have used pseudonyms and in some cases, I also conceal their identities by changing the details of locations or events, a precaution that is necessary when subjects live in a small town. The participants represent near equal numbers of Green Hmong (hmoob ntsuab or moob leeg) and White Hmong (hmoob dawb), the two principal dialect groups. The number of Christian men and women and those who coj dab (bear witness to the spirits) are in close balance. The median age of the participants was 34 years, and the median length of time spent in the United States was 14.2 years. Half of the people interviewed were either married or divorced. All of the married and divorced participants had children. I found the majority of the participants with recruitment help from the Hmong American Community Association (HACA) in Menomonie and the Hmong Stout Student Organization (HSSO). As a recruitment tool, HACA translated and sent a letter I wrote to approximately 66 families in Menomonie, but this approach only yielded three interviews. The remaining interviews were secured through a volunteer request I made at a meeting of the Hmong Stout Student Association and through telephone recruitment at the Hmong American Community Association. Nineteen people were interviewed in seventeen separate interviews, some of which were conducted with more than one family member present. The interviews lasted between 2 and 3 hours each and were conducted in either the English or Hmong language, depending on the participant’s preference. Interpreting services were employed from three interpreters at the Hmong American Community Association. In one case a younger family member interpreted for an older family member during the interview. I have also gathered genealogical information from more than 12 individuals about their families to get some insights into who is considered related and how kinship structure is determined. I have depended heavily on two Hmong colleagues for insight into kinship terminology and group structure. These sources of data have provided me with diverse kinds of information from various perspectives. I felt it was important to have insights from those who strayed from the mainstream so I sought interviews from people who married non-Hmong partners or were divorced. Their perspectives were extremely helpful in evaluating

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

collective norms and conventions and the reactions to nonconformity in Hmong communities. I am genuinely grateful to all those who have liberally given their time, their knowledge and their stories.

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Hmong-American Kinship Networks My core premise, which is based on Hmong characterizations, is that establishing and maintaining a network of relatives who are able to help one another, especially in times of need, is quintessentially Hmong. Wherever they have migrated, Hmong form networks of related individuals whose dealings with each other affect their common welfare. In Hmong kinship networks, as in many societies, alliances are established and broken, generations come together and carry on, and children are born and reared. However, Hmong diasporic experiences illustrate how their schema of kinship afforded individuals distinctive powers of adaptation and resilience. When Hmong have undergone displacement and relocation they have drawn on familiar patterns, but they have renewed these traditions in light of their new circumstances. Across oceans and generations, a well established meta-understanding of kinship binds Hmong people together. Most importantly, this schema of kinship has, at once, withstood and accommodated change. The data illustrates specifically how participants have used kinship schemas to adapt to life in Wisconsin, as well as to maintain a sense of cultural continuity and identity. Because kinship encodes relations of power and dependency and assigns social values to various kinship categories, any individual’s power within his or her family and kin network is relative to the individual’s status and ability to strategize. My objective is to convey understandings of Hmong kinship through the lived experiences of men and women in this study. For Hmong-Americans, strategies are developed based on interpretations of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, cultural domains. Gender and generation have a bearing on Hmong perspectives and strategies. I have tried to make these subjective standpoints salient throughout each of the chapters. These chapters are organized around important elements of kinship and a flow of themes that emerged from my fieldwork. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of Hmong people that concentrates primarily on

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the most recent migrations out of Laos and resettlements in the United States. It explains some of the changes faced by Hmong people during the war, the exodus and resettlement. This chapter also explores the ethnohistory of Hmong people in terms of language, subsistence, political organization, and religion. The final part of the chapter provides an introduction to the structure of Hmong kinship systems and briefly highlights published research on the topic of Hmong-American kinship. In Chapter 3, I begin to describe how Hmong refugees used kinship as a resource to navigate the challenges they faced during the war, exodus and resettlement. I draw on the memories of those people I interviewed who had experienced relocation and adaptation first hand. My premise in this chapter is that Hmong people depended heavily on kinship as a resource for survival and escape and also in the early stages of adaptation to life in the United States. Hmong kinship is an organized but flexible system that helped refugees restructure and reorder their everyday lives. I discuss how families chose where to live, how they arranged for transportation, housing, and employment, and how they began a new life. Chapter 4 describes family values and practices as they relate to making a go of it after resettlement in the United States. I describe the many strategies families and individuals employ to reach selfsufficiency in the United States. I also share insights about the declining importance of family size to family well-being and the increasing importance of education, which itself is a major adaptation to mainstream culture in the United States. Lastly, I discuss the influx of new stressors relating to work, material consumption, and generational relationships that come with cultural accommodation. One of the issues explored in this chapter is how Hmong people are fitting into the wider community (local and national) and what happens when Hmong and U.S. expectations are contradictory. In Chapter 5, Gender, The Family and Change, I focus on the range of kinship values and norms that exist within Hmong communities regarding intimate relationships, marriage, family conflict, and divorce and how these values are changing in light of new contexts. Marriage and divorce are frequently discussed topics in Hmong media sources, at conferences and during community

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

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gatherings. I share the ways that families have successfully managed many of these challenges as well as problems that persist. I also discuss drastic changes in personal and social relationships that accompany marriage but affect Hmong women and men differently. In the realm of marriage, kinship responsibilities come to the forefront especially in regard to gender roles and expectations. The ways in which Hmong people use kinship is highly adaptive, meaningful, and informative. In the final chapter, I highlight the lessons that policy makers and social service providers can learn from the support networks I have observed in Hmong communities.

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CHAPTER 2

Hmong History and Culture

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History of the Hmong (Keeb Kwm Hmoob) An estimated 12 million Hmong people live in communities scattered around the globe. Sizeable Hmong enclaves thrive in northern Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, northern Laos, and since 1975 in France, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, French Guyana, and Germany.”11 China is home to some eight million Hmong, who the Chinese refer to as Miao. Hmong people have fought for the protection of their homelands, escaped persecution by flight, and relocated many times in their history. Hmong cultural history suggests they have successfully developed ways to cope with rapid and drastic social change and dislocation. Recapping the entire history of the Hmong people is beyond the scope of this chapter, but their history is a harrowing story of change and adaptation (Quincy 1987, HamiltonMerritt 1999, Morrison 1999, Tapp 1986 & 1999). The Southeast Asian conflict changed the lives of the Hmong living in Laos in tremendous and costly ways. The Hmong lost more lives in the civil war than did any other ethnic group in Laos. Almost one-third of the Hmong in Laos, mostly noncombatants, perished from civilian military campaigns, disease, and starvation (Quincy 2000:5). The war and its aftermath disrupted family units, changed family roles, set in motion a massive exodus of people, and made reconnecting with family members an ongoing struggle even today. Understanding how

11

The ethnographic data for this chapter come primarily from a previous publication by authors Julie Keown-Bomar, Timothy Dunnigan, and John Beierle, Cultural Summary: North American Hmong, eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, September 19, 2002. 33

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

the Hmong survive conflict, experience loss, and cope with change and conflict is central to understanding them as a people. The history of the Hmong is characterized by a succession of migrations. Most sources date the origin of the Hmong to between 2700 and 2300 B.C. in the Yellow River and Yangtze River regions of China. After numerous conflicts with Han invaders from the north, the Hmong moved from their homeland to the mountains of Southeast Asia, settling in the nation-states of Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos in the early 1800s. Hmong migrants to Laos settled in the highest summits of mountains and quickly adapted from a lowland way of life to an upland subsistence strategy based on swidden agriculture (Yang Dao 1990). Their crops included rice, corn, and vegetables for food as well as opium for medicinal use and sale. Because the Hmong did not compete directly with established populations in the river valleys and plains, they were able to resist cultural assimilation and preserve their traditions. Hmong people lived in villages of 40-50 families connected by marriage alliances and a social philosophy that emphasized cooperation and mutual dependence. The Hmong way of life in Laos changed significantly when powerful nations including France, Japan, China, the Soviet Union, and eventually the United States engaged themselves in regional conflicts in order to control and exploit the resources and people of Southeast Asia. The French were the first Europeans to seriously initiate colonization of Laos. Thinking the Mekong River would be their trade route to the lucrative resources and markets of China, the French established an official presence in Laos in 1886 (Quincy 2000). Following the colonial modus operandi established in Cambodia and Vietnam, the French imposed taxes, tried to capture profitable markets (opium in Laos) and demanded forced labor from the natives. A rebellion in 1920 led by a messianic Hmong farmer named Pa Chay influenced France’s decision to grant limited self-governance to the Hmong, although the French stayed firmly in control (ibid). The French administration exploited and exacerbated existing tensions between local populations and ethnic groups for political gain. The rivalry between Hmong who thought they might make political gains under colonial administration and those who opposed alliances with outsiders was steadfast even

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though colonial actors came and went.12 Anti-French resistance groups eventually morphed into pro-communist forces while pro-nationalist forces cast their lot with the Americans who began to support the French in their fight against the Chinese-backed Viet Minh in 1950 (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). As the Southeast Asian conflict stepped up during the Cold War, Hmong people became increasingly involved. As many as forty thousand Hmong men and boys fought on the side of the United States and the Royal Lao government against the insurgent Pathet Lao (Communist forces). Most Hmong soldiers served in Special Guerrilla Units that received logistical support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. A smaller number of Hmong joined the Pathet Lao, which received its aid from North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. By signing the Geneva Accords of 1962, the United States and 15 other nations agreed to keep Laos independent and neutral by withdrawing all military forces. North Vietnam agreed to the accords but left thousands of their soldiers (in direct violation of the agreement). Because the United States could not overtly support a military presence, money and military supplies were covertly funneled through the Central Intelligence Agency with smaller amounts laundered through humanitarian agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (Quincy 2000). CIA operatives brokered agreements with indigenous leaders to provide ground support in this region. Laos was strategic to both sides because the Ho Chi Minh trail ran along its panhandle. A vital transport vein, running 625 miles and linking with 12,500 miles of arterial roads, the trail became the central supply route for regional communist forces (ibid). Hmong soldiers, familiar with the rugged terrain and guerilla warfare, became the primary anti-communist force in Laos. They served as pilots, conducted surprise attacks, rescued downed pilots, provided intelligence information, and coordinated ground to air supply and attack missions. The term “secret” is a cruel word to use in describing this war effort because it was anything but secret to the people involved on the 12

Japan invaded many European colonial territories during World War II. The French returned to colonial rule in Laos after the war ended.

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

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ground. Between 1968 and 1973, Laos became “the focus of one of the largest bombing campaigns in military history …eventually delivering more than two million tons of explosives—fifteen hundred pounds for every man, woman and child in the country, making Laos the most heavily bombed nation in history” (Quincy 2000:3). In one area alone, the Plain of Jars, the tonnage dropped by American planes exceeded that dropped in both Europe and the Pacific during World War II (Fadiman 1997:132). The human cost was staggering. Quincy (2000:5) states 35,000 Hmong were lost in battle—a figure comparable to “America losing 16.5 million in Vietnam rather than the actual 57,000.” The war effort spared no one. Particularly toward the end of the war, as the numbers of able-bodied adult men dwindled, male adolescents and boys were recruited to replace the casualties. “Yes, I was just a boy at that time--ten years old,” said a middle-aged veteran, “…they don’t care the age because they need soldiers.” After the ceasefire between the United States and North Vietnam in 1973, U.S. support for the anti-communist forces in Laos began to dry up. Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army forces initiated systematic repression of Hmong people including outright extermination, bombing, forced relocation to prison camps, hard labor, surveillance, and intimidation. A 48-year-old Hmong veteran described the grim situation: At that time, we signed an agreement to have peace in Laos and the Americans pulled back the CIA. The Pathet Lao took over Laos and gave us a hard time. They tried to catch all the former soldiers and the doctors and teachers and take them to the concentration camps. They will try to…wash the American brain. So they [the prisoners] would go there and never come back. So we tried to escape as soon as possible. So that is why I have to go…. The Pathet Lao stated that the only way to deal with the Hmong was to extirpate them (Quincy 2000). Few choices were available: flee across the border, take up arms and fight, hide and wait, or try to arrive at some sort of reconciliation with the new government. None of the choices was an easy way out. Numerous Hmong people told me they lived in the jungle to escape what they feared was certain death either at the hands of the communist soldiers or in prison

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camps. They foraged for subsistence and continually moved to evade patrols of soldiers. Resistance groups formed to defend against the new communist state.13 Chemical warfare was reportedly used against Hmong in rebel areas, but at that time Hmong refugees’ reports of toxic rains that caused illness and death were dismissed (Hamilton-Merritt 1999, Quincy 2000). The war and the refugee camp experiences disrupted family units, sub-lineage and patri-clan networks and set in motion a massive exodus of Hmong people from Laos to refugee camps in Thailand. The introduction of the market economy, Christianity, Western doctors and medicine, and new subsistence patterns (USAID food drops and wetrice cultivation) had led to significant social changes even before exodus (Trueba 1990). In Chapter 3, I explore what the changes meant for families and individuals. Every Hmong family has an exodus story that also serves as a grim reminder of broken promises. Despite the CIA’s assurance that the United States would help and protect Hmong forces, only several thousand Hmong were airlifted from Laos to Thailand. The tens of thousands who remained had to find their own means of survival. Until the 1990s Hmong, ethnic Lao, and Mien peoples found their way out of Laos by trekking through jungles to the Mekong River, crossing it in makeshift rafts or floating devices, and entering Thai refugee camps on the other side.14 Losses from exposure, starvation, gunshots, and landmines were severe but countless groups made their way out of Laos. In Chapter 3, I will also discuss the role of kinship in the course of leaving Laos. 13

As a testimony to the Hmong people’s resilience, the resistance movement was not eliminated after the Communist takeover and exists to this day. 14 Over time, eleven camps in Thailand were established. The following list provided by Ken Her, contains the English translation of the camp name with the Hmong name in parenthesis: 1) Nam Pong (Nam Phoos); 2) Nong Khai (Noom Qhais); 3) Ban Vinai (Vib Nais); 4) Xieng Kham (Xias Qhas); 5) Sao Toua (Xauv Tuas); 6) Me Chi Ling (Mej Ci Lin); 7) Nam Yao (Nam Nyaus); 8) Ka Rung Ya Thet (Kas Loos Ya Thej); 9) Kao Thaw (Kaus Thaus); 10) Na Phao (Nam Phau); and 11) Phanat Nit Khom (Phanat Nikhom), a transitional camp for outgoing refugees.

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Life in the refugee camps continued the cycle of devastation. Some people I interviewed told me they were relieved to get out of Laos but they suffered new horrors in the camps. A man described the misery experienced on a daily basis in the early days of the camps.

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A lot of people got sick…and I lost my second son at that time. He was eight months old. A lot of kids died at that time. So at the same time you were burying a dead person, a dead body, you will see many groups at the cemetery. And when you came back you will see many people taking their kids to the cemetery. Many people died. So we felt too bad. And some of our group went back to Laos at that time. We almost went back to Laos. But we were very lucky that we made a decision not to go back…if we had gone back to Laos, maybe we would be gone. Thailand did not want the incoming masses and tried several tactics to halt refugees before they reached the sanctuary of the camps as well as offering voluntary repatriation to refugees already registered. Without the intervention of the United Nations and the United States, Thai officials would have continued to stop refugees at the borders and started repatriation even sooner than they did. The camps were overcrowded, disease-ridden, and foul by most accounts, but some became active communities despite the deprivation. Even in camps where conditions were deplorable, most Hmong would not repatriate and many would not relocate to third countries either. Surrounded by barbed wire and caught in political limbo, minimal numbers of refugees did risk the dangers of life back in Laos. Several books and human rights reports document the disappearance and the extermination of Hmong refugees who voluntarily or involuntarily repatriated (Hamilton-Merritt 1999, Quincy 2000). Many others waited for options. One family I interviewed stayed in the camps for 22 years. In 1991, the State Department brokered an agreement with Thailand, the United Nations, and Laos for repatriation of all Laotian refugees including the Hmong. Most refugees chose to move to a third country rather than return to Laos, but tens of thousands fled to the Thai countryside, thereby losing their official status as refugees (Kaufman 2003). For more than a decade, 15,000 of these stateless Hmong sought unofficial sanctuary at Tham Krabok Buddhist

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monastery in Thailand. In a recent policy turnaround, the State Department has agreed to allow Hmong registered at the temple to resettle in the United States. Destined for Hmong-American communities in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the temple refugees should begin arriving sometime in 2004.

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Hmong in the United States Over one and a half million Indochinese refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea have arrived in the United States since 1975 (Koltyk 1998:8). At least six distinct ethnic groups are lumped together in this category. Initial sites for refugee resettlement were determined by voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) working with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The U.S. government’s plan was to disperse the refugees so as not to create an unfair burden on any one state and to “avoid another Miami,” as one planner put it, referring to the huge concentration of Cuban refugees there (Rumbaut 1997). Anne Fadiman (1997) points out that the “cornerstone” of Hmong social organization, group solidarity, was completely ignored by policy makers and planners. According to policy, new refugees were scattered all over the United States. By the early 1980s, however, about a third of arriving refugees already had close relatives in the United States who could serve as sponsors, and another third had more distant relatives, leaving only about the remaining third without kinship ties (Rumbaut 1997). As a result of kinship ties, the dispersal patterns of incoming and established refugees quickly changed, resulting in a wave of secondary migration within the U.S. and the formation of ethnic enclaves. Large Hmong populations in Fresno, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota exist today. The Hmong have always been self-supporting. Dependency on outsiders is an uncharacteristic social pattern for Hmong, but war and its aftermath affected their ability to provide for themselves. During the decades of war in Laos, many families were unable to farm, hunt, and forage as they had before. Thousands were forced to rely on U.S. food drops of rice and eventually on state support systems as they became landless and displaced. Participants in this study repeatedly

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Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees

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stressed and demonstrated that hard work and self-sufficiency are important to Hmong people. Even as political refugees, Hmong had to find sponsoring organizations or individuals who could verify that they could support the family’s journey to the United States. As is the case with all refugees who are unable to support themselves, Hmong refugees were eligible for Refugee Cash Assistance for three years. But after 1982, the length of time for this financial support was reduced to 18 months and eventually limited to one year. Refugees received the same benefits provided for citizens under the AFDC public assistance program. Local vocational and language training programs varied widely depending on the local voluntary organizations and the support they garnered from federal, state, and local agencies. At the end of the support period, “refugee families were supposed to speak enough English and possess appropriate technical skills to participate in the U.S. workforce” (Mason-Chagil 1999). After going to English classes and technical training for six months, a man described how unprepared he felt for mainstream life in the United States: I didn’t speak no English---the teacher told us how to say hi and help. And then you know in the morning I got out of my house and then I say hi [to my neighbors] and they say hello, to me and I say what? I didn’t know what. When I say hi and they say hello to me. I would say hello back to them. In the morning I say hello, and they say hi back. Later on when I continued to go back to school, I knew the [difference]. Right now, I think about those days and I think it is so stupid. Despite transitional challenges, many Hmong-Americans have managed to become self-sufficient. It is difficult to compile employment statistics by sector because many state and national studies use one broad category for “Asians” and do not identify their ethnic background or national origin. From local reports and observation, it is evident Hmong men and women are employed in many different kinds of wage labor ranging from farming and factory work to careers in social service agencies. Hmong are beginning to enter the legal and medical professions in greater numbers and are increasingly promoted to business and social service management positions. Besides their

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participation in the U.S. economy as workers and consumers, Hmong are purchasing and operating small businesses. Hmong home ownership has soared in Wisconsin, increasing nine-fold in the last decade (Hall and Patton 2002:C1). While most studies and local observers agree that some progress has been made in socio-economic status, living standards for HmongAmericans are much lower than national and state averages. Even for working families poverty remains one of the greatest challenges. In 1989, 45 percent of Wisconsin Hmong-American households, averaging six members, made less than $10,000 per year (ibid). In Wisconsin, 47 percent of Hmong-Americans age 25 and over reported they had less than a fifth grade education (Zaniewski 1998). Language barriers, a lack of necessary formal education, and insufficient technical training created a need for many Hmong families to turn to state assistance programs after their benefits from the Refugee Cash Assistance program were terminated, but in Dunn County (the center of this study) only three of the approximately 66 families in the community now receive cash benefits. Approximately one-third of the families receive some kind of public aid, usually in the form of medical assistance. This fact alone illustrates that even if adults are working, many families are unable to meet basic needs and complete selfsufficiency is still not a reality. Following an aggressive overhaul of public assistance programs in 1996, all recipients of public assistance are required to find employment or be in a job-training program. Initially, the new federal law prohibited Supplementary Security Income (SSI) to all legal immigrants. Many elderly and disabled immigrants (including Cuban, Russian and other recently arrived immigrants) who were dependent on this source of income were devastated. Rather than become a financial burden on their families and relatives, at least seven immigrants (of various ethnic backgrounds) committed suicide and many more threatened to take their lives. In Wisconsin, Asian widows attending public county commission meetings spoke of killing themselves (Morello 1997). Several lawyers in San Francisco assisted with placing elderly clients in mental institutions after they described their plans to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge (Morello 1997). SSI benefits were

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heavily lobbied in Congress and eventually restored to elderly legal immigrants. The maximum aid period for Wisconsin’s state assistance program (Wisconsin Works or W-2) is five years. A report from the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future documented some of the barriers facing the statewide Hmong population still receiving government assistance. More than 90 percent of the respondents (who were primarily middleaged and married) read little or no English; over half indicated that they needed either technical training, apprenticeships or more education; and one in five felt that they needed English as a Second Language Classes (Moore & Selkowe 1999:1). More than 50 percent of the participants had five or more children under the age of 18, and nearly one in five indicated they had eight or more children under the age of 18. The impact of the Wisconsin Works program was felt intensely by large families because median family income is lower than it was under the former AFDC program and there are no adjustments for family size. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents reported that they have less income since the transition from AFDC (Moore & Selkowe 1999). The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s Executive Assistant, Mark Liedl, condemned the Institute’s study, calling it “shoddy” and politically biased research (Department of Workforce Development 2000:1). To rebut the institute’s report, this office reported data showing that 92 percent of the Hmong families who left welfare after the start of the W-2 program did so because they had employment and/or other sources of family income and that the number of Hmong families on cash assistance decreased by 84 percent, from 965 to 150 since the program started in 1997. Although both sides selected the statistics that favored their positions in the welfare debate, real issues do emerge from these studies despite the rhetoric. On one hand, for some Hmong families still on W-2, genuine limitations exist which inhibit them from reaching self-sufficiency including language, childcare, and job skill barriers. These enormous obstacles are not adequately addressed by current policies. On the other hand, the state has not completely abandoned low-income Hmong families. The Department of Workforce Development points to the fact that needy families are not completely dropped from state sources of support. In fact, 77 percent of those families who have secured jobs or found additional family income are still receiving some support services such as Medicaid, job

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case management, or childcare. What neither report tells us are the real life experiences of people affected by these economic adjustments. In Chapter 4, I will describe participants’ strategies for adapting to the socio-economic realities of life in the United States.

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Political Organization The political status and organization of Hmong people in the United States has changed significantly since 1975. Today, virtually all Southeast Asian refugees are identified by the government as permanent or legal residents, having been reclassified from their former refugee status. Although more and more Hmong immigrants are choosing to becoming naturalized, the lack of proficiency in English has hindered some from completing the naturalization process (Shah 1999). In terms of political organization, strides in political mobilization, representation, and lobbying have been made. For example, Hmong-American community leaders lobbied successfully at the local, state and national levels to lessen the language requirement in the naturalization process for Hmong veterans of the Indochina War (ibid). In most cities where Hmong have settled, they have established mutual assistance associations. These organizations work as information clearinghouses and refugee assistance centers that provide cultural transition services to refugees and the wider community. The boards of directors for these local organizations are usually composed of Hmong people who represent local kin groups and non-Hmong community leaders. Most also have ties to the Hmong national leadership group. In Minnesota, California and Wisconsin, Hmong-Americans increasingly enter elections for school board positions, city council seats, and for state offices. Although some local community leaders and electoral activists have expressed concerns that Hmong-American voters are somewhat disengaged from the American political process (Doherty 2001), the election of the first Hmong senator in Minnesota, Mee Moua, may signal a positive change in voter participation. Moreover, Mee Moua is a woman and may serve as a role model for

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Hmong women and girls interested in public service and community leadership. Interestingly, in comparison to other recent immigrant groups, a relatively large number of Hmong-Americans are running for office in the upper mid-west (Doherty 2001). Since the successful election of several candidates for public office, a precedent exists for future candidates and a growing political activism in the Hmong communities of Western Wisconsin (Doherty 2001). Operating at the university level, Hmong Youth Associations are training future community leaders. They keep younger generations of college-age Hmong-Americans in touch with national issues and organizations. Hmong student conferences often focus on improving self-awareness and preparing young people for professional growth.

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Cultural Beliefs and Practices Hmong people living in the upper mid-west usually place themselves in one of two religious groups: those who coj dab (literally, bring along the spirits) or those who are Christian and believe in Jesus (ntseeg Jesus). Rough estimates place about 50-75 percent of the Hmong in the United States in the coj dab category. Followers believe in the existence of multiple souls, benevolent and dangerous wild spirits. They venerate their ancestors at all family ceremonies. For good health, individuals must attend to good and evil forces, seek equilibrium in life by maintaining the co-existence of life-souls within the body, and converse with ancestral spirits and natural worldly spirits. The males in a lineage group are responsible for taking the lead in ritually honoring the ancestors and in representing the family in all rituals. Spiritual help is sought from a religious specialist called a txiv neeb. Despite some consensus that this religion is hard to practice in the United States, Hmong are nevertheless managing to retain their religious traditions. Some of the barriers to overcome include timeconsuming training, aging religious practitioners, and outsiders’ perceptions. Young people who immigrated without elders generally do not know how to perform the rituals. Religious specialists in the United States are getting older and few apprentices want to learn the time-honored skills because the training is difficult and lengthy and takes time away from paying jobs or formal schooling. Moreover, one must be called to the practice; it is not considered a free choice

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occupation. People traditionally receive an indication that they are destined to be txiv neeb if they survive an illness or injury. Individuals may then begin to learn the ways of the txiv neeb. If harm comes to an individual, the txiv neeb is prepared to bring back the soul from the spirit world in an intricate healing ceremony. Relatives offer an animal soul on behalf of the person or persons who are sick or in need of help. Infants are welcomed into their families by a naming ceremony, the nyuj dab, which also requires the sacrifice of an animal. Funerals are traditionally very elaborate and much effort is taken to guide the dead person on his or her spiritual journey to the ancestors. These and other traditional Hmong practices are seen as peculiar and have sometimes attracted condemnation from non-Hmong observers. Christian missionaries were in communication with the Hmong beginning in the 1600s, but in the 1940s and 1950s Protestant missionary activity finally began to produce large numbers of converts. Many of those who immigrated to the United States were sponsored by Christian organizations and converted at some point in the immigration experience. Because Hmong wives are expected to adopt the religious orientation of their husbands, Christian parents want their daughters to marry co-religionists. The preference for intra-faith endogamy seems more pronounced for Christians. Christian Hmong serve their communities as ministers, priests, lay preachers, and church elders. Men hold most of these leadership positions. Christian Hmong ardently separate religion from culture, a point I will address more thoroughly in Chapter 4. Hmong-Americans use ceremonies to mark their distinctive culture and ethnic identity in the United States. New Year’s celebrations (Hmoob Noj Tsiab Peb Caug) are conducted during November or December in most U.S. communities that have sizeable Hmong populations. Large numbers of Hmong from different faiths converge to celebrate ethnicity and to wish for prosperity in the New Year. Many customary rituals thrive alongside new competitions (Miss

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Hmong-America contests, for example) and performances in the United States.15 Hmong divide themselves into several social divisions. Green Hmong (Hmoob Ntsuab or Moob Leeg) and White Hmong (Hmoob Dawb) are the two principal groups in the United States.16 The distinction is primarily one of dialect, including pronunciation, terminology, and word spellings. Marriage occurs between the two groups. If a woman marries into another social group she is expected to adopt the dialect and the domestic and ceremonial patterns of her husband’s family. One of the principle public differences between the groups is the style of ceremonial dress.

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Kinship as Identity and Social Organization Maintaining kin relationships and living close to kin continue to be core features of Hmong ethnic identity and social life in the United States and in other Hmong diasporic communities.17 Rumbaut and Ima’s 1988 report on the social and cultural adaptation of Southeast Asian refugee youths in San Diego found that the Hmong, more than any other group, have retained their pre-immigration family patterns. After resettlement in the West, most Hmong still marry other Hmong, obey the taboo against marrying someone from the same xeem or patri-clan, keep existing xeem and sub-lineage structures intact or rebuild them, and observe family rituals (Fadiman 1997:208). When refugees or immigrants carry familiar cultural patterns to new homelands, it does not mean these institutions are static or that they are impervious to pressures from outside social, economic, or political forces. Gary Yia Lee (1986), a Hmong anthropologist working in Australia, is more pessimistic about the durability of 15

See the article by Annette Lynch, Daniel Detzner, and Joanne Eicher (1995), “Hmong American New Year Rituals: Generational Bonds Through Dress,” for an excellent summary of ritual meaning in a new cultural context. 16 No English translation exists for Moob Leeg, but people belonging to this group are often called Hmoob Ntsaub, or Green Hmong by the White Hmong. 17 The maintenance of Hmong ethnic and kinship identity in Thailand is the focus of Prasit Leepreecha’s recent dissertation (2001), Kinship and Identity Among Hmong In Thailand, University of Washington.

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Hmong kinship patterns. He believes Hmong families face almost daily fragmentation from school and work influences and argues that Hmong social values and norms have eroded significantly among the refugee population in Australia.18

Kinship Structure

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Hmong social organization and family life are characterized by the exogamous patri-clan (xeem) and lineage (caj ces) system. Some 18 patri-clans are recognized in the United States (Ken Her 2000). Table 1: Hmong Patri-clan (Xeem) Names in the U.S. English Hmoob Dawb Moob Leeg Vang Vaj Vaaj Vue Vwj Vwj Muas Muas Moua Hawj Hawj Her Xyooj Xyooj Xiong Lis Lis Lee Yaaj Yaj Yang Haam Ham Hang Faaj Faj Fang Khaab Khab Khang Koo Koo Kong Kwm Kwm Kue Lauj Lauj Lor/Lo Thoj Thoj Thao/Thor Tsaab Tsab Chang/Cha Tsheej Tsheej Chieng/Cheng Tswb Tswb Chue Phab Phab Pha

18

Approximately 350 Hmong refugees reside in Australia. The small size of the Australian group most likely affects the amount of networking and mutual assistance support that can be offered.

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Hmong in America like to say they are all related in some way. I have seen people map out their kin network in elaborate ways, connecting their immediate family to every Hmong xeem by way of kinship affiliation (consanguinial or affinal). For example, a man might say his mother was a Xiong and therefore he is connected to the Xiongs. His brother-in-law is a Moua and thus he is tied to the Mouas. The interconnectedness of Hmong people by kin relationships may be conceptualized as a way of marking ethnic identity because the Hmong are “one big family.” In turn, relatedness is marked by polite linguistic references. Leepreecha (2001) argues that the use of kinship terms instead of proper names to refer to each other is a method of locating an individual in a “kin-based social space” and is a strategy for creating a sentiment of close kinship relations among individuals. Kinship terms reflect this interdependence. No terms exist for parallel cousins on the male side; they are referred to as brother and sister. Leepreecha (2001) remarks that outside of one’s siblings or close generational friends, all Hmong are supposed to be referred to using the appropriate kin name. Failing to follow these rules demonstrates poor etiquette. The primary importance of kinship is also reflected in the practice of teknonymy. People refer to one another by their relationship. “If Nhia Doua and his wife Mee have a child, Kong Meng, usually Nhia Doua will call his wife, Kong Meng’s mother, and she will call him, Kong Meng’s father” (Donnelly 1994:193). One interpretation of teknonymy is that it promotes subjective identity formation in relationship to other people rather than from the character of the individual as in mainstream U.S. culture. The naming system remains much the same as it was in Laos, although some Hmong-American parents are choosing to give their children American sounding first names.19 Hmong people in the United States identify themselves based on their father’s patri-clan. This generally includes women who retain their father’s patri-clan name and membership in this natal group even though their spirit is recognized and remembered in their husband’s family. Some American Hmong women are choosing to take their husband’s last

19

In stark contrast, many Hmong living in Thailand are officially choosing Thai patronyms (Leepreecha 2001).

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name after marriage or to hyphenate their maiden and married name. This trend may signal a gendered shift in the creation of surnames. Generation after generation, a legend has been passed down that details how the Hmong people and the patri-clans came to be (Leepreecha 2001). There are various versions of this story, but the basic theme is much the same.20 A great flood came to the Earth and the only living beings remaining were a Hmong brother and sister who were saved by hiding in a large drum. Alarmed and distraught by their situation, they didn’t know what to do. The brother suggested to his sister that they marry so they might have children to repopulate the earth. “I can’t marry you, you are my brother,” she said. He persisted and she refused. After a time, the sister suggested a contest to settle their impasse. They agreed to roll stones down from the mountain-top and if the stones had managed to go back up the mountain and were lying together by morning, the sister agreed she would marry her brother. The brother devised a plan to trick his sister and so that night as she slept, he carried both stones to the mountaintop and laid them together. Upon seeing the stones together the next morning, she kept her word and agreed to marry her brother. The wife gave birth after some time, but the creature was deformed without a head or legs and resembled a pumpkin. They asked Saub (the Creator) what to do next and he advised them to cut the creature to pieces and throw the parts around their house and farm and so they did. When they awoke the next morning, they found little huts had appeared in all those locations. They were delighted when they saw a human couple in each hut! Each of the couples had a name that sounded like or symbolized the place from which they had emerged. For example, the Vang (Vaj) patri-clan came from the garden (vaj). When the couple asked Saub what they should do next, he said they should perform wedding rites for each of the couples, and never allow their descendents to marry people from their own patri-clan. I concur with Leepreecha (2001) that the origin folktale creates a sentiment of shared descent and conceptually binds all Hmong people 20

I borrow from Leepreecha (2001), Donnelly (1994), and the elder storyteller in the film Great Branches New Roots: the Hmong Family, St. Paul, MN: Hmong Film Project (1983), to construct the oral history here.

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together. The origin story also sanctions Hmong separation into descent groups whose members may not intermarry, thus establishing a basis for kin categories within Hmong society. A uniquely Hmong schema of collective identity and kinship identification emerges when the oral history is combined with other practices like using correct kin terms in social conversations, and linking one’s family to all other clans by tracing kinship ties. In daily life, relatedness also materializes as a vital social force. The extended patri-clan (xeem) and the lineage system (caj ces) form the basis of Hmong social organization and family life (Dunnigan 1982). Lineage and sub-lineage groups are important markers of identity and relatedness and are often much more relevant in people’s daily lives than xeem affiliation. Everyday decisions that many Americans think of as falling in the realm of the nuclear family (parents and children) come under the decision-making powers of extended Hmong families or even larger extended family groups. The tsev neeg (house family) might include a man, his wife or wives, and his sons and their wives and children (Koltyk 1998:39). Occasionally these decisions will be passed on to the pawg neeg (a sub-lineage grouping), which may have formed an entire village in Laos, but today refers to a group. This assembly is composed of several households that share close agnatic ties with one another and perhaps paternal grandparents. On occasion the group may even include a husband’s affines, the patrilineal relatives of his wife who are called the neejtsa. In terms of residential arrangements, many Hmong people still live in close proximity to members from the male side of the family (patrilocal residence). In a study of a multi-ethnic urban tenement in Chicago, Dwight Conquergood found only the Hmong wanted a degree of closeness that required “side-by-side proximity” to relatives (1992:124).

Marriage (Kev Sib Yuav) Marriage is considered vital in every Hmong person’s life and is the basis for establishing ties with other family groups. In marriage negotiations, one of the first tasks is to work out unresolved disputes or issues between the families of the bride and groom that may have originated decades earlier. I spoke with one woman who told me about

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a violent domestic homicide that occurred in Laos. This incident still affects her family group and the grandfather’s descendants are forbidden to marry into the patri-clan of the guilty son-in-law. Overall, few if any firm patterns of alliance remain except patriclan exogamy and ethnic group endogamy. The preference for crosscousin marriage that existed in Laos appears to be fading rapidly in the United States. The term npawg has several meanings. In kin terms, it refers to the cousins of a different xeem, who may also be potential spouses. Accordingly its second relational meaning is “sweetheart,” but few Hmong-American people under the age of 25 know this “old” meaning of the word. In the United States, npawg is commonly understood to mean friend, in reference to any male of another xeem who is particularly close to the speaker. Children are viewed as both a blessing and a resource because they are the future link to other xeem groups and they help keep one’s own group strong. For the Hmong who adhere to native religious beliefs, children are critical because they will continue the duties and obligations to the ancestors, which are important features of Hmong spiritual life. Hmong men still assume these political and religious duties in the household. Because ancestral rites can only be performed by descending males, if there are no sons in the family, a lineage will be forgotten. As a result, many Hmong parents stress having one son or more to ensure the lineage and the physical and spiritual well being of the tsev neeg (Lee 1999b).

Research Voids Given the importance of kinship in Hmong social life, why more is not written about this topic is puzzling. Previous research focused heavily on adaptation, health, and education.21 The following section details the ways Hmong-American kinship has been limned thus far by various researchers working in the social sciences and humanities.

21

For bibliographies of Hmong studies literature, see J. Christina Smith (1988, 1996).

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Joanne Koltyk (1998) and Nancy Donnelly (1994) are the authors of two important ethnographies about Hmong in America. Kinship is discussed only in relation to other features of cultural life and is not a central theme in either work. Koltyk’s ethnography is set in Wausau, Wisconsin and her primary focus is how Hmong refugees are adjusting to life in this rural, midwest setting with economic life and the minutiae of daily life as concurrent themes. The reader gains a simple understanding of Hmong kinship networks and community because Koltyk devotes one chapter to family life. Included in this section are personal stories and testimonies about gender roles, secondary migration, consumption, education and aspirations. Donnelly’s ethnography is about needlework cooperatives in Seattle. She writes extensively about women’s economic activities, leadership styles and preferences, individual strategies, family obligations, and personal disputes. Interestingly, she does not find that economic changes were driving social changes: “The goals of doing needlework had altered to include making money, and the social paths through which this was achieved had shifted to include women in trade, but the internalized cultural model for social organization remained in place” (1994:112). She finds that many aspects of the pre-immigration social structure were being reproduced, but that some practices, like marriage rituals, were modified due to external pressures. Gender and generational relations can be viewed as part of a larger system of evolving social relations. Donnelly (1994) and Goldstein (1986) have suggested values and behavior surrounding age and gender status may be integral to maintaining cultural and ethnic identity in Hmong communities. Both authors discuss Hmong women’s lack of authority in relation to Hmong men. Prior to immigration, filial piety also existed. If Hmong culture hinges on such hierarchies, as suggested by these authors, some interesting questions emerge. What happens when these relationships are challenged by mainstream culture or by members of the Hmong community? Does Hmong identity fall apart if such relationships are leveled? In other words, are patriarchy and filial piety essential to Hmong culture? In Chapter 5 and 6, I will take up these questions using some of the insights from participants in this study. Marriage in the Hmong community has been the central theme in earlier studies. Writing in the 1980s, when Hmong migration and adaptation were still relatively unexplored, Meredith and Rowe (1986)

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found some marriage practices were changing while others remained constant. The results of their marriage attitude survey show that many conventions of mate selection were being maintained. The strongest exceptions were attitudes concerning polygyny: if it were legal in their new country, only 21 percent of the Hmong respondents would maintain that custom (1986:127). Gender did seem to influence peoples’ views on this subject. Women in particular disagreed with polygynous union; only 7 percent said they agreed with the custom today, compared with 38 percent of the men. Higher levels of education did not change support for polygyny. In fact, those with higher levels of education were more likely to favor polygyny if it were legal. Slightly more than half of the respondents in their study felt it was not proper for a Hmong person to marry someone who was not also Hmong. Meredith and Rowe found men and women supported marriage matchmakers, marriage contracts between families, bridewealth, and male authority in the family. A shift does seem to be occurring regarding attitudes toward early marriage; 87 percent agreed it would be best if a woman waited until she was 18 to get married. Although some attitudes and practices regarding marriage have changed, “the significant patri-clan linkages resulting from it are still very important in Hmong life” (Trueba 1990:69). In the popular press and even in scholarly work, early marriage, high fertility, catch hand marriage (a type of elopement, a forced marriage negotiation, or a forced marriage), bridewealth, and arranged marriages in the Hmong community are portrayed as “traditional” and alien practices. Many Americans disapprove of these practices and find affirmation in sensationalized reports in the media and through collective community stereotypes. The criticism almost inevitably lacks attention to the cultural context of the Hmong. Furthermore, some research reveals early marriage may not disrupt couples’ lives as negatively as we might expect. Early marriage was studied as part of the Youth Development Survey at the University of Minnesota, the only longitudinal study of its kind with regard to Hmong youth. Hutchinson and McNall (1994) found, despite the high levels of early marriage and early fertility in the Hmong sample studied, the overwhelming majority of young persons stay in high school and report high educational expectations. Hutchinson and McNall (1994:588)

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attribute this result to the remarkable network of family resources upon which these students can draw: “The cultural structures of Hmong society have been utilized to ensure that the younger generation will pursue the educational opportunities available to them in America, thus enabling them to become economically independent in the second generation.” The authors stress that research on Hmong families in the United States has often reinforced stereotypes of traditional family patterns (i.e. the U.S. nuclear family) and applied them uncritically to the Hmong community. Mary Cohn (1986:201) exemplifies this ethnocentric perspective when she writes, “Whether or not this group [Hmong youth] will continue to marry young, drop out and start large families is uncertain, but the way this issue is resolved may have a large impact on their own self-sufficiency and adjustment and on the economic and social adjustment of the next generation of Hmong.” She discounts the fact that many Hmong youth are delaying marriage, having smaller families and continuing their education. Secondly, she presumes that some Hmong family patterns are a hindrance to socioeconomic advancement. Her statement incorrectly links a lack of education with large families. Unfortunately, some Hmong-Americans have also adopted this wider societal view, which labels their culture as traditional and dysfunctional, and consequently they are confused about their family relationships and cultural identity. I offer a more complex analysis of family and kinship patterns (from the perspective of Hmong-American people) and as a result reach a more encouraging, grounded interpretation. The durability of Hmong kinship in the West may be attributed to the ideological and material advantages it offers. Some have speculated the kinship organization of the Hmong might enhance refugee adaptation. Timothy Dunnigan, a cultural anthropologist, who has worked with Hmong-American refugees in Minnesota writes, “evidence indicates that the segmentary kinship of the Hmong allows for great flexibility in responding to changing conditions, and may provide the Hmong with the means for surviving in urban America as a distinct ethnic group” (Dunnigan 1982:126). Pointing to the elasticity of existing kinship ties, Dunnigan (1986:49) suggests, “The willingness of the Hmong to recognize even the most distant ties of consanguinity and affinity has been crucial in reestablishing family mutual assistance groups that were decimated and scattered due to war, refugee flight and resettlement.”

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Despite the durability of Hmong kinship in the United States, it is important to acknowledge that the cultural misunderstanding and hostility many Hmong experience from American individuals and institutions influence which aspects of Hmong culture will be maintained and which practices may disappear. Cultural conflict is the central theme in journalist Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997). This book tells the tragic story of cross-cultural conflict between the California medical establishment and one epileptic Hmong girl and her family. Fadiman eloquently describes the spiritual life and adjustment issues facing Hmong refugees and evokes reader empathy. She gives less attention to describing the process of social change and adaptation that Hmong people have experienced. The reader is left with the impression that Hmong people are trapped by cultural and language barriers which is not the case. Jeremy Hein has studied discrimination towards Hmong in Wisconsin and his disturbing research results point to the prevalent racist and nativist encounters many Hmong face daily. His extended case study documents rampant discrimination including one or more of the following: verbal harassment, poor service, police mistreatment, rejection, and physical harassment (Hein, 2000). Besides cultural conflict with mainstream American culture, elders worry that Hmong language and culture will disappear as young Hmong people adapt to American society. More and more Americanborn Hmong are not fluent speakers and writers of Hmong language and do not even know the proper kinship terms. Dunnigan and Vang (1980) suggest that maintenance of the Hmong language is tied to its function in ritual processes and particularly to rituals associated with the extended family. Understanding more about how Hmong kinship is functioning in the United States may shed light on other markers of Hmong identity such as the ability to speak the native language. The connection between Hmong kinship and spiritual life needs further study. Writing about social life before resettlement, states, “A Hmong’s religion cannot be separated from his social groupings, and his relations with other Hmong are meaningful only in terms of whether or not they share similar ancestral rites. Therefore, he cannot do without his kinsman and a good knowledge of their rituals in order to

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carry out his Hmong existence” (Lee 1986:57). Veneration of ancestors is believed to be mandatory for the fortune of a family or kin groups (Lee 1999a). Through ritual veneration of the ancestors, relationships among the living and the dead are continually affirmed. One of the ways of reckoning kinship between members of the same patri-clan or xeem is to compare ancestral reverence rituals (the door and the ox ceremonies). If the rituals are conducted the same way, for instance, using the same number of plates laid out in the same fashion, they immediately recognize each other as members of the same sub-clan.22 This practice reflects the unique interconnectedness of religion and kinship in Hmong culture and also acknowledges that Hmong kinship is based on protocols for practice, not simply on descent criteria. How Hmong conversion to Christianity has affected kinship practices and beliefs is difficult to gauge.23 Some Hmong see no conflict between these two cosmologies, and indeed draw from both for spiritual health. Others strongly reject the beliefs of coj dab (literally, to bring along the spirits). For some Hmong Christians, the word dab (spirit) means demon or devil and a taboo may exist prohibiting the use of this word. Some Christian denominations forbid their members to participate in coj dab rituals. Part of the problem for those who bring along the spirits has to do with location as well. Ceremonies that require animal sacrifice and religious specialists flourish because of the knowledge and support found within Hmong ethnic enclaves. It is difficult to practice the ways of the ancestors in isolation. Understanding how Christianity influences Hmong culture and identity is complicated. Lisa Capps (1994:163) whose research focused on Kansas City, believes that for Hmong “Christianity provides a means for the Hmong to reinforce their cultural identity as they gather in their own churches and at the same time to ‘fit into’ mainstream U.S. society.” She finds that despite the loss of many ritual practices, including “shamanism and animal sacrifice,” the Hmong people whom she interviewed demonstrated certain continuities in their ideas about illness, particularly its moral and spiritual dimensions (Capps 1994:166). She speculates that for Hmong who become isolated from 22

Gary Lee refers to lineage as ib tus dab qhuas (one ceremonial household or one spiritual practice). 23 For more about Hmong spiritual health and therapy after resettlement, see Jacques Lemoine (1986).

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family and kin networks, Christianity may be more appealing and feasible because it relieves them of cumbersome and expensive ceremonial rituals involving extended kin. Christianity also stresses the individual’s relationship to the supernatural—not the community of the living and dead or even familial groups. In the U.S. context, Christianity may be more expedient than ancestor worship because Christianity focuses on the individual’s relationship with the supernatural. The study of kinship and religious preference is an undeveloped research area. Little is known about the connection between religious change and Hmong kinship patterns in the West. As a result of resettlement and cultural adjustment, many Hmong families have faced role changes within the family. Older people and newly arrived adults often depend on their children for assistance and advice with regard to how to conduct the tasks of everyday life in America—driving, paying the bills, shopping, and so on—and as a result may have experienced a loss of authority, prestige, self-esteem, and self-confidence (Gross 1986). Lee (1986) reports older people are worried that parental authority, filial respect, patri-clan obligations, and reverence for the ancestors may become irrelevant or unenforceable. Catherine Stoumpos Gross who has studied the Hmong in Isla Vista, California, makes a valid point when she states that the unhappiness of the elderly affects the entire community. Young people also feel stress with the pressures of acculturation. In interviews conducted by Lynch and her colleagues, teenagers repeatedly expressed the feeling that they did not know enough about their own culture to participate in Hmong community life (1995). Discontinuity exists between the experiences of Hmong parents and the experiences of the younger generation (Cohn 1986). Yang Dao (1991), a highly regarded Hmong social scientist, estimates that generational conflict leads some 5 percent of Hmong youth to experience serious problems as a result of tension with their parents and elders. From his own experience, he believes that young people who come from Southeast Asia with some cultural awareness generally have a better chance of making the transition to the mainstream culture without renouncing their own culture. Appreciation of their own culture’s moral and human values allows ethnic minority youth to perceive the dominant culture with a better sense of judgment. Zimmerman (1998)

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points to the positive effects of enculturation for American Indian youths. According to his research, learning native culture can positively affect young people’s self-esteem and psychological wellbeing and may even protect them from risky behaviors like substance abuse. These findings warrant further cross-cultural research because whatever the young experience today will certainly shape the outcome for people tomorrow. Uprooted people present anthropologists with a situation where tradition and innovation co-exist and complement each other in contexts marked by great unrest (Reyes 1986). This uprootedness creates a new environment for diasporic peoples where family hardship and conflict may be amplified by gendered expectations, financial distress, isolation and feelings of despair. There has been relatively little research into Hmong-American coping strategies, the actual changes that are occurring, and the role of gender and generation in these complex human relationships. In the next chapter, I explore how kin groups provided help to relatives in the midst of war and relocation. These stories offer compelling evidence that Hmong people have used their understandings of Hmong kinship as a cultural and personal resource to absorb enormous shock, contain their losses, accept some cultural adjustments, and hold on to their cultural identity in the process.

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CHAPTER 3

Rupture and Resilience

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Refugee Status and Survival The signing of the United Nations Convention of the Status of the World’s Refugees in 1951 codified the international community’s criteria for refugee status. Refugees are people who flee their homeland because they have experienced persecution or because they have a well-founded fear that they will be persecuted based on their ethnicity, nationality, membership in a particular social group, race, religion or political beliefs. Refugees are commonly understood to be fleeing something: famine, war, environmental disaster, or civil strife. They remain uprooted people until the homeland conditions that prompted their exodus are settled so they can return safely or until they are permanently accepted into a host country. The United States Committee for Refugees estimates that there are currently 35 million refugees or internally displaced persons, those forced from their homes, but still in their country of origin (U.S.C.R. 2002). Most of the world’s refugees reside in refugee camps in a provisional state of asylum. Refugees are different from immigrants because they often face harsh contexts of exit, are less prepared for migration, and have no return options (Rumbaut 1997:13). There may be psychological ramifications of exile including post-traumatic stress disorder, feelings of helplessness, and depression. Adjustment to life in a new location is profoundly complicated because of these factors and because of lingering flight issues such as desire to find missing relatives and friends, support those left behind, and find ways to reconnect family and kin networks in the host country. Despite these adjustment problems, Hmong have been able to adapt to mainstream U.S. culture and maintain their core Hmong values and customs. 59

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War, exodus, exile, and relocation are experiential departures; they break routines and trusted ways of knowing and getting by. They also rupture human relationships. To what and to whom do people turn in these circumstances? My objective in this chapter is to reveal what Hmong shared with me about their coping strategies and their relationships with one another during their incredible human journey out of Laos and into the United States.

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Fateful Decisions In her discussion of Hmong political organization in Laos before and during the Southeast Asian conflict, Donnelly (1994) emphasizes that political loyalties were shaped by family membership. Even during these times of considerable foreign influence, political organization was built on the framework of Hmong kinship organization. Because there was no single Hmong government or ruler, it may appear that the Hmong (some 350,000 to 500,000 in Laos) were a sprawling, unorganized mass, but there was patri-clan organization and protocol that led in a most democratic way to political representation, consensus building, and decision-making (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). As Hmong people were drawn into the geopolitical events unfolding in Southeast Asia, government and military leaders used existing kinship ties to broaden and secure their base of support. Moreover, kin group rivalries were exacerbated as the civil war progressed and these differences evolved into large-scale, organized political opposition (HamiltonMerritt 1999). Donnelly (1994) reports a surprising number of women and families lived in combat zones because it was believed that soldiers would fight harder when their families were threatened. People in combat zones were fed by air-drops from the CIA/USAID planes. Local villages were often either overrun by fighting, completely destroyed, or in disarray, which may have made life on the run behind soldiers a viable, albeit dangerous, alternative. Quincy (2000:252-253) contends that Vang Pao, the general who led and orchestrated the Hmong resistance, was not equally trustful of all kin groups and that he favored those whose leaders he knew were completely loyal. By any account, Vang Pao did consult kin group leaders among the scattered, isolated villages of Laos for major

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decisions, including the resolution to enter into an agreement with the Americans against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao (the major communist forces in the region). In 1960, at a meeting of patri-clan and military leaders (including Vang Pao), CIA operative William Lair, “pledged arms and supplies and training if the Hmong made a good accounting against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese, and a new place to live if they were defeated” (Quincy 2000:179). The sanctuary agreement had been discussed but not fine-tuned at CIA headquarters, but Lair, with authority from the CIA, made a pledge of commitment to Vang Pao and his people. Some 15 years later in May of 1975, at another fateful gathering of patri-clan and military leaders, a momentous decision faced the Hmong people. Because of the withdrawal of American support in the war effort, the question at hand was whether they should resist the North Vietnamese or surrender. It was a marathon meeting complicated by the news from a key U.S. adviser, Jeff Daniels, that the U.S. could no longer help the Hmong and that Vang Pao and his key men must leave Laos immediately (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). Daniel’s words were apodictic in tone and the evacuation of the top command commenced soon after. The news of the evacuation spread fear among the thousands of Hmong who had fought on the side of the Americans. Aircraft flown by Laotian, Hmong, and American pilots made several trips from the military post at Long Chieng to an abandoned air base in Nam Phong, transporting only several thousand of the tens of thousands gathered there (Quincy 2000). Top officers and their families were evacuated first, and the remaining families who were lucky enough to get out by air did so by bribing the flight crews. Only one individual I spoke with evacuated Laos by air and the story he passed along, as told to him by his mother, illustrates the extreme chaos that accompanied the evacuations. Dao, who was only two years old at the time, said his widowed mother was a “pretty smart lady” because she was able to hire a taxi and bribe her way onto a CIA transport plane. She went through the desperate crowds with two small sons in infant carriers on her body and a third son in her grasp. Dao said his father’s brother was so concerned about getting his own family out that he did nothing to help his sister-in-law and nephews at that time.

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Pathet Lao troops began to engulf the surrounding villages and refugee settlements and thousands of Hmong responded by fleeing the area by car, by taxi and on foot. Quincy (2000) describes an exodus of forty thousand leaving Long Chieng on their way to Thailand. Some 10,000 of these unarmed refugees were stopped at a bridge near Hin Heup and were fired upon and charged by soldiers with bayonets (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). News of the massacre spread quickly, elevating the fear and panic among the thousands of Hmong remaining in Laos. The evacuation of the wartime leaders meant the Hmong were without direction and on their own against the impending Communist forces. Seventy-two year-old Mee remembered the confusion and grief during this period:

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The Americans left and came back to the United States and then General Vang Pao also followed. So it just left the Hmong people crying because they didn’t know where to go, and they don’t know what to do because the Communists [controlled] the country. If you lost your parent, [you are] still okay, but [if] you lose your leader then you miss the leader and you don’t know what to do. Mee was in a particularly vulnerable situation because three male relatives including her husband, son, and stepson were all in Vang Pao’s army, which put her whole family in great jeopardy under the new regime. The situation deteriorated further when, as Quincy (2000:394) describes, “Only a few days before Vang Pao’s departure from Laos, the official Pathet Lao organ, Khao Xane Pathet Lao, announced it would be ‘necessary to extirpate, down to the root, the Hmong minority.’” This statement was confirmed by on-the-ground events including atrocities committed against Hmong civilians like the massacre at Hin Huep, the arrest and subsequent disappearance of suspected American collaborators, and the imprisonment of Hmong in concentration camps. Neng, who began his eleven year military career at 14 years of age, described how his worst fears were confirmed when his uncle was caught and taken away for reeducation training and they never saw him again. He said soldiers and their families scattered to the jungle but they had to move constantly because there were always

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helicopters with machine guns and artillery looking for fugitives. His group consisted of approximately 30-40 people, including two of his brothers and one sister. In secrecy, a few men would slip into their former villages to meet with relatives who provided food and information about relatives and troop locations even though consorting with and aiding the former soldiers were grounds for their own imprisonment or death.

Refugee Flight and Kin Networks

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Not only were existing family and kin networks shattered by the wartime losses and refugee flight but the persecution of the Hmong by the Communist regime made it difficult to trust one another. One veteran explained how the Communists gathered information about soldiers who fought with Vang Pao and the CIA: The problem is that we have some Hmong who were Communists, and they already know who we are and that we were serving as soldiers. Actually the Lao people didn’t know [that information] but our people told them, “This person was a soldier and he fought.” So they reported it to them so you cannot hide it. They shared information and finally they have no way to deny it. We were going to reeducation training. We knew we had a problem and we escaped to the jungle. Any attempt to help a relative or friend who was connected to Vang Pao and the Americans could cost one’s life. However, I spoke with many individuals who recounted the efforts and strategies of relatives who helped despite these risks. For example, several people described how male cousins or brothers journeyed back from safety in Thailand to lead others through the Lao jungles and across the Mekong River. One man and his paternal grandmother told me in great detail about the strategies Hmong families devised to ensure the best odds for their survival. People were concerned that if the household members left together and met Communist soldiers, the entire family would be

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killed. In some cases, close relatives stayed behind to elude Communist troops and cover for family members who had already fled to Thailand. The disappearance of an entire household would raise suspicion and perhaps endanger the lives of other relatives or villagers. For these reasons, it became necessary to break up families, extended households and sub-lineage groups. In our interview, Mee and her grandson described how their extended family left in small groups, several years apart. Mee, a widow at 46 years of age, was the last one to leave. Without relatives in her group to help her cross the Mekong River, she had to pay a young man to tie himself to her because she feared she would drown. Groups of refugees in flight and those hiding in the jungle faced brutal conditions. “It is difficult to be a human in the jungle,” said one man who took his wife and children there to wait it out and fight with a resistance movement from 1975 to 1986. They would often “see only bones moving,” referring to people who were malnourished and sick. Describing the lack of food and help of any kind, the perpetual need to move, and the ceaseless rain, he said, “It was difficult to handle the family or children with you, and we could not survive in the jungle.” They opted to leave Laos in 1986 for the relative safety of Thailand, but at that time they had to sneak into a refugee camp eluding Thai officials. Thai policies toward refugees from Laos varied depending on the year, but throughout much of the 1980’s, a clear effort was made to push back Lao and Hmong refugees coming across the border. Many reports document the inhumane treatment of Hmong refugees by Thai border guards and the Lao People’s Liberation Army (LPLA). Hundreds of Hmong were pushed back into the hands of the LPLA and murdered (Quincy, 2000: 464). The resistance movement was a stealthy force in the jungles, albeit decimated and deprived. Communist soldiers reportedly used poison gas dropped from airplanes in an attempt to drive resistance fighters and their families out of the jungle. The final toll on the Hmong people of Laos is difficult to gauge, but from an estimated 350,000 living there before 1975, approximately 100,000 perished and an equal number fled to Thailand (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). On a personal level, participants testified to the horrendous impact the war and exodus had on their immediate families, relatives, and friends. For example, one-quarter of the people I talked with lost young children or siblings in exodus or in the refugee camps in

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Thailand. Many infants and young children died from overdoses of opium intended to quiet them and protect the group from detection. One mother with a young infant gave her daughter one-quarter of the opium dose ordered by the leader of their group before their attempt to cross the Mekong River. Of the fourteen children in their group only three made it; the rest died of opium overdoses. Her infant survived the crossing, sedated and secure on her body while she swam the river that took so many Hmong lives. That infant is now a successful college graduate who owes her life to her mother’s risky act of defiance. The Hmong have a saying, “Widows cry to death,” reflecting the isolation and vulnerability widows can face alone in Hmong society (Hamilton-Merritt 1999:251). Unmarried widows in Laos are reported to live a precarious existence—their children belong to the husband’s family, they have no male figure overseeing their welfare, and they inherit nothing from their deceased husband because his nearest male relative inherits everything (Donnelly 1994). They do have the option of being provided for in the customary way by marrying their deceased husband’s younger brother (the junior levirate system). During the war, they were also provided “widow’s pay” if their husband died in the war effort (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). All these support systems were disrupted during the war and exodus and yet many widows demonstrated rugged self-determination and got themselves to safety. Legal troubles ensued for those who became second wives and wanted to immigrate with their new husbands to the United States. They were forced to divorce or conceal their married status because of the staunch opposition to polygamy in the United States. France, on the other hand, allowed Hmong levirate and second wives to enter the country legally if they were married before immigration (Donnelly 1994). During the war and exodus, family members were willing to make role adjustments within their family and kin groups. In some cases, their adjustment required taking on uncustomary leadership roles. Many widows, such as Dao’s mother and Mee, demonstrated leadership and strength under great odds, both physically and culturally, by getting themselves, their children, or sometimes other relatives out of Laos with no male leadership. Older siblings were often obliged to take over parental roles if they were able to care for younger brothers and sisters. Bee’s mother and father died before he immigrated to the United States

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and because he was still very young at the time, his sister took over his care:

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…according to many of the older brothers and sisters, they say the sister who lives over there [in Laos] was the one who raised me when I was little. After my mom died, during the night, I was crying a lot and so she was the one who stayed up and took care of me and was there. Moua, at the age of seven, fled the Communist soldiers on the heels of his ten-year-old brother. In the panic, the boys were separated from their parents. All the family members survived, but they live apart because the boys decided to immigrate. He said living without parents for over twenty years has been “really tough” on them, but they saw other people coping and felt prepared to take on responsibility at an early age. The brothers have relied on different paternal relatives for some support during their relocation, but Moua says his older brother has been his primary source of emotional and financial support. The only reason his parents would choose to immigrate to the United States from Laos is to reconnect with their children. Rumors about the stress and unfriendliness in the United States trouble the elderly couple. The “harsh reality” Moua experienced in his younger days lingers in his memory, and he said he would be reluctant to return to Laos if he had to relive any of it over again. To explain the coping strategies people used during these dangerous and upsetting times, one has to understand Hmong kinship networks. Hmong have developed a recognized schema of relatedness that allows them to build a network of people on whom they can depend, even in the most trying of circumstances. Ideally, members of these kin groups reciprocate, feel obligation to one-another, and in many cases, reside together. As these cases illustrate, family and kinship networks unraveled during the war, exodus and aftermath. Nevertheless, people took it upon themselves to care for their own even when the familiar family and kin groups were shattered. In some cases, like the stories of widows and orphans, their ability to cope was measured by the degree of role change and personal responsibility they accepted. They were the most vulnerable because they had few, if any, relatives to depend on. What I found in this study is that Hmong refugees seek to rebuild and recreate what they know to work, but their

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schema of kinship seems resilient and flexible enough to accommodate contexts of change.

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The Refugee Camps Kin networks were helpful to fleeing refugees and to those people already in the camps who faced challenges of a different sort. Instances of Thai brutality toward tribal refugees began surfacing in 1978 (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). In some cases, Thai bandits threatened to turn refugees over to the Communist authorities if they didn’t give up their money and valuables. If the victims didn’t have the means to pay their captors, the captives sent messengers to the camps looking for relatives or friends who could pay for their release (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). Even before refugees crossed the Mekong River, they often ran into trouble with Lao civilians who tried to extort money from them. One man described a terrifying ordeal with rogue Lao taxi drivers that lasted four days. His family group was split up, threatened with their lives, and abandoned by the drivers. After paying a hefty sum, they were able to negotiate their passage to the border. Later, with the help of kin in a nearby river town, they hired a boat to take them across the Mekong. Eventually, they made their way to the refugee camps on the Thai side. The camps were composed of many long sheds divided in 10 x 12 foot housing units that typically housed 10-30 people. Crowd diseases and gastrointestinal ailments from spoiled food and polluted water were common. Food supplies from the United Nations were insufficient to feed the massive number of people streaming into the camps, and their hunger forced refugees to supplement their diets with purchased food. One of the few ways to get needed money was from relatives already resettled in third countries (Hamilton-Merritt 1999). The needs of the refugees were met by a collection of relief agencies called voluntary organizations or VOLAGs. At least 50 different organizations provided literacy training, health care, vocational training, public health, and education. Some of the most active were the Christian Missionary Alliance Church, The Church of

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Christ in Thailand and the Catholic Office for Emergency Relief (Quincy 2000). Eventually, Hmong became more organized under the direction of patri-clan representatives and leaders for the different camp sectors. The Hmong resisted repatriation and relocation to a third country more strongly than other refugees groups in the camps, but after 1991, there were no more options. The camps were slated for complete shutdown and refugees could either repatriate or seek asylum elsewhere.

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Leaving Asia The decision to relocate was not opportunistic or easy. Rumors of evil doctors, raging crime, and religious intolerance in the United States circulated among refugees and their relatives scattered across camps and countries. Australia, Canada, Argentina, French Guiana, France and the United States agreed to accept refugees. The vast majority, some 150,000, favored the United States for several reasons: the military alliance between the Hmong and the CIA; the recognized military leader of the Lao Hmong (General Vang Pao) who had already relocated to the United States; and preexisting family ties. One man recounted how hard it was for him to make a decision about where to go next: To go to France, or go to Guyana, the south of France or to America? I didn’t know that. It was hard to make a decision at that time. So I wait and wait. I told my mother [in the U.S.] I will go to France and she recorded a cassette and sent it to me. And she cried all through the cassette. “Why you don’t want to come here [to the United States]. The suggestion by Roger Warner (1996:374), that the camps were, “part travel bureaus where Iron Age tribesmen could sign up to emigrate to the West,” is wrong and offensive. Hmong in Laos were not “Iron-Age tribesmen” and in my conversations with people, it was apparent that leaving the homeland, relatives and friends was a difficult and painful period. Mee Lor and her family were confronted with the decision to seek asylum or repatriate, but hers was a family torn apart. In our

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discussion, Mee, now 72-years-old, explained how she helped make it possible for her granddaughter, grandson, and his wife to relocate to the United States rather than go back to Laos. Their situation required family role adaptability and creative strategizing. Because her stepson and her son were fighting with the Hmong resistance and were unwilling to leave, she helped secure the marriage of her grandson so he could take an adult role and lead the family to the United States. She said that she took on the parents’ role and provided money for the bridewealth, helped buy meat for the wedding party, and prepared the wedding food. The marriage established a culturally recognized, maleheaded household. The grandson said, “She provided the marriage for me first, and it’s kind of like I have a family then, so I can take the family journey to the United States.” Establishing an intact kin group in order to immigrate overrode the normative expectations that the parents should provide for their son’s marriage. This is a primary example of strategic rule bending within culturally acceptable guidelines. Keeping family and kin safe and together is at the core of Hmong kinship. Established roles and expectations are important, but they can bend if needed. This newly established, small tsev neeg (house family) left in 1991, about the same time the refugee camps were closing down in Thailand. At the time of our interview, the grandmother, her grandson and his wife and their children were living in a trailer park on the outskirts of a small city in Western Wisconsin. In order to immigrate to the United States, Hmong refugee families had to have the financial support of a third party. Five types of sponsorship were available to refugees: by an individual U.S. citizen, family, church group, voluntary agency, or a relative already living in the U.S. (Koltyk 1998). I asked a multitude of questions about sponsorship to determine if there were any reoccurring patterns of support. Did Hmong friends with citizenship ever sponsor acquaintances? Did people rely more on the wife’s side of the family or the husband’s for support? Churches and non-profit organizations typically sponsored refugees who sought asylum in the early days of resettlement. Relatives already in the host country often sponsored families who immigrated later. Officially, the role of a sponsor is “to assist a new refugee in becoming a productive member of a host society” (Tran

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1991:537). Temporarily, refugees are dependent on the sponsor both economically and socially. Kinship ties—consanguinial, affinal, and sometimes both, were used by Hmong refugees to establish lines of support. To illustrate this fact, I compiled a partial list of responses I received when I asked the question—who sponsored you?

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--- “My stepfather, his brother sponsored us, he’s in California.” ---“ My wife’s brother.” --- “My dad’s older sister.” --- “My dad has a sister that lives there [in Wausau, Wisconsin] and so she sponsored us.” -- “When we came to the United States, Toua Lor was the sponsor of our family. His last name is the same as my last name. In Hmong we could call us kwvtij [cousin-brother] too, but he kind of has a relationship to my wife because my wife’s mother is his sister.” ---“I think it was my grandpa’s brother, one of my great uncles.” --- “So my wife’s family came to the United States and they sponsored my family.” It is worth reemphasizing that even distant ties to consanguinal and affinal kin aided Hmong refugees’ passage to the United States. Most of the people I spoke with said they knew their sponsoring relatives back in Laos. No one in this study identified friends, associates, or fictive kin (family friends, god-parents, etc.) as sponsors. Churches and non-profit agencies played a significant role because they helped sponsor thousands of refugee Hmong families. Without a doubt, these “outside” sources of support were critical for refugee families. The assistance provided by non-Hmong agencies and individuals is appreciated and acknowledged to this day by members of the Hmong community. Even so, I am confident in saying non-Hmong sources of support are viewed as temporary and conditional because Hmong people generally believe they need to rely on each other to make things work out. In the vast majority of cases I studied, people relied on kin first and then the wider community. In Chapter 4, I will discuss indicators of changing attitudes regarding reliance on kin, and the

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influence of organizations in the Hmong community, but at this point in the Hmong refugee experience, most turned to a time-honored system of social relationships based on descent and marriage. Once a family decided to relocate to the United States, the paperwork process began. Applications including names and biographical data of all family members were compiled, which required a good deal of guessing, since Hmong traditionally don’t register specific birth dates and marriage dates. Next, the U.S. embassy and Immigration and Naturalization Service reviewed and either rejected or approved the refugees’ applications for resettlement. My understanding is that applicants needed to prove they, or other family members, were involved in the war on the side of the Americans. Those who were eligible to arrive in the U.S. as refugees but had no sponsors were referred to local VOLAGs to find sponsors. In some cases when no private sponsors were found, the local voluntary agencies took responsibility to settle the refugees (Tran 1991). Sponsors had to prove they could support the applicants for a specified amount of time by documenting sufficient financial resources. If approved for relocation, some refugees received very basic vocational, acculturation, and language training at an intermediary refugee camp, Phanat Nit Khom, before coming to their new home, but the real work of acculturation started when they arrived in the host country.

Resettlement The challenges of adjusting to life in the United States were central to our conversations on resettlement. Refugees initially relied on the good will of their sponsors to find housing, buy clothing, enroll in English classes, apply for state assistance, and other tasks. For many people, these first months of culture shock stand out in their memory. One young woman described her family’s disorientation upon arriving in wintry Wisconsin: It was a cold winter day when we arrived here and we all were sick because of the climate change. We all had runny noses I remember. I think it was during [the holidays] because they

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had the Christmas stuff up and I remember we were asking “why do they put stuff on trees?” The year was 1985 and we were donated the same jacket so my whole family had the same jacket on. Why were Hmong refugees, trained primarily in subsistence agriculture, from the mountain regions of Laos, placed in northern U.S. urban centers? As mentioned earlier, as part of the U.S. government’s resettlement plan, Indochinese refugees were dispersed across the United States so as not to place an unfair burden on any one state (Rumbaut 1997). Little concern for the needs or desires of the refugees was demonstrated. Vang Pao had originally requested Hmong refugees be provided a large tract of land so they could sustain themselves by farming but this plan was not to be. The policy of dispersion worked, from the point of view of policy makers, for several years because few of the immigrants arriving from Southeast Asia had pre-existing family ties. By the early 1980’s, however, the dispersal patterns began to change as relatives already in the United States were able to serve as sponsors, and kinship ties began to facilitate the concentration of some ethnic groups in specific geographical areas. In fact, kinship ties, whether by blood or marriage, were a primary force behind Hmong migration and relocation after the late 1970s. All of the people I spoke with had rebuilt kinship networks. One man working as a janitor, with a wife and 10 children to support, combined his financial savings with his mother’s and they brought his four sisters and their families over from Thailand, one family at a time. It was clear that many participants felt a responsibility to help relatives relocate to the United States. One young woman described how her paternal aunt had helped start the flow of kin to this country: [The aunt] was married and she had a couple of kids and they were pretty well off and that is why they could sponsor us. And then after we were here a couple of years, we sponsored our relatives from Thailand. [After the relatives] from Thailand came, they lived with us in Wausau, and then the ones in Green Bay moved back to Wausau too. So now the majority of our close clan relatives are all in Wausau.

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As illustrated in the previous narrative, families wanted to be with kin. I found an apparent desire for men to move their families near paternal relative (kwvtij) clusters as explained in this interview with a young man. I am listed as “J”. We came to California for several months and then we decided to move to Green Bay because we had more relatives. I guess that is just the way Hmong live their lives, wherever they have more relatives they will tend to move to that area. J: Were these kwvtij? Your father’s side? Yes.

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In another interview, a middle-aged man explained how his family moved from a refugee camp in Thailand to Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin to live with his wife’s family. Her family had also sponsored them to come to the United States. After a few years, he decided to move to Menomonie, Wisconsin, to be near extended paternal relatives. In this case, he had no immediate family in Menomonie, but a relative in his sub-lineage group was still preferable to the wife’s side (neejtsa): When we were in Wisconsin Rapids [we lived near the wife’s family] and you know Hmong culture, if you live or stay with them that is what they call no good. J: Right. You have to move to [be with] my cousin or someone close to my family. So that is why in Menomonie I have Chang and another brother here too. So we think this is a good place and I move to Menomonie. Although I found living close to the kwvtij to be a pattern in most cases, individuals and families did consider other factors when deciding where to move. One man explained that he had brothers in Denver and

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sisters in Omaha and St. Paul, but he wanted to move to a little city so he could drive safely. He decided to move to Menomonie, Wisconsin, about one hour away from the St. Paul sister. Although he has some relatives living within a reasonable driving distance, he has no close relatives living in his community. Job or business opportunities may entice Hmong families to relocate, but usually they move only if relatives accompany them or they have kin already living in the area. Pa Houa said her parents and 12 siblings moved from Wausau, Wisconsin to St. Paul, Minnesota so they could open a business in the Hmong community and have “something to show for our family.” Initially, her parents went into business with a distant uncle and aunt, but they had disputes and the uncle and his wife backed out of the business. Now Pa Houa’s family has taken over the business completely, but making a go of it is grueling—her mother works seven days a week at the restaurant, her father works long days at a construction job, and her 84-year-old grandmother takes care of the children and house. In most cities where Hmong have settled, they have established non-profit community organizations to serve as refugee assistance centers and provide cultural transition services to refugees and the wider community. Staff members at the mutual assistance agencies help clients find work, get language and job training, and coordinate educational seminars on topics such as income taxes, steps to citizenship, and other pertinent topics for refugees and immigrants. They also provide services to the wider community, working as translators, interpreters, and cultural brokers. The board of directors for these local organizations is usually composed of Hmong people who represent kin groups in the community, and non-Hmong community leaders. These local organizations are vested in their communities and have ties to the Hmong national leadership group. Kinship thus becomes a relevant basis for organization and consensus as patrilineage and sub-lineage membership extends from the local to the national level.

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Adaptation Across the United States, Hmong refugees have worked to be as selfsufficient as possible, but there have been many difficulties along the way, including language barriers and the lack of applicable job skills. Despite these odds, most Hmong families are coping. In the following chapter, I will discuss economic adaptation and cultural change more thoroughly. Based on information provided by men and women in this study, it appears that the mutual exchange of goods and services between kin has contributed at least partially to their success. It was common to hear accounts of relatives extending their support to other family members. The following story about coping strategies is representative of dozens of others I heard during the course of this study. See Yang came to the United States in 1988 and lived in California for six years. While he was there, he was on state assistance and found it very difficult to find a job that paid more than four or five dollars per hour. When he heard that the California assistance program was going to end, he decided to relocate, so he called his kwvtij and they helped him move from California to Wisconsin. They paid for his family members’ plane tickets, found him an apartment, and picked him up from the airport. He said, “In our culture we need somebody that you know is your family or cousin and anytime that you need help, they will help you. Nobody else is responsible to you because you are not related to them.” He and his wife work in a factory assembling electrical parts and are now able to support themselves and their children. I do not want to give the impression that relying on kin was the only adaptation strategy Hmong immigrants used, but clearly, these relationships were influential in determining where people chose to move. Having kin nearby enabled refugee families and individuals to maximize their resources as they adjusted to life in a new community. In Dao’s case, he was able to graduate from high school because of kin networks. He is an orphan by Hmong standards because his father is deceased and his mother married into another patri-clan. He lived with his stepfather’s brother for several years in California, but when

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he was sixteen, he moved to Wisconsin to live with his father’s brother in Milwaukee for a very practical reason:

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In California they have a law that if you’re 18 you can’t go to high school anymore, so I’m thinking [in] the future I want to go to college and get a better education. I heard [in] Wisconsin you can go until [you’re] 21 in high school. I talked to my mother and stepfather [and I] say I want to live with my uncle in Milwaukee so they said ok and [they] sent me to Milwaukee. [I] stayed with my uncle in Milwaukee until I graduated [from] high school… Another man moved from Rhode Island to Wisconsin because his family was miserable living in a crime-ridden neighborhood. His wife and children were terrified even to open the curtains for fear they would be shot at. Besides, he said, “I have no cousins in Rhode Island, how could I live there?” He called his oldest brother in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and several kinsmen, including his brother, arrived soon after to move him and his family to the mid-west. His kwvtij provided food and shelter and took him to the Department of Family Services to apply for food stamps. Besides getting to a new location and getting a place to live, many refugees needed loans to start school, put together bridewealth for their sons, and purchase items like cars and large appliances. The following quotation, from a middle-aged man with ten children, illustrates the value of kin networks in the context of Hmong refugee adaptation: If he gets SSI assistance or something like that and he doesn’t have a job that can get him enough money, most of the time he borrow money from his cousin. You know a family can borrow $500 or $600 dollars and [when] they come up with enough to purchase a used vehicle then they can use it and then pay them back later without any commission or any interest. It is only the Hmong culture and the Hmong tradition that leads the Hmong to be able to live here in the United States. Turning to the kin was practical, but some people said it was also more comfortable than turning to outsiders. One Hmong man

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described how he felt more at ease relying on kwvtij than on his American sponsors when he first moved to Elk Mound, WI.

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When we came here, we spoke no English. So it was very difficult for the sponsor to communicate with us. We had a very difficult time. The sponsors took us to technical school in Eau Claire for English, and they took us there every day. So after 6 months…my cousin and I went to the church and talked to the pastor and explained what we were planning. I told my sponsor that it is hard for you to take me back and forth to Eau Claire every day. I know that it is very difficult for you. Over in Eau Claire, they do have a city bus, so I think it might be better for me to move to Eau Claire and take the bus to school. Maybe it will be easier for you than if I stay here. He told me that he knows how hard it is but says, ‘if you live here we are going to take care of you—all the paper work and everything. If you move there, who will help you?’ My cousin said, ‘I will help him.’ So we moved to Eau Claire, and I took the bus to the technical school for another two years. This same man helped his sisters and their families in the immigration process only a few years later when he was in the position to do so. The Hmong refugee experience does not have a clear ending. Laos is still not free, the resistance from jungle soldiers is ongoing, and even people who have been in the United States for some time talk about going home. In fact, most of the people I spoke with over the age of 35 said they would go back if Laos was free and safe. For these people, and older people in particular, they still feel displaced from home and kin. Sometimes they spoke about relatives living in Thailand or Laos and their desire to reunite. Even young adults, who I presumed were quite at ease in the United States, were noticeably affected by the absence of particular relatives in their lives. For various reasons, some economical, others personal, many Hmong–Americans are living an ocean apart from loved ones. One of these, Bee, a young man in his twenties, communicates with his sisters in Laos by cassette tapes. He

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said, “Every time I hear a cassette from my sisters over there, I always cry. It is kind of hard to listen. It is hard for them because you know how poor it is over there.” Repeatedly during our discussion he talked about saving enough money to sponsor his sisters to come to the United States or buying a business for them to run in Laos. As these cases reveal, Hmong individuals and families develop a number of coping strategies when confronted with personal and social tragedy. The experiences people in this study shared exemplify commitment, ingenuity, and adaptability within Hmong kinship groups, but stories like these are also contextual, demonstrating than any person’s ability to cope is dependent on many factors. Some families had kin to rely on when they arrived, some were relocated in states that had better paying jobs, and some had formal education before they arrived in the United States – all factors which may have made initial adjustment transitions easier. Refugee adaptation and reconnecting kin networks remain ongoing issues, but 29 years have passed since the first Hmong refugees made the United States their adopted home and thus contemporary strategies and institutions in Hmong communities reflect different realities, divergent challenges, and multiple coping mechanisms. Mutual assistance associations thrive, most Hmong-Americans are adept at working within and between cultures, rising incomes are allowing more personal and family independence, and some families are finding nonkin sources of support, in Hmong church groups for example. In the next chapter, I will discuss the changes noticed by refugees and share what some of their reactions are to the process of cultural accommodation. Cultural change, by choice or by influence, is a condition not unfamiliar to Hmong-American refugees.

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CHAPTER 4

We Know The Way To Be Human

See Yang’s Story A veteran jungle fighter and a lifelong student of human behavior, the tall, husky-voiced See Yang captivated me with his keen wit and worldly wisdom. See Yang and I were comparing Hmong and mainstream American ways of resolving conflict when he said something I will never forget (I am listed as “J”):

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J: Do you think it is important to keep the [Hmong] tradition of solving family problems with family? Well it depends on the people and what they want. Because some [people] they keep the American way. I don’t like the American way because you need somebody to help you and everything is money. See? That is why I don’t like it. And you know, if someone helps you in the court or solves your problems, it is money. Money! So this is a problem and that’s why I don’t like it. If it is a big problem…I need just cousins to solve, because we know the way to be human. So, we will solve that problem. It is not a big problem…trouble like money or fighting or children or something like that, it is not a big problem for our people. The big problem is we leave our country and we have no farm, no house, no place to live, everything is gone. Now you sit down and think about the past and now you have nothing. So angry…because there is no reason, and because sometimes you think about the other way in the past, and you [are] a little bit angry. …Somebody else, they don’t know why you are angry.

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My conversation with See Yang was a watershed moment in the ethnographic process largely because of one particular statement: “…we know the way to be human.” His words come to me every time I reflect on the refugee experience of Hmong-Americans. For See Yang, and for many Hmong refugees, the “problem” with adjusting to life in the United States is that they have to adjust at all. I focus on See Yang’s personal narrative in this chapter because his is a story of contrasts, adjustment, and frustration. Ultimately, through his story, we learn about Hmong cultural accommodation and resilience in the United States. Like most Hmong refugees, See Yang remembers life in Laos with a mixture of nostalgia and sadness. I listened intently as he described the routine of daily life in Laos compared to his life now: Well, we are different. Because when were in Laos the way you had to carry your life, the way you had to make your own life [was to] farm—grow some food to sell yourself. And you had to have some animals—water buffalo, pig, chicken—with you in your life. And anytime you go to work, you have to walk. You have to carry a basket on your back. Everything comes from the farm. Put it in the basket and take it home. …I plan to make the farm and I know that it will or won’t be enough. If it is not enough, then next year I will make a bigger farm because last year it wasn’t big enough and [there was] not enough [food] for my family to eat. So, I have to make more than last year. When you grow rice or corn [you] have to make a little house to keep them in. We just wait for the rooster to call you and you wake up. We don’t care how early or late, just wake up, and prepare yourself breakfast, and go to the farm. We don’t have holidays or weekends. He laughed and shook his head when he mentioned life without holidays or weekends. Describing how people worked together and contributed to the welfare of the family, See Yang said: In Laos, the woman or housewife, had to carry the children or watch the children, feed the animals, and cook. The man, it kind of like isn’t fair, but he is like the king—to control the house, to make decisions. What am I going to do for my

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family? So, he makes decisions about the house, how to change it or how to fix it. How do I make money for my family? How to grow the rice and corn for next year? Do I have the tools to use for the farm? If I don’t have it, I have to go and make it or buy it. So we have different work. Sometimes when the man has nothing to do he can help the woman…do their jobs, like keep the baby or feed the animals or cook—helping each other. In Laos, See Yang’s life was also laden with the horror of war. He fought with the Hmong/American war effort from 1972-1975, and then he joined the resistance movement and lived as a jungle fighter (with his family) in the forest for eleven years. I asked him about those times and, he solemnly said: It is difficult to be a human in the jungle. We didn’t have food or clothes. And you see the people…you just see only bones moving. See? J: See bones moving?

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See the bones moving. J: Oh, because the people are so hungry. Yes. So hungry, so skinny. See Yang, his wife and their small child, scrounged for edible plants to sustain themselves. They were constantly on the move to keep away from Communist soldiers who greatly outnumbered the resistance fighters. The rains came in June, July, and August, and it was terribly difficult to handle the family in those conditions. Finally, he knew they couldn’t survive in the jungle any longer, but he was fearful they would not be able to get out of Laos alive because the journey was so difficult and the way out was uncertain. See had some formal education in Laos, so he knew the names and approximate locations of the surrounding countries from the maps he studied in

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school, but how far or how long it would take to reach the borders was unclear. Like most Hmong in Laos, See Yang had heard stories about the thousands of Hmong refugees who had starved in the exodus or just gotten lost and died. His family fled in a group of about 50 people, many of whom were strangers. After finding their way through the jungle to the border and crossing the MeKong River, they were refused entry into the refugee camps. Thai officials told them there was no program to care for them, no food and no help were available; they would have to go back. That night, they paid a bribe and were able to sneak into one of camps. After two years in the camps, with sponsorship from his wife’s brother, See Yang and his family made their way to Fresno, California in 1988. The Yang family, now with six children, found competition for jobs was stiff in the ethnically diverse community of Fresno. Few jobs were available and the ones they could find paid only four or five dollars an hour. See Yang said making a living was impossible on such low wages and for the first six years, they depended on state assistance. Later, they moved to Wisconsin because he had relatives in the area and the job prospects were better. See and his wife started working the same shift at a turkey slaughterhouse located about 45 minutes away from the town they live in. After putting the children in school, See and his wife would leave for work, but when the children came home they were without adult supervision. The children “would just leave whenever they wanted,” See said, and they began getting in trouble and started hanging out in bad groups. He made the decision that he and his wife would change jobs and work different shifts. Today, they work at an electronic assembly plant, also about 45 minutes from home. Because they work different shifts, an adult is with the children around the clock and their family life is more stable. “Before we had a lot of problems,” See said. He and his wife would “argue and fight” because the kids were in trouble. Compared with their lifestyle in Laos, See and his wife now share more responsibilities such as working outside the home, childcare, and housework. Before reaching a breaking point, See and his wife made the necessary adjustments to keep their tsev neeg intact and safe, even if it required some familial fine-tuning and relocation. See Yang survived a particularly horrific refugee odyssey, adapted to life in a very different society, made accommodations and adjustments, and now, the future looks promising for his children. In

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fact, See told me his daughter was preparing to go to college next year. Some might interpret the Yang family story as the all-American success story, but this conclusion glosses over some very key distinctions between people who choose to immigrate to the United States and refugees who are forced out of their country and way of life. See Yang reminded me of this very important distinction when he said, “…we know the way to be human.” See was comfortable with his life in Laos before the war—he had a farm, he had a stable household, and the methods he had learned to solve problems worked for him. He fought for this way of life at enormous cost. See Yang is a survivor, not an assimilationist. I asked See if he would go back to Laos if it became democratic and/or peaceful. Without hesitation, he said, “I want to go back.” “What about your kids?” I asked. He laughed and said, “I don’t care. One day they will know and they will follow me.” Despite Hmong refugees’ remarkable journeys to new geographical and cultural settings, their connection to Laos and their former way of life is an integral part of who they are now. See Yang’s identity as a Hmong man in the United States is the result of the dynamic conjunctions of war, economic struggle, and cultural patterns in Laos and in the United States. Contrasting Hmong people’s life in Laos, and their current life in the United States creates a misleading binary that limits accurate understanding of the processes of refugee adaptation. Uprooted people exist in a state of disruption. One of the adaptive mechanisms emerging from refugee communities is the ability to make tradition and innovation co-exist and complement each other (Reyes 1986). I argue that Hmong-Americans use their understandings of relatedness as a means to maintain cultural continuity as well as to adapt to new situations. It is vital to look for patterns of continuity as well as points of conflict between conventional expectations of Hmong relationships and the conditions and norms in American society. Incorporation of these two perspectives may provide a more accurate understanding of the ongoing processes of change and of the ways in which Hmong-American families are influenced by both the past and the present. My intent here is to highlight stories of cultural continuation and innovation in the Hmong refugee experience and to demonstrate the effects of this synthesis on relationships between Hmong individuals

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and families. I use economic and generational relationships as key indicators of dynamic and concurrent cultural change and resilience within families and kinship networks.

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Kinship and Self-Sufficiency Most refugees arriving in the United States encounter limitations. Although the natures of these restrictions differ, the newcomers create some type of social organization to insure their survival in an untried environment (Chan 1990). In more recent historical and sociological work, scholars have repeatedly shown how migrant groups cluster together and how these social and economic networks can endure far beyond the time of immigration (Tilly 1990, Gold 1992). Social networks provide mutual aid and solidarity, but also produce division and conflict. They may serve spiritual and political ends. Most importantly, material goods and services essential to maintaining group and individual well-being are acquired and shared through these networks. How have pre-immigration Hmong kinship patterns affected refugee adaptation? Time-honored kinship duties, obligations, and networks, do have an adaptational quality. Alternatively, some cultural patterns may limit economic self-sufficiency. In this chapter, I limn Hmong refugees’ struggles for self-sufficiency, care giving, and adaptation to the U.S. environment. My observations are complicated by the fact that immigrants may gain vastly different kinds of benefits and rewards from cultural resources and ethnic networks because of differences in their gender and age. In the 1980’s, economic self-sufficiency dominated the agendas of policy makers working with Indochinese refugees. Little attention was given to culturally specific needs or desires. Assuming assimilation was the best model for reaching full economic self-sufficiency, planners strove to document how refugee assimilation was proceeding and how it might be assisted by institutional intervention (Dunning 1989).24 The 1980 Refugee Act “mandated annual surveys and reports

24

Milton Gordon (1964) did the most extensive theoretical work on the process of assimilation for immigrants. His model predicted the progressive weakening

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to Congress in order to measure the progress and success of refugees coming to the U.S.” (Koltyk 1998:82). Key measurements of refugee adaptation included employment status, welfare dependence, and adjustment. The studies concluded that states that had high welfare dependence and high refugee unemployment also had generous welfare benefits, and they also indicated that the longer refugees had been in the country, the more likely they were to be self-sufficient. Many of these studies did not distinguish Hmong refugees as a distinct ethnic group. The consequences of family or relative sponsorship versus American sponsorship emerge as one item of discrepancy in subsequent studies. Thanh Van Tran (1991) contends sponsorship by a member or organization from the host society provides Southeast Asian refugees with more opportunities to make a better integration than does sponsorship by a relative or person from the refugee’s own ethnic group, but his research did not measure this variable specifically for the Hmong refugee population. It seems likely that unrelated sponsors were eager to push refugees into the work force. Sponsors discouraged refugees from seeking public assistance, and instead urged them to take low-paying, entry-level jobs. Sponsors who shared cultural, historical and social ties with the new immigrants were probably less concerned with speedy acclimation and more attuned to individual refugee needs and desires. Perhaps they were also more attuned to the newly arrived refugees’ expectations about status and employment. Koltyk (1998) contends that Hmong ethnic sponsors conveyed an attitude that it was normal to be on state assistance, and they guided newly arrived relatives to apply for these benefits. Recognizing the multiple demands placed on newly arrived refugees is vital to understanding their decision-making. Selfsufficiency and securing a job were important goals for many Hmong refugees I spoke with, but many were also preoccupied with familial of cultural traits and bonds, the increasing participation of immigrants in the primary groups of the core society, intermarriage, and the development of a common national identity based on the symbols of the core group. For a review and critique of assimilation theory see Charles Hirschman (1983), Olivier Zunz (1985), and Ewa Morawska (1990).

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obligations such as helping family members get to the U.S., reconnecting with kin, taking care of children, and providing care for the elderly and the disabled. Additionally, many people I interviewed extended their financial dependence on relatives or welfare so they could get supplementary language or job training, find better paying jobs, or reach post-secondary educational goals. Koltyk (1998) found the same patterns in her study of Hmong refugees in Wausau, Wisconsin. Refugees’ use of state assistance is often misunderstood and harshly judged in the wider community. Many people stereotypically assume Hmong refugees pay no taxes, have more children to get welfare benefits, and avoid working to stay on state assistance. These choices do not reflect the complex realities of refugee adaptation and contemporary welfare guidelines. For example, in regards to the aforementioned research, rather than blaming relative sponsorship or attitudes towards state assistance for delaying labor force participation, one must also consider refugees’ length of residence in the United States. Families who resettled in the 1970’s and 1980’s (and therefore, were more likely to have American sponsors) have several time factors working in their favor. They are usually more proficient in English, they have job skill training and experience, and they have a more extensive United States-based employment record. Subsequent immigrants, who were more likely to be sponsored by family members, lack comparative in-country experience. Do family sponsors guide their newly arrived kin to be welfare dependent as Koltyk suggests? This is a difficult question, and my research does not offer any clear-cut answers. Several Hmong refugees told me they helped relatives apply for state assistance (disability, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.), but they also mentioned that they funded their relatives’ transportation costs, offered them free shelter until they got on their feet, helped them apply for jobs and/or training opportunities, found them suitable housing, and helped them get acquainted with the services in the community (transportation systems, schools, etc.). In other words, state assistance was just one resource among many that family sponsors used to help relatives get adjusted. I found families usually moved to a location to be near kin, but some also told me they took the state’s welfare benefits and educational opportunities into consideration. Typically, unless there is a problem that prohibits a person from entering the job force, like inability to communicate

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proficiently in English, physical disability, or overpowering family obligations, Hmong refugees I spoke with eventually found work. What factors might limit a family’s ability to be self-sufficient? Some participants pointed to low-wage labor and health problems as restrictive factors. For example, See Yang and his wife could not support their family on jobs that paid $4-5 per hour. Once they were able to land jobs that paid more, they managed to support themselves and get off welfare. Ger, a man in his thirties, stays home to care for his sick wife and eight school-age children. He said he did not have time to work or get an education because of his family obligations. His wife sustained brain damage in a car accident and as a result has severe, on-going mental and physical health problems. He has some kin in the community, but they work regular jobs, and are unable to step in and consistently care for his wife and children. Another story of struggle for economic self-sufficiency comes from 48-year old, Pao, who described the vagaries of his work career in rich detail during our interview. He arrived in the U.S. in 1980, and within two years he was working in a grocery store. Later, while going to a technical school for welding, he held a job in a local restaurant. After deciding he did not enjoy welding work, he decided to return to school for a degree in tailoring. For a short while he owned his own tailoring business, but his career and advanced training in tailoring came to an end after an accident in which he burned both his eyes. He was blind for about three months and he thought he would never see again. He was lucky and his sight came back, but he couldn’t see to read or stitch. “And then I lost everything,” he said, including three sewing machines he had purchased for his tailoring shop. “I have all the designing books, but I can’t read,” he told me despondently. Pao volunteered to work as a janitor to get some training in a job field that may not require full eyesight. After a couple of months of on-the-job training, he was hired on full-time. During his years of working as a janitor, he and another family member were able to save enough money to sponsor four of his sisters to come to the United States. Pao developed a debilitating carpal tunnel condition after several years at this job and eventually had to quit. His wife has severe nerve damage in her leg, which prevents her from standing for any length of time. Both he and his wife do not have a job right now. Pao said he thinks

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this is “God’s plan for him so he can help his kids.” Six children are still at home under his watchful eye so he can “keep them out of trouble, especially during the middle school years.” The oldest children are out of the house and on their way to what Pao hopes are prosperous careers. His first son has finished his bachelor’s degree and is now a manager at a print company. His second and third sons are in college. He is proud of his children’s accomplishments even though his own work career has been full of disappointment. As the preceding examples illustrate, individuals made choices that promoted the reunification of kin, family stability, and enhanced their professional or educational training. Although some have made decisions that may not promote immediate self-sufficiency, their choices were grounded in a logic that was forward thinking and often in the interests of their families. This conclusion is consistent with Joann Koltyk’s (1998: 136-137) statement that “Hmong families are characterized by values that prize self-sufficiency, saving and thrift, hard work, goal-setting, delayed gratification, future orientation, independence, and an emphasis on strong family ties and kinship cooperation [and] this system of values and social organization influences the types of choices and decisions that individuals and families make economically.” In the process of adapting to a market economy, some choices made by Hmong-American families may not seem advantageous. In Hmong society, large families symbolize economic and cosmological strength (Symonds 2004). Many sons and daughters-in-law, as well as numerous incoming bridewealth payments could offer economic advantages in the agricultural based economy of rural Laos, but large families are difficult to provide for in industrial economies. Although a downward fertility rate among Hmong refugee families has been noted (from upwards of eight or nine children per woman, down to four or five), they are on average very large in comparison with most U.S. families.25 No individual or family I interviewed mentioned large family size as a barrier to adaptation, self-sufficiency or upward mobility, but several individuals did mention it was hard to raise large families in the United States while coping with work and school. My 25

For a more thorough comparison of fertility rates among Indochinese refugees, see Ruben G. Rumbaut (1986). The average Hmong fertility rate at the time of his research was 8.6 children per woman.

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perception that large families are an economic liability because they deplete meager resources in Hmong households is an etic perspective. Hmong parents generally encourage their children to obtain education and advanced degrees, and if one child succeeds, his or her success is reflected on the entire family group. Perhaps this is why having large families may not be perceived by all Hmong parents as an economic liability. Koltyk’s (1998) observation that diversified incomes from multiple sources (jobs, social security, state assistance) produce more cash flow for Hmong families than a single income wage earner is instructive. She also believes that the non-income earning members of a family or household (elders, older children) provide vital functions of child care and subsistence activities, which further enhance savings. I concur with Koltyk on this last point, but I would add that kin reciprocity has been just as important in the process of adaptation. Extended networks are crucial when there is a shortage of resources. Many changes have occurred in state aid to vulnerable populations since Koltyk conducted her research. Since the overhaul of the Wisconsin welfare program in 1996, cash welfare payments have dried up. The maximum aid period for Wisconsin’s state assistance program (Wisconsin Works or W-2) is now five years. The impact of the Wisconsin Works program (Wisconsin’s welfare reform measure) was felt intensely by large families because median family income is lower than it was under the former Aid to Families with Dependant Children (AFDC) program, and no adjustments for family size exist. While W-2 may have pushed many Hmong adults to enter the labor force and reduce their dependence on state assistance, Hmong families have not been lifted out of extreme poverty. Many of my research questions focused on Hmong understandings of kinship networks and on the ways Hmong people use these relationships to organize economic life and devise strategies for economic subsistence. The extended household and the practice of reciprocity in kin networks have helped Hmong refugees adjust to the market economy. For example, the extended household is often the mechanism by which newly-arrived Hmong refugee families pool resources, find jobs, secure housing, and basically find their way in the United States. This is not a hard and steadfast rule, but it emerges as a general pattern, especially in the early years of adaptation as explained

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in Chapter 3. People in this study explained how kin relationships provided the basis for capital growth through pooled savings and mutual reciprocity. As one man told me, Hmong people can borrow money from kin without any commission or interest and pay them back later, while institutions in the United States expect to profit from these kinds of transactions. For newly-arrived immigrants without credit histories, relatives are a reliable and practical source of capital. Likewise, if a family has an undeveloped or poor credit history, it is not uncommon for relatives to provide them with loans or invest in family business ventures. Financial reciprocity between kin is still common, but it is becoming one alternative among many as Hmong refugee families become more familiar with banking and loan options, establish their own credit histories, and accumulate more capital within individual households. Furthermore, non-Hmong businesses are reaching out to immigrant consumers in ways they did not in the past. For example, at least one insurance company in Menomonie now advertises, “we know how to speak Hmong” (“peb paub hais lub Hmoob”) on its street-side billboard. Similarly, car dealerships and mortgage companies in St. Paul regularly advertise in Hmong community newspapers. Hmong immigrants and their children are a growing and relatively untapped consumer market. For Hmong consumers, an eager business community expands their options, even when it comes to traditionally kin-based transactions. I was stunned to learn about a Hmong couple that went to the bank to get a bridewealth loan for their son rather than asking cousins and brothers for contributions (as is customary). The parents believed the bank loan would cause less aggravation in the long run, and they had enough money to pay the loan interest. While the substance of the ritual may continue (making alliances between kin groups), variation exists now regarding the means to achieve those ends.

Ethnic Enclaves After the original dispersal of Hmong refugees across the United States, they re-grouped voluntarily in enclaves. Particularly in California and Minnesota, communities organized around a spatial concentration of Hmong refugees. In these enclaves, a variety of Hmong-operated

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agencies and Hmong-owned enterprises exist to serve Hmong residents, as well as the community at large. Hmong-owned small businesses offering a multitude of goods and services to the community, flourish in St. Paul, Minnesota, for example. Hmong people arriving from Thailand or from other U.S. communities provide new sources of labor and new consumers for established businesses. Even in smaller communities with sizable Hmong populations, such as Menomonie and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it is common to find residential clustering. In Menomonie, Wisconsin, Hmong households are more densely concentrated in the southern portion of town, encompassing a large residential area composed of houses, apartment buildings, duplexes, and trailer parks. Rather than abandoning personal relationships within the Hmong community or moving away from urban enclaves, I believe Hmong immigrants have moved forward in the U.S. economy by relying on such bonds. Depending on ethnic ties is not a new phenomenon in the United States. Ewa Morawska’s (1985) socio-historical study of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Alejandro Portes and Robert L. Bach’s (1985) study of the Miami Cuban community both document ways in which immigrant communities turn inward to form complex networks of solidarities and associations to adapt to the broader society. Morwaska (1985:10) believes East Central Europeans incorporated themselves into the larger society by a “segmental appropriation of sorts,” not for or against, but alongside the dominant system. Segmental appropriation also exists in Hmong communities. Lao Family Community, an organization designed to support refugee adaptation, was originally established by General Vang Pao in Santa Ana, California in 1977 (Quincy 2000). In most U.S. cities where the Hmong have settled, similar centers, based on this model, work as information clearinghouses and refugee assistance centers, and they provide cultural transition services to refugees and the wider community. Mutual assistance associations compete for funding from federal, state, and local sources usually on a grant-by-grant basis. Headed by acculturated Hmong-Americans with good language and bicultural skills, these centers have helped promote a sense of ethnic solidarity and cultural accommodation at the same time. Politically

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savvy mutual assistance leaders bridge existing gaps between Hmong residents and the larger community. Center staff work to advance issues of concern to the Hmong community, such as housing, English as a Second Language (ESL) training, and work force development, while maintaining a smooth working relationship with key non-Hmong players in the community (school officials, social service providers, political officials, law enforcement officials, and judicial representatives). On each board of directors sit representatives of the major patri-clans in the community as well as non-Hmong allies. Tradition and innovation exist contemporaneously in Hmong-American political organizations. The emerging question is whether or not the newest generations will reproduce, modify or discard the existing order, which is based largely on adult male leadership and conciliation between family and opportunity. Will the younger generations favor Hmong communities and family solidarity or chase job opportunities far from home? In the course of this study, I became quite aware that a dialogue was underway about Hmong political leadership and support systems in general. Fault lines exist primarily along the axes of generation and gender. Young people I spoke with generally acknowledged and respected mutual assistance agencies, but also noted they were experientially detached from these organizations formed by the “elders.” Some Hmong women, particularly young, educated women, were reluctant to turn to mutual assistance agencies because they felt that any organization composed of older Hmong men would not listen to them. Young men were less critical, but did express they would be undervalued in such organizations because they were too young, didn’t speak Hmong well enough, or were just inexperienced. Perhaps the younger generation’s disinclination to rely on institutions established by the older generation precipitates the downfall of conventional Hmong leadership organizations, or at least a move in a different direction. On the other hand, many young Hmong-Americans I spoke with wanted to return to their U.S. home town, take care of their families, and make a difference in their communities. To accomplish their aims, they must have dependable, ethnic-oriented political configurations. I will explore future scenarios, with gender and generation in mind, in the final chapter.

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Changing Relationships

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The ties that helped refugees adapt and function effectively when they first arrived in the Unites States are changing to include more non-kin networks and associations. In all the structured interviews I conducted, I asked questions about how kin networks function, and whether kin relationships and strategies were changing. The responses indicated that people were now more willing to turn to non-Hmong sources for assistance, and some participants said they noticed less and less dependence on kin, specifically cousins or brothers within a sublineage group. One woman said she had seen her relatives turning to each other less frequently over the years. She provided this example: My parents they just got back from Laos, and they are trying to sponsor an uncle of mine to come over here to live, but my parents say that in order for you to sponsor someone over there, you need to have some money set aside at the bank to know that you can provide for that person. They don’t have enough to meet the requirement and so they have been asking the relatives, the close relatives, to see if they can help. But they are like, “we don’t have that much money either.” They don’t tend to be helping each other as much. My father, he is the only son in his family so he has no other brothers to depend on. The others [he would depend on] would be like the cousins or [more distant relatives]…so it is hard for him. If you had four brothers then one or two would likely help you. In this conversation, she noted that, if her father had brothers to depend on, he might have more support. Depending on more distantly related kwvtij was less reliable in her father’s case. She also noted in our conversation that several relatives were financially better off than the rest. She believes this class disparity “breaks the bonds” of kinship, and it creates feelings of superiority and inferiority amongst her father’s relatives. In this case, economic distance is the primary issue rather than biological or geographical proximity, but economic decisions today influence many facets of Hmong-American kinship, including her kin’s recent geographical displacement: She explained:

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In the last two years, due to economic opportunities, they [the relatives] are moving to the cities. At least three families have moved there already. So right now it is just my family and [a few others left]. It used to be that we’re all together, no matter what, we are all there. Now it’s like we want education, we want a good job. In America, we are changing to fit the Caucasian, today’s society. In her short lifetime, she has witnessed the rebuilding of kinship networks through immigration sponsorship and secondary migration as kin were moving to be near kin. Perhaps the dispersal of her relatives in search of new economic opportunities is just happenstance. Quantitative research on this topic might tell us whether another major demographic shift is underway. Her comment about Hmong and “Caucasian” value systems is more telling. Notably, she identifies “Caucasian” society as “today’s society,” indicating that Hmong family patterns are unique. Prioritizing education and good jobs, a EuroAmerican pattern stands in contrast to Hmong kinship solidarity. Lastly, her comment suggests that the family residential patterns she has come to appreciate may not withstand pressures from the dominant culture. A constant theme in these conversations was pressure—people felt the demand to work hard, make more money, and get an education. Preoccupations with getting ahead and being successful by American standards affected their relationships with family members. As a case in point, one young man I spoke with said he was burdened with a heavy course load in college and finals were approaching. His kinsmen, who lived on the other side of the state, were trying to schedule a soul calling ceremony during the final week of exams. He was trying to negotiate a different date so he could meet both his educational and kin obligations. This same young man expressed how relieved he would be to graduate from college so he could spend more time learning the time-consuming kinship rituals of his religion. I only nodded my head, knowing that the pace of American life rarely slows down after college.

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Religious Change Does religious change alter Hmong culture? Writing about Hmong social life before resettlement, Lee (1986:57) states, “A Hmong’s religion cannot be separated from his social groupings, and his relations with other Hmong are meaningful only in terms of whether or not they share similar ancestral rites. Therefore, he cannot do without his kinsman and a good knowledge of their rituals in order to carry out his Hmong existence.” Veneration of ancestors is believed to be mandatory for the fortune of a family or kin groups (Lee 1999a). Hmong who venerate the ancestors recognize a connection between those who are living and those who are deceased. “Religious beliefs define relationships between living members and their ancestors” (Dunnigan 1986:48). One of the ways of reckoning kinship is to compare how ancestral reverence rituals are conducted. For example, people sharing the same last name compare how each conducts the door and ox ceremony. If the rituals are conducted the same way they immediately recognize each other as members of the same caj ces or lineage. A change in faith is one way many refugee families have attempted to adapt to a new life in American society. The religious conversion of Hmong has pre-immigration roots, but in the context of refugee adaptation, change of faith is both a source of solidarity and of conflict in Hmong communities. Religious differences and practices are changing alliance patterns in Hmong communities. In many instances, bonds and relationships forged in Hmong churches are replicating kinship ties and responsibilities. Christian participants in this study noted that they are developing a reliance on other members of faithbased Hmong associations.26 As a case in point, the wedding I described in the beginning of this text was Christian Hmong. Members of the local Hmong church helped make the ceremony transpire in a way that was favorable to the bride’s family by filling in roles that are typically kin-based. At this particular ceremony, the support provided 26

Christian Hmong in this study were primarily associated with the Christian Alliance church.

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by congregation members increased the status of the bride’s broken family. Had the family been non-Christian, or had they still been in Laos, I suspect the bride’s family would have been far less commanding at this matrimonial event. Kue Her and his family converted to Christianity primarily because of a post-immigration family tragedy. His young son became very sick with leukemia and died. Kue’s family had trouble getting support from family members to conduct the healing ceremonies when their son was ill. Kue called the local Hmong pastor to come to his son’s aid. During this crisis, he made the decision to convert to Christianity. “Christianity is easier,” he said. “I just call the pastor, and he stops by my house to pray. I don’t have to sacrifice animals.” After his family’s conversion, he believes God has helped his family. As an example, he said his remaining children are better off now because they don’t get sick as much as they used to when his family followed the ways of the ancestors. I asked him how the change in faith had affected his relationships with his brothers. Kue said that they still socialized, called each other, had dinner together, and shared vegetables from his garden, but he did not depend on them as much as he did in the past. He attends their hu plig (soul calling) ceremonies, but he does not “do the religious activities” anymore. As a closing remark, he explained that he now saw people in his church as family, too: “If you are Christian and I am Christian, we are all related, we speak the same language. We help each other. I think of the whole congregation as my family.” I wondered if any patri-clan alliances existed within the congregation, and he replied, “The name does not matter.” The church “looks like a village” to him. Joseph Xiong, a Christian Hmong, said his fellow church members saw each other as one family and they acted like a family, especially in times of need. He said if he needs help, he first turns to another Xiong in the church, but if no kwvtij are available to assist him, he goes to other friends in the church, regardless of their patri-clan affiliation. Joeseph Xiong made it clear regardless of the situation he would rely on Hmong church members before Hmong non-church members. Of course, not all Hmong find Christianity to their liking. One elderly man I spoke with converted to Christianity when he first came to the United States, and he subsequently returned to “follow the way of his parents.” I was curious about his return to the Hmong religion and he had this to say:

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If you coj dab and xwm kaab [bring along the spirits], it is similar to what they are doing in the church, but we don’t have writing, something written about that. So we don’t do readings. We perform orally. When you going to church, you see that they are reading the Bible. And they are doing something similar to what you are doing in your home. But the difference is that if you go there, you have to pay money. So if you don’t pay money, then the priest or the master is not happy. If you go back to our coj dab, we don’t have to pay anything, just help each other. We don’t read a book. Conversion to Christianity can affect relationships within kinship networks particularly if the change in faith leaves relatives in different religious camps. I do not mean to suggest this conversion necessarily puts up an insurmountable divide, curtails family socializing, or disintegrates kin groups, but it does open up new alliances between non-related church members. Given the importance of religion and ritual to kinship practices, I expected Hmong people I interviewed to say Christianity greatly influenced contemporary Hmong culture and social relations. NonChristian participants did not pinpoint Christianity as an agent of cultural change, but many subjects were worried that their traditional ritual practices were in danger of being lost because few young people have enough knowledge to carry the ways of the ancestors forward. One young woman described her father’s frustration with his children who lack enthusiasm for carrying on the family rituals: He thinks that nobody takes him seriously. We don’t really take him seriously, like the way we should, and I don’t think he thinks we are worthy of learning it. Because he thinks we are childish yet and we don’t understand. For my older brother he’s too Americanized, and he refuses to learn that kind of stuff. I don’t’ know, I guess my dad is pretty disappointed. Her father’s concern is understandable since the eldest son is traditionally responsible for carrying out all the family rituals.

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Not only are many young people unwilling to learn the rituals of their particular family, but they also may lack the language skills to appropriately conduct the rituals. Dunnigan and Vang (1980) have suggested that maintenance of the Hmong language may in some part be determined by its function as part of ritual processes. This is particularly true of the rituals associated with the extended family. Family rituals and language maintenance may be mutually reinforcing, but teaching the language associated with ritual and the family traditions takes time, special initiative, and cooperation between the generations. Hmong Christians tell me that religion and culture are separate things; one can be Hmong and be Christian. They describe Hmong culture as essentially about language, dress, and history. Church elders make the case that the Hmong language is being preserved in the churches where it is taught to the next generation. At the local Hmong Christian Alliance Church, the Bibles and songbooks used in services are written in Hmong, the sermon is in Hmong, and all the hymns are translated from English to Hmong. Members I spoke with said they also see Hmong values as wholly congruous to Christian values. Lisa Capps (1994:163-166), who has studied the Hmong in Kansas City, believes “Christianity provides a means for the Hmong to reinforce their cultural identity as they gather in their own churches and at the same time to ‘fit into’ mainstream U.S. society.” She found that despite the loss of many ritual practices, including “shamanism and animal sacrifice,” the Christian Hmong people she interviewed demonstrated certain cultural continuities, especially in regard to ideas about illness. Capps speculates that for Hmong who become isolated from family and kin networks, Christianity may be more appealing because it relieves them of expensive ceremonial rituals. Hmong Christians can live isolated from kin, maintain a spiritual life, and connect with other Hmong people, whereas non-Christian Hmong depend more heavily on nearby kin to practice their religion. Part of the challenge of maintaining the ways of the ancestors, is demographic in nature. It is difficult for Hmong people to perform conventional coj dab rituals within American society unless there is a concentrated ethnic enclave where there are people who can ua neeb (communicate with the spirits) and animal sacrifices can be made (Desan 1983). For these reasons, Hmong people who coj dab need kin and spiritual

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practitioners within a reasonable geographical distance to conduct religious ceremonies. My research has led me to conclude that ethnic enclaves and generational cooperation are essential for the preservation of the Hmong language, kinship rituals, and the native Hmong religion. Young people must seize the initiative to learn their native tongue and receive wisdom and practical training from their elders, whatever faith they choose to practice, or cultural traditions will vanish in Hmong diasporic communities. Hmong people still rely on Hmong people, even if they have a change in faith, which is a positive sign of ethnic solidarity. Many Hmong people see no reason for religious differences to split the community. In fact, some see no conflict between these two cosmologies and even draw from both for spiritual health. I do not believe different religious belief systems in the Hmong community will necessarily splinter ethnic solidarity or identity, but my research thus far indicates religious conversion may alter kin relationships and alliances.

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Generational Deliberations Min Zhou (1997) has pointed to critical questions of “second generation revolt” or “second generation decline” among the American-born children of immigrants. Second generation immigrants may feel rising aspirations related to work and education, but have less opportunity than other Americans to attain their goals because of poverty, living conditions, educational status, or other barriers. For the second generation, working hard at low-paying jobs and maintaining cultural traditions as their parents did, often seem like counterproductive, demeaning measures. Do Hmong-American refugee children relinquish their cultural traditions readily? Do immigrants and their children see the world from vastly different perspectives? This study was designed to try and elicit first-hand experiences with cultural adjustment from young American-born men and women, adults who immigrated as children, middle-aged adults whose lives have been shaped by their experiences living in two

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cultures, and elders whose time in the United States has been relatively short. In Laos, children could expect to follow the paths that their parents took, knowing their experiences would not be remarkably different. Hmong families shared all aspects of daily life and life transitions. The extended family household, interconnected kin networks, and kinshipbased economic production meant Hmong families could sustain themselves by turning inward, and they were rarely dependent on outside institutions for life skills or livelihood. Parents had faith that they could teach children the skills they needed to survive. This is shown in the account of Mee, a 72-year old elder, who described family life as she remembered it in Laos and compared it to life in the United States: In Laos, mostly the children will go with the parents—go to the farm and live in the home. In Laos, schools were few, and mostly in the city. Most of the children don’t have education, and they don’t have school. They just go with the parents. But in the United States, they mostly go to school, and they are separated from the parents. So, in a positive way, they know more than the parents. But in the negative way, some children don’t do good; they join gangs, do another things, and don’t listen to parents. So it’s a big difference. Changing intergenerational relationships are of great concern to many members of the Hmong-American community, but few researchers have focused on this topic. Lynch and co-researchers, Detzner and Eicher (1995), found substantive differences in how resettlement is experienced by different generations. They found the demands of relocation and adaptation have fragmented Hmong families into three distinct age groups: “Teenagers are swept into a demanding daily routine dominated by school; elders remain at home talking among themselves and caring for the younger children in the family; the generation of those in their middle age serves as a liaison between the outside world and the community and often financially supports the other two generations” (Detzner & Eicher 1995:114). As a result of resettlement and cultural adjustment, many Hmong families have faced role changes within the family. Older people and newly-arrived adults often depend on their children for assistance and

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advice with regard to how to conduct the tasks of everyday life in America. For older Hmong and/or adults with limited English skills, driving, filling out forms, paying the bills, and shopping may require help from younger family members. During one interview, a young woman broke down in tears when she remembered going home after being away at college for a few months. Stacks of mail and paperwork belonging to her parents and grandparents were piled up in her absence. For years, she had been assisting the older family members by sorting through the minutiae of daily life in the United States. “It is really hard for the elders who remain,” she said. Some Hmong adults worry that parental authority, filial respect, clan obligations, and reverence for the ancestors may become irrelevant or unenforceable (Lee 1986:60). Parents did not usually say it to me directly, but instead they implied that young people are becoming more American and less Hmong. To see their children losing touch with their history and with those who can share something of the past troubles some parents. I asked See Yang if he felt Hmong-American kids were losing respect for their elders, and he said this: Yes, I am concerned about it. Most children like to learn TV and everything is coming up new. They don’t care about the old ways or the rules they [lived by]…in the past. They just care in the front. This is made them blind and stupid. They are killing each other; they are fighting because they see only in the front. They don’t see in the past, and this makes trouble. They will do like the animals, when they see each other and they just [growl and snarl]. Another father told me that in Laos, the young people usually respected the older people and listened to them for guidance. In the United States, he said, the young people “just don’t care”; they are more preoccupied with themselves and less concerned what their elders think. Hmong society in Laos never had to deal with adolescent problems, according to Fungchatou T. Lo (2001). Children were taught responsibility at a young age, married relatively young, and had fewer opportunities to get in trouble. Today, some Hmong-American kids

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talk back to their parents, drop out of school, run away, and get involved in gangs (ibid). Excessive social freedom and equal treatment under the law in the United States allows teenagers and adults to disengage from the rest of the family in ways they couldn’t in Laos. In Hmong families social codes dictated a hierarchy in families, younger men, women, and children were not supposed to challenge their places in the hierarchy. In Laos, the family could pressure individuals, even adult sons, to follow the wishes of the family. Mee, a seventy-two year old grandmother, explained what she had observed regarding American law and its affect on Hmong family authority: For example, in Laos, Hmong men live under the control of the family. The family can control the men. In the U.S., the family and the man are equal. For example, a man can have a wife and go to work. He can go anywhere he wants, and if he wants, he doesn’t have to stay in the family. If he doesn’t want to live with his wife, he can go to live with another woman. So the family [in the U.S.] cannot say anything. The family says come back, but by the U.S. government law everybody has the power. If I don’t want to stay in the family, I can go anywhere I want. It is very difficult for families to say anything to the man if he doesn’t want to stay in the family. The family says [one thing] but the law says something [else]. You can just say it, but you can’t enforce it. It is a big difference. In Laos, the family can stop the man and say, “If you go, the family will punish you.” In the United States, even children can evoke their individual rights under the law. Parents I spoke with expressed some mild frustration that they could not enforce their authority in the household. They were afraid the police would be called if they used physical force to correct behavior or discipline their children. In Laos, it was acceptable for Hmong parents to discipline children through the use of physical punishment. Now parents wrestle with how best to raise Hmong children in America, enforce order in their home, and stay within the confines of American law. Because See Yang pointed out that Hmong children were losing touch with their past and their elders, I asked what things he wanted his children to take with them in the future. What things would he like

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them to know about being Hmong? His manner was quite thoughtful, and I could tell that this was not the first time he had pondered this question. He began by saying it was important for the individual to know their identity and to proclaim it: “I want them to remember that we are Hmong. We have a different culture.” Wearing clothes and jewelry that are Hmong shows others you are “who you really are,” he said. Next, See Yang talked about the inner dimensions of cultural identity. “On the inside of their minds,” he said he wanted his children to understand the importance of marriage and of waiting to have sexual relations until they are married because children born out of wedlock “make trouble for the kids and their parents.” He said the boy can just leave the girl, and she will not be able to take care of the children properly. The functional aspects of a Hmong marriage are to establish binding financial, emotional, and social ties—he believes all these obligations are missing if a couple does not have a Hmong marriage. Sex outside of marriage, a common American phenomenon, threatens Hmong family relationships, according to See Yang. Lastly, in English, he spoke about family roles and authority in the household: I want them to know that we are Hmong and we love each other—grandfather, my fathers and brothers and sisters and their children, my brothers and sisters and their children, all the children to my grandchildren—they have to know that we are a group, so we have to love and join one another. This is the way that we are. In the family, I want them to know that you have to respect your mom and your dad and your older sister. You have to love your younger ones and be patient to them. I told my children – if we stay in the city we respect the governors, the rules, and the laws that control the city. If you stay in the house, you have to respect me because we are on different levels. You stay on your level. You cannot jump over the roof. You have to stay under the roof. We shared a laugh at the metaphor he used to describe Hmong family rules of respect and authority. However, in all seriousness, many Hmong parents feel like their children are “jumping over the

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roof,” and it upsets the entire foundation of the Hmong home. A Hmong proverb illustrates the traditional understanding of power relationships in the family: “Animals are responsible to their masters, and children to their parents” (Fadiman 1997:206). Now this order is being questioned and challenged by Hmong youth who must straddle two different, and sometimes opposing, cultural worlds. Young people feel the stress of intergenerational conflict in the context of cultural adjustment: “As they try to adjust to school, while at the same time trying to maintain their attachment to home values, they often feel divided and unable to cope with demands from either school or home” (Trueba 1990:75). In interviews conducted by Lynch and colleagues, teenagers repeatedly expressed their frustration with the feeling they did not know enough about their own culture to participate in Hmong community life (1995). In the following passage, a young woman describes her aggravation living between two cultures. For years she tried to be as American as possible, but eventually her rejection of her culture and language brought on personal guilt: When I was living with them [stepmother and father], it was like a wall between us because I was so much into the Western culture, so much adapted to it because I had grown up in it. My Dad had been trying to pressure me to recognize [I was growing away from the Hmong culture]. He was scared that we were going to turn away from, or not follow, the Hmong culture anymore. So he was always pushing, and, at that time, I didn’t like it at all. I was mad and I said, “Dad, we live in this country, try and speak English, you know,” and my Dad would get angry when we would speak English at home and when he argued with us, we would argue back in English and he wouldn’t understand. But now after I look at it, and I am married and I have my own family, I feel terrible that I have done that. I mean my vocabulary in Hmong is not even as big as my son’s! My vocabulary is so limited because I didn’t take in what my father was trying to get to me—that I was going to lose my culture soon. Degrees of experiential separation also exist between the generations. Many parents don’t even talk to their children about the war, the exodus, and the refugee camps (it’s as if a wall of silence

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exists in many Hmong households), but young people I spoke with often expressed gratitude. They told me they know their parents made great sacrifices so they could have a better life. Usually this realization comes with maturity and after the young adult has left home for a period of time. One young woman participant said her father never talked about the war and refugee experience until she recently asked him. She said he had difficulty finding the words to describe his experiences, and it was very painful and “terrifying” to relive this part of his life. As a young person, she is disappointed with her generation’s unwillingness to honor the older generation’s actions: I think that a lot of young people don’t realize [what] their parents [went through]. I mean if we were put in that situation, we would probably just give up, but [our parents] actually fought—for us. Most of the youth that I see today, how they screw up their lives with gangs! I guess they don’t realize how hard it was and what it took for their parents to bring them over here. That’s just really sad.

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Another young woman pointed to the Hmong-American generation gap as a difficult problem, but said she was working through it: No, it is still hard. I mean the [generation] gap. Sometimes it isn’t easy, but sometimes you have to learn that they are the older generation and you are the younger one. It is just really, really hard going through it. And I am finally realizing it and thinking through it, that it is okay. A cousin has a lot of problems because of the gap, but I understand why my parents told me what they told me now. Some young people’s rebelliousness goes even further than quarrelling with parents and results in deviant and dangerous behavior. Crime and gang involvement, for example, can cause severe family conflict. In some cases, adolescent frustration and anger is directed toward parental authority and Hmong culture. In an interview with a 28-year old Hmong social worker, I asked about intergenerational

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turmoil and second-generation backlash. He described some of the reactions he had seen from Hmong youth: In a way they kind of try to irritate parents by saying, “This [Hmong] culture sucks. I want to do what I want to do. My American friends don’t do like we do here. This culture sucks.”

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I asked him what advice he gives parents who are dealing with troubled adolescents and are in need of coping strategies. He said when parents consult him, they are glad to meet a young person who can “see the positives and the negatives in both cultures.” Of course, his advice depends on the situation, but he habitually has this to say: I encourage them [parents] to be open-minded and not to be so stuck into their little world …to see the larger picture of why their children behave the way they do. If they are just stuck into their little world they will never understand when the children go to school and come back home, they behave differently than the way they expect their children to behave. Many parents were expecting their children to come home, do their household chores, do homework, go to bed, and get up go to school. Having spent his childhood in Laos and Thailand and his adolescent years in the United States, he has a good understanding of each culture, as well as personal insight into the kind of environmental pressures Hmong kids face growing up in the United States. Typical classroom experiences in U.S. schools exert strong pressure on Hmong children to assimilate. Even if school administrators and teachers make positive efforts to instill a sense of cultural pluralism in their institutions, Hmong children often come away with the idea that their culture, and even their parents, are deficient in some way. For example, the way parental love is demonstrated is wholly different across cultures. American schools reinforce mainstream notions that parental love should be demonstrated with hugs, kisses, rewards, and praise, given in private and in public. Parental humility and modesty is the norm in Hmong culture. In my conversations with Hmong parents, they told me they were very proud

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of their children’s accomplishments, especially if they had gone to college, but children tell me they do not hear the same from their parents. As far as expressing love and affection, one young woman described parent/child emotional relationships like this: There is just this thing between a child and their parents—with the older people you never really say that you love your kids. It’s just embarrassing, my mom’s always like, “Well you know, if we didn’t love you, you wouldn’t be as big as you are.” She has never said, “I love you.” She’s always like, “Well, if I didn’t love you and care for you then you wouldn’t be where you are.”

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I asked her if it was difficult living with the American ideal that parents and children should express their love for each other and demonstrate physical affection and then going home and experiencing something quite different. She said it had been difficult, but that she knows some young parents, like her sisters who grew up in the United States who are repeating the same behavior: My older sisters never really got along with my mom, they where always like, “…why don’t they ever say that they love me?” But now that they have their own kids, they don’t even do that! It’s just this thing, I don’t even know what it is. J: Do you think it’s a Hmong thing? I think it’s a Hmong thing because I always ask my sister, “Do you ever tell your son that you love him? That you’ve done wonderful today, that you’ve done a good job on your homework?” She is like, “No, I haven’t.” She’s got that magnet, One Hundred and One Good Things To Say to Your Children. And you know when I tell her that, she goes and says, “Robert, you’re wonderful.” I’m like, “Why can’t you say it from your heart like you mean it?” I think it’s this Hmong thing where you just expect them to know that you care about them.

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Only recently has this young woman’s mother started giving her hugs after not seeing her for some time. She said this is a real development in their relationship and that it shocked her the first time it happened. Material consumption is another topic that parents told me caused some frustration in their families. Ger, the man who stays home to care for his disabled wife and eight children, said he believes some Hmong children are turning to gangs to buy things for them when their parents can’t provide these material goods: Some kids cannot work and they tell [their father], “Daddy, give me $20 bucks.” The daddy says, “I don’t have money for you,” and the children are mad. They need to buy a computer or good clothes and the parents don’t have money for them, so they run away. In the U.S., I know there are some gangs [that] call the children and say, “We will do something good for you.” So they run away.

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J: They go with the gang? Yes. I know the children may need money or need something so I have to buy for them and I do for them every time to get them to be happy. J: So you feel like you need to give them those things so they [stay out of trouble]? Yes. J: Has it been a difficulty to be able to afford those things with your wife being sick and not being able to work? Have you run into financial hardships or problems? Yes, I worry about my family too because I [do] not work, so I [do] not have money for the children. If they …need big things like a car or computer or to pay something big, it will be hard for me.

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In a different interview with another father, I brought up the issue of gangs enticing Hmong kids with money and he said, “Kids don’t join gangs because of a lack of money.” Illustrating this point with an example from his own kin group, he said his cousin makes decent money, and he even bought his children sports cars, but the kids aren’t going to school and are getting in trouble. “If the kids are no good,” he said, “money does not make a difference.” To a certain degree, Hmong parents have adopted the mainstream idea that parents are responsible for how their children turn out. At the same time, I also sensed that Hmong parents felt some children were just going to turn out bad no matter what. The abilities of family and kin to raise good kids only go so far.

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Conclusion The interviews conducted for this study illustrate the many ways family and kinship ties influence individual and family economics in contexts marked by enduring and emergent cultural alternatives. The participants expressed their frustrations with cultural adaptation and shared with me some of the strategies they developed to aid them in dealing with this process. What impressed me was the sense of obligation that exists between the generations, irrespective of gender or length of time in the United States. Even though gaps exist between the experiences of second-generation Hmong immigrants and their parents and elders, and between men and women, a sense of obligation and desire to stay together, despite the forces of change, was expressed. More often than not, young men and women in this study told me they would return home to help their parents and to give something back to their community. Second-generation backlash is evident, but it appears temporal. Once young people come of age, remove themselves from the immediate home environment, and struggle a bit with their identity as Hmong-Americans, it appears many “find themselves” in their families and communities once again. I asked all participants what they wanted for their children—what would they pass on? This exchange with a twenty-one-year-old woman echoes other conversations I had with many young Hmong-Americans:

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J: What things would you like your kids to know about Hmong lifestyles, families, or culture? I would like to pass down everything that my Dad has ever said to me, and everything that my mom has ever done for me, even if I don’t tell her that I love her. You know I used to wonder, why do my parents do this, and why do my parents do that, but now when I think about it, everything good that I have is because of them…everything…I’m Hmong because of them. J: That’s really a wonderful compliment. I thank them for giving me life, and I can never repay them for what they have done for me, I can never give them anything… J: Well that sounds like respect, you know.

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I think you gain it as you get older. I think a lot of people haven’t reached that point. Participants pointed out that maturity often brings on a sense of balance, equalizing both the positives and negatives of Hmong and American culture, as well as a recognition of the role and value of family. I do not intend to romanticize the role of kinship in the diasporic experience of the Hmong people. As I have stated previously, kin relationships are heavily textured with mixed emotions, and they affect individuals differently and even inequitably. My task was to ask questions about how people use their relationships, how they organize themselves, and how they sought to accomplish certain kinds of things as diasporic people. Participants in this study expressed the many ways in which kinship encodes meaning for them across Hmong and American cultural domains and helps them adapt to the challenges resettlement poses. Every Hmong person in the United States, at some point in their lives, must come to terms with the role, value, and ambivalent nature of family and kin. See Yang told me, “…we know the way to be human,” and that way was, and still is, very much shaped by Hmong relatedness.

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CHAPTER 5

Gender, The Family, and Change

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Introduction As I looked in the large shopping bag filled with spoons, knives, spatulas and other assorted kitchen tools, I jokingly asked the young married man if he brought all the utensils from their kitchen. He looked directly in my eyes and calmly replied, “No, I brought all the utensils from my wife’s kitchen.” This verbal distinction, casually made during a conversation at a community dinner, may have seemed unremarkable to most observers but it struck a cord in me. Bear in mind this young man’s wife does all the cooking and much of the cleaning for her family, her husband’s mother and her mother-in-law’s seven children. In addition, she holds a job and goes to college full time. Her husband and his family are often critical of her non-familial obligations; however, her efforts have not gone unnoticed by others. Non-Hmong friends, including myself, are struck by her relentless dedication to finish college and make her family life work. In subtle yet recognizable ways, life in America does have an impact on what family and kin expect from Hmong-American women. In some cases, like this one, cultural transition means women must juggle many responsibilities. In dramatic ways, these women recognize the numerous opportunities and challenges they assume in this process. From the stories that follow, it is clear that although women may have different roles than men in family and kin groups, the gendered division does not make Hmong women powerless or submissive. Refugee men and women both must actively decide what paths to take. Vividly acted out in the context of family and kin, American gender practices most affect Hmong decisions about child rearing, marriage and family relationships, and domestic conflicts. Donnelly (1999) contends that war with the Communists and resettlement ripped the social fabric of Hmong life in paradoxical ways. 111

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Despite the devastation it caused for women refugees, it also led to new and varied economic and educational opportunities. Education and work are vital paths to sustenance, success, and status in the United States. Many Hmong-American adults eagerly seek college degrees and professional careers, which would have been unnecessary and unavailable to most Hmong men and even fewer women in Laos. The enduring Hmong social structure emphasizes family and kin relationships as the basis of personal integrity and status in the Hmong community. A woman once told me a Hmong person could become President of the United States, but if he didn’t have good family and kin relationships, Hmong people would give him no respect. Wherever the Hmong have settled in the world, they have clung to their core cultural values, which include knowing and following appropriate behavior and customs, ensuring the family’s welfare and reputation, and respecting others (Kao Xiong 2000). What happens when the realities of life in the United States converge on the time-tested and accepted patterns of Hmong social life? The personal stories addressed in this chapter illustrate the unique challenges and opportunities Hmong women and men face as they weave their own way in the fabric of American life. A frequent item of discussion in Hmong communities is how to be Hmong in American society and not surprisingly, gendered family and kinship roles are at the heart of this inquiry. This chapter explores the complex and distinctive cultural and personal changes for men and women as members of family and kin groups after resettlement.

Good Sons and Daughters Comparative information on life in Laos and the United States clearly indicates that adaptation is shaping the ways Hmong parents raise their children. In Laos, about the ages of five or six, Hmong children began training for their adulthood roles (Donnelly 1994). Boys in a household worked alongside the adult men farming, mending tools, hunting, and building houses. In this way they assumed responsibility for outside work and began a lifelong identification with the management of resources and people. Sons learned to exercise judgment over the organization of economic production and acquired the skills needed for adult leadership roles. Men were expected to

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support their immediate and extended family and provide for their spiritual welfare. Training and exercise in political decision-making was given to men and boys but not to women and girls. One should not think of this process as necessarily dictatorial since male leaders frequently consulted both male and female relatives, but once a final decision was made, all family members were expected to submit to the interests of the household group (Donnelly 1994, Mason-Chagil 1999). Gendered expectations shaped the childhood experiences of Hmong girls in Laos as well. Like boys, girls were expected early on to assume adult roles that contributed to the welfare of the group, but they were considered “other people’s women” because it was expected that they would marry outside their own group of birth (Lee 1999b:1). Daughters learned the skills essential to becoming good daughters-inlaw, wives, and mothers from their female elders (mothers, elder sisters, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law). Domestic responsibilities included childcare, cooking, producing textiles, sewing, serving guests, and contributing to agricultural production. The differential treatment of boys and girls in Laos relates directly to their adult roles in family and kin networks. Patrilineal descent keeps men close to natal kin whereas a woman joins her husband’s kin group upon marriage. A woman’s labor and long-term companionship does not stay with her family of origin even though she may keep close personal ties with her parents, siblings, and relatives from this group. Boys, on the other hand, are more permanently tied to their family in terms of obligation, support, and personal welfare. In reference to kinship and gender, Koltyk (1998:39) writes: …the Hmong conceive of the links to their ancestors as their origins or roots; sons are considered the roots of the family, especially as families branch off into separate lineages within the patrilineal clan line. Daughters, on the other hand, do not carry the weight of the past. They will marry out and bear children for other patrilineal clans. Patrilineality and patrilocalism cause Hmong women to have a different relationship in kin groups than those of men (Goldstein 1986, Symonds 2004). Whereas men’s kin identity and responsibility are

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continuous through life, those of women change as they move into their husband’s kin group at marriage, move to the husband’s home, give birth to children who belong to the patriline, and are divorced or widowed (Goldstein 1986). Gender and kinship in Hmong communities continue to be organizing principles in the construction of personal identity and daily life in the United States, and, as in Laos, parents prepare their boys and girls for these gendered changes and responsibilities across the life cycle. I would like to emphasize that a continuum of interpretations exists regarding how best to implement these organizing principles. Based on the interviews and observations conducted over the last six years, I have tried to describe patterns as well as inconsistencies and resistance. In most cases, Hmong-American boys and girls today are taught to take on responsibility years earlier than their non-Hmong peers. Patience and tolerance with children younger than four are stressed and stronger disciplinary measures are exercised as children reach the ages of five and six (Mason-Chagil 1999). Older siblings understand that they are responsible for younger ones and a common sight is to see multiple younger siblings under the temporary care of boys and girls who are seven or older. This is the accepted pattern in Laos, but it often becomes an economic necessity in the United States. Particularly since the advent of welfare reform, both parents may be away from home working at low paying jobs. Although many Hmong parents are choosing to have fewer children, providing for large families on low incomes is a constant and difficult challenge. In some cases, older children are the primary caregivers when both parents are working. Finding second or third shift daycare for more than two children is next to impossible, financially or logistically, unless they can rely on family or kin. The importance of caring for others and living in “harmony” and “unity” with members of their family and community are important lessons that Hmong-American parents teach to all their children (Mason-Chagil 1999), but notable differences in gender socialization do exist. All the women I interviewed said they were given childcare, cooking, and cleaning responsibilities about the age of seven. One father told me his ten-year-old daughter is big enough to take care of chores like cleaning, dishwashing, and cooking, but he said the boys are “free.” He explained the situation:

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It’s Hmong culture and I see it in Laos but not in the United States. The boys just work outside, outdoors. They do the big jobs outdoors. The girls are cooking and doing everything in the house. But in the United States, there is no work outside and it’s hard to find them work. Sometimes I call him to clean the carpet…or he does something like that, but not much. Even though this father wanted his children to accept responsibility, according to what he perceives as the norms of his culture, he did not push his sons to do jobs defined as women’s work. This was an interesting situation because the father took on a primary care-giving role for his disabled wife and seven children, which was somewhat of a gender adjustment, but he had not asked his sons to modify their gender roles. The domestic/public dichotomy present in advanced industrial economies creates gendered dilemmas for Hmong parenting strategies. In Laos, Hmong parents taught children the skills they needed to be successful in life by modeling the appropriate behavior and by having children increasingly participate in adult activities. Some Hmong parents in the United States are able to continue along the same lines, depending on their circumstances. For example, one of my former Hmong-American students described her visit to see a distant relatives who farm in California. In this household, she observed the children returning from school to do many chores. She was amazed when her uncle had his eight-year-old son go out and butcher six chickens. My student said she has never killed a chicken and has no idea how to clean or chop a chicken. The fact that this California family maintains an agricultural lifestyle with many indoor and outdoor duties likely places the children, including boys, in positions of responsibility within the household. Few Hmong parents are able to teach their children the full range of skills they will need for socio-economic success in the United States. Many are finding it difficult to even teach their children their own culture and language. “We are living in a complex society now and we cannot teach our children about our culture and language at home like we used to anymore because most of the things they learn are from an instructional setting,” one man explained. Most Hmong-Americans are

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fully aware of this reality and push both their sons and daughters to do well in school, but they also encourage them to speak Hmong at home. One of the greatest changes in Hmong family life due to immigration is that educational and career opportunities exist outside the home for all children, regardless of gender. Women in this study described how they were encouraged to learn the skills necessary to become successful mothers, wives, daughters-in-law, and to find an occupation. Parents want their sons to do well by staying out of trouble, finishing school, and going on for educational or professional training. The men I interviewed were less specific on how their parents prepared them for their roles in family and kin groups. The domestic and familial responsibilities for boys and men seem less straightforward than those for women since resettlement. Many of the domestic responsibilities (cleaning, cooking, childcare) easily carried over to life in the United States, while the “outdoor” duties (building, hunting, agricultural production and management) are waning in importance. Adaptation to life in the United States consequently produces many variations on gender roles and expectations. Necessity often trumps tradition in the course of daily life, and people do what needs to be done, regardless of “traditional” Hmong gender roles. Repeatedly, I spoke with men who cooked and cleaned for their families and cared for children because of illness, divorce, work schedules, or other circumstances. Shoua, then a young mother in high-school, described how her husband and mother-in-law stepped in and took care of her colicky baby when she was exhausted: When Kia was born and I had to stay with his parents (on the weekends when he came home to visit us), he would stay up with her every night. He would say, “you go to sleep, I’ll take care of her all night.” I swear Kia was the worst cry baby--she would cry all night when she was an infant. She was just terrible. Cry every night and I couldn’t get any sleep and it was just too much stress on me. And so whenever he came home, he’d say, “You sleep, I’ll take care of her.” That really helped. His mom was really helpful sometimes when I come home from work and she knows that I’m really tired and I had school-work to do, she’d say, “Daughter-in-law, give me Kia and I’ll sleep with her tonight. And then tomorrow, you can

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sleep with her.” And so she would take Kia for the night and that would really help.

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In this tsev neeg, family members share childcare responsibilities so that the new daughter-in-law could finish high school and work outside the home. Most likely, these educational and formal labor expectations would have been nonexistent for Shoua had she been in Laos. Her new family draws on a familiar pattern of taking care of their own in an adaptive way. Shoua and her husband, as do many in their generation, juggle old and newfound expectations. In cases where the family has no divorce, illness, or other major stressors, gender roles drift towards pre-immigration patterns, but changes can be expected in the lifestyles of the next generation. A young married woman described growing up in Wausau, Wisconsin, with her brothers and sisters and the things she does differently as she rears her own children: I did not see my brothers doing any dishes; whereas my sisters and I were washing dishes, cooking, vacuuming, and taking care of them. They didn’t do much. I guess growing up you know you are Hmong and this is common so you don’t say much about it. But with my kids, I was telling my husband, they are not going to be like them; boys are going to do dishes too. None of these data make much sense unless family responsibilities are examined in light of the multiple cultural domains HmongAmericans must cross. Boys and girls receive contradictory messages from mainstream culture and their native culture. Both American society and acculturated Hmong-American families emphasize that the key to success is getting an education and landing a decent job. At the same time, Hmong-American society expects women to be good wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. Obedience and hard work are still admirable traits. Girls who are older and/or have been to college may be perceived as bold and non-compliant (traditionally, not highly desirable qualities in a daughter-in-law); after all, formal education in mainstream America teaches assertiveness, decision-making, and

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leadership—skills afforded only to men in Laos. Younger HmongAmerican girls or newly arrived Hmong women from Thailand may be considered attractive wives and daughters-in-law because they are more obedient, but often they lack the educational and technical training essential to economic well-being in contemporary U.S. society. Girls who wait to get married until they are finished with college find themselves in a limited marriage market. On several occasions, I listened as young women (aged 19-22) lamented that they were getting too old to find a Hmong husband, but they knew that if they married before college graduation they were taking the risk of not finishing. Mixed messages are prevalent, as explained by one young woman:

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See, the thing about Hmong women and school and college is this: the guys and all the elders really want us to succeed as women, but at the same time they are telling everyone, “…don’t marry her she’s too old.” Go marry a really young girl, the really young stupid one, so you can kind of kick her around. That is what I don’t get. I’m getting mixed messages. Hmong people will acknowledge these are generalizations, but they nevertheless provide insights into the complexities of young adulthood and the characteristics that are socially acceptable for second-generation Hmong men and women. How do parents feel about raising Hmong children in American society? From my conversations, it appears that parents try to raise their sons and daughters based on what they know to be important in both Hmong culture and mainstream society. Above all else, Gale Mason-Chagil (1999) contends, Hmong parents want each child to be a good person (neeg zoo) and one of the characteristics of a good person is to uphold the family image in the Hmong community. Parents I spoke with elaborated on the negative forces in American society that were threatening their children: peers with bad reputations, disrespect for elders, promiscuity, crime, and gangs. How do Hmong children respond to the older generation’s angst? Adolescents may be less concerned about their image in the Hmong community, and more concerned about their image in school and with peers. Young adults shared their frustration about constant monitoring and verbal reprimands from parents who didn’t understand what it was like to be a young Hmong-American.

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Parental anxieties reflect gendered expectations, but they also illustrate how parents must come to grips with longstanding Hmong cultural norms and values in the larger context of American society. Parents told me they were mostly worried that their sons would become involved with gangs or would get into trouble with the law. Gang involvement and illegal activity can spell legal trouble for young people in American society, but in the Hmong community this behavior will also bring longstanding shame to the individual and his or her family. Additionally, if the individuals in question are not U.S. citizens, they can lose their legal immigrant status and be deported back to their country of origin. As for Hmong daughters, the men and women I interviewed pointed to female sexual indiscretion as a moral failing, and their rationale was based on cultural understandings.27 For example, one woman said, “I was always a good girl and my parents expected I would do the right thing, but they would always say, ‘You are a Hmong girl. Do not disrespect your parents, do not invite guys over and sleep with them, do not be slut, do not get married early, do not have premarital sex,’ and all that.” Hmong women who transgress the norms of female sexuality are judged harshly in the Hmong community, but men are not sanctioned in the same way. Certainly, this double standard is not specific to Hmong, but I would like to pinpoint how the consequences of pre-marital sex and infidelity impact Hmong women far more negatively than men because of their place in family and kinship groups. One woman shared her dilemma upon finding out she was pregnant. At the time she was in a vulnerable situation— unmarried, still in high school, and living in a town far away from her parents with her brother, his wife and kids. She did not want the baby or to get married to the father. An abortion was scheduled, but after hearing the baby’s heartbeat, she changed her mind and “went with the

27

Resettled Hmong in the United States appear to have adopted a fairly stringent outlook on premarital sex in comparison with Hmong living in Asia. Premarital sexual relations are discussed as the norm in Hmong villages from China to Thailand by writers Symonds (2004), Donnelly (1994), and Cooper (1983 & 1984).

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tradition” and got married.28 One of her big concerns through the whole process was her natal family’s reputation in the Hmong community. On the other hand, she had to worry about pleasing her inlaws who were struggling to get by and could not afford a high bridewealth. If she told her parents of the pregnancy, the prospective groom and his family would be charged a fine (between $400--$3,000), which would be added to the bridewealth. According to her cultural norms, which include both Hmong and American expectations, she took a wise but difficult route. Knowing her relationships with her natal family and her husband’s family were now terribly important for her own welfare and reputation, she did not want to make trouble with either one. She got married, but kept the pregnancy a secret from her natal family until after the wedding. Saddled with almost impossible odds, over the next two years she finished high school, worked nights at a fast food restaurant, and fulfilled her daughter-in-law responsibilities by cleaning and cooking for the patrilocal family, which consisted of 13 members living in a two-bedroom apartment. After some time, the couple was able to afford their own apartment. The young wife made her way to college and found a better job, but family relations were beset with tension. The couple struggled in this marriage for five years. Even though they sought marriage crisis intervention from their families in the customary manner, their relationship deteriorated and the wife chose a divorce after accusations of infidelity and repeated incidents of physical abuse. She told me her decisions have left her disconnected from her Hmong friends and from her own family members. According to her father, once she made the choice to have sexual relations and get married, she was bound to accept the responsibilities of being a mother and a wife. These obligations include obeying her new family and her husband. She infuriated relatives from both sides when she went against their advice and decided to divorce.

28

For Hmong-American women who get pregnant out of wedlock, abortion is usually not considered a viable option; marrying the father and giving birth is still the most common alternative. Abortion is becoming more common for mutually consenting, married couples. Adoption of unrelated children is rare for married and unmarried couples. The adoption of orphaned children of close relatives is accepted.

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By mainstream American standards, her academic and personal accomplishments are exceptional. While still a teenager she had a child and then graduated from high school. She then went on to singlehandedly put herself through college. The recipient of many collegiate awards and scholarships, she is well-liked and admired by her friends, instructors, and administrators. In her case, the navigation of these multiple cultural domains is undeniably awkward and riddled with contradictions. Teenage marriages are prone to problems in American society, but from my observations of gender socialization in the family, I would contend Hmong girls and young women are probably better prepared to take on the responsibilities of family life at earlier ages than their male peers. Hmong-American parents continue to stress the importance of raising girls to be good daughters-in-law because this training builds individual character, brings social status to the family, and helps maintain healthy relationships between Hmong kin groups. Having a good temperament and working hard remain desirable feminine qualities. One young woman explained that her own mother pressures her to help around the house by saying, “Who would want to marry you? You are too lazy anyways.” Another woman described how she was socialized for marriage: “Growing up, I swear, by the time I was in fourth grade I knew how to cook, make rice, and sweep the floor. I could be almost like a mini-mother already. You were groomed to get married early, so it was expected.” Because eldest daughters are most experienced in helping with child and home care, wedding negotiators may argue that their status justifies an elevated bridewealth from the groom’s family. Stigma is attached to women who know little about cooking and/or do not meet the domestic expectations of their husband’s family. Girls who are raised with little responsibility at home may be “too Americanized”—a deficit when it comes to their new role as daughters-in-law. The scenario varies according to the family, but many women said they would be embarrassed if they didn’t know how to cook “the Hmong way” or could not meet the expectations of the new family. Despite the differential treatment of girls and boys, parents expressed great affection for children. When the conversation turned to their children’s future, parents unanimously said they wanted them to

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be happy. Only after many conversations did I begin to flesh out a broader notion of happiness that includes harmonious relationships with others as well as meeting the wider definition of success in United States society.

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Marriage—Hmong-American Style Marriage is one of the most important events in life for Hmong. It is considered a necessary and sacred passage in all people’s lives, not only for their own identity and status, but for the good of their families and kin groups as well. A newly married young man told me that for Hmong the tsev neeg is always “the number one source of pride in one’s life.” Another man said “we Hmongs live through our families.” When I asked people what aspects of Hmong culture they considered most vital to pass on to the next generation, marriage rites and traditions, and respectful family behavior were at the top of the list. Conversations with women generated rich data about marriage and family relationships while men had less to say on this subject; thus I have much more information about women’s experiences in marriage than men’s. Topics that seem to stand out include: choosing a marriage partner, early marriage, appropriate conduct for men and women in marriage, family strategies, and resolving domestic conflict.

Choosing a Partner The people I interviewed rarely said Hmong should only marry Hmong; however, they did note some advantages to marrying a person from the same cultural group. Women and men (regardless of their generation) mentioned cultural compatibility and marital security as advantages in marrying a Hmong partner. The following comments were made by a young unmarried man who described a conversation he had with his parents: I talked about it with them …what if I date a white girl? Or what if I date some other race? They don’t want me to do that …they always have this idea about if you marry another race,

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then they don’t know the little steps, like [how] to cook or respect your parents and stuff like that. So it would be really hard. And they believe that the marriage won’t last long. Because once that girl has a couple of kids, pretty soon she wants a divorce or something like that. In another conversation, I was introduced to the word “fobby.” Used by young women in this case, it stands for “fresh off the boat.” Although it may be used in a patronizing way, it also has some deeper connotations as explained in the following (I am listed as “J”): We are always teasing each other about dating fobby guys because it’s the fobby guys that don’t really know English, that are going to love you, because they don’t know English and stuff and they can’t leave you.

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J: So…you’re kind of attracted to the kind like that? No, we just joke about it and stuff. I think in the end that we conclude that it’s better to find someone who is Americanized, and at the same time very traditional. Because it’s those guys that are going to respect you and are going to love you and stay with you because they know that you are Hmong and they respect you for that. But it’s those really modern thug guys that […want to leave you] today….29 J: So there is more security if there is that Hmong tradition back there that says you marry for life—am I reading that right? Yeah, because you can date all the thuggish guys the really modern guys, but they don’t like you they are going to leave you faster, but it’s those guys that are traditional and still very 29

In this context, she is referring to young Hmong men who attempt to gain popularity by joining gangs, following the latest fashions, and in general, acting rebelliously towards their family and communities.

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Americanized, that have some kind of motivation to succeed in their education, it’s those guys that are going to stay together and kept the family going.

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One father told me he didn’t care if his daughters married nonHmong men but he really didn’t want his son to marry an American girl. In the following narrative, he explains that he is unable to stop his children from choosing their own partner, but he does see advantages to intra-group endogamy for his son: I don’t care. I can’t stop them. If it’s my way, you can’t do that, it is not fair for them. It depends on whether they know who loves them, who they want to marry, because we see a person we just know the outside, we don’t know the inside. If they love, they will know inside. I can’t stop that. For my son, I would like him to marry Hmong because Hmong they don’t have divorce. They know they will make a life [and] they will save money, obey the husband, because in Hmong culture women marry and they have children, a place to live. We support the woman and know what to do. I see mostly in American girls, they don’t care about their life. Today I love you, you love me, and we marry, but two or three years later, we fight and leave away. No [willingness] to excuse…I made something wrong to you and you made something wrong to [me]. We have to be patient or excuse. This has made a problem for our people. Americans don’t care; they are too quick to jump out. I recommend to my son that he marry Hmong first. I listened as several Hmong men described their view of Americans in a similar way. Americans, they believe, lack marriage commitment and are too quick to leave a partner out of self-interest.

When To Marry Besides who to marry, the question of when to marry is also deliberated in Hmong-American communities. A White Hmong proverb underscores the economic and social importance of having children

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early in life: grain planted late is mostly chaff; late marriage leaves orphans. For the Hmong in Laos, having many children was important to the economic and social viability of the family. More hands literally meant more agricultural production, and thus increased prosperity for the family. Hmong girls typically married between fourteen and eighteen and men married between eighteen and thirty (Meredith and Rowe 1986:123). Shaped by the economic and social realities of an advanced industrial state, children of refugee parents are choosing a different course by delaying their own marriages and having fewer children. The Meredith and Rowe study (1986:127) found that a shift is occurring in the attitudes of Hmong women toward early marriage and high fertility; 87 percent agreed it would be best if a woman waited until she was 18 to get married. One woman I interviewed linked peoples’ changing attitudes regarding early marriage to educational goals: I see that back in Laos and Thailand men were given the opportunity to go get an education. But here in America, parents are pushing both their sons and daughters to go. It is not just saying okay, you are a daughter, you don’t have to go, but so you really, really have to go and it is more of their choice. And sometimes, maybe the girls are not pressured to go to college, but at least to finish high school. At least you have to finish high school before marriage. Or even if you do get married, finish high school. That is what they are aiming for. They want their daughters to get out of school. As noted previously, women who wait to get married or delay marriage further to attend post-secondary education, do get mixed messages. Anecdotal evidence suggests the average age of marriage seems to be rising as Hmong become more adjusted to the demands of education and work in the United States. On the other hand, a recent study in Minnesota provides alarming evidence that increasing numbers of Hmong teenagers are getting pregnant and having children, and a smaller percentage of Hmong teenage mothers are getting married than a decade ago (Estrada 2003).

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Interestingly, today when early marriages do occur, the couples are closer in age than would have been the norm in Laos or even earlier in the Hmong resettlement experience (Estrada 2003). When I asked Shoua, who married a 21-year old man when she was 15 years old, what she thought about adolescent marriage, she had this to say: I think it is more stressful for them. And sometimes their marriage may not be as stable. Because the father, the groom, is still young and so is the bride. Sometimes when you are married, you want him to be the man, to be more responsible, and if he cannot do that for a couple of years then the marriage is going to fail somehow. And maybe conflicts with the inlaws can add to it, too. I just feel if you are going to get married, you should marry someone who is a little older, a little wiser, and who can support you a little. Whereas, if I was a sixteen and I married a sixteen-year-old—boys at that age are still very immature. They don’t know what the future is going to be like. All they want to do is have fun, party, maybe drink, and things like that. When you are married, as a woman, you want more in life; you want to be stable, you want children, you want education, you want your husband to be working to support you and all that. And if he cannot fulfill that, then it is going to end somehow. A guy that age, he still wants fun. He doesn’t really think about his future, his kid, his wife, you know. He just wants to have fun, party, go out and all that. And so it is hard. A twenty-five-year-old, he can be like that too, but at least he is a little more mature. He knows what he wants in life, not a lot, but at least a little. In Laos, in Thailand, and during the early years of Hmong resettlement, first time marriages between older men and younger women were more common. As explained to me by Shoua, this kind of union increased the financial stability of the couple as well as endowed the relationship with male maturity. Shoua believes the six-year age separation between her and her husband has contributed to the stability of their marriage. The links between adolescent parenting and poverty are bona fide. Across all ethnic groups in the United States, adolescent parents have

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more difficulty finding jobs, finishing their education, and supporting their families than adult parents. Most people I talked with acknowledged it was tough for young Hmong couples in the United States. Financially, adolescent couples are ill-equipped to support themselves; emotionally, they are not ready for adult relationships and parenting; and socially, Hmong-American boys are often less prepared than girls to take on the responsibilities of adult family life. However, there are some key cultural factors that do increase the ability of young Hmong couples to have a successful marriage. Hmong couples find essential sources of support from their kin group(s) including; financial assistance, childcare, living space, guidance, and relatives that want and expect secure marriages.

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Marriage Decisions in Light of Family Concerns As with any significant decision, the choice of when and whom to marry is complicated and factored by many different variables. The experiences Hmong refugee men and women shared with me illustrate that the decision is also colored by concerns for family and kin relationships. Because individuals see their own self-interest linked with the kinds of relationships they have now and those that they hope to create in the future, their ties to relatives influence their most intimate, personal choices. Cases in point are the marriage spurred by pregnancy I described previously, and the story of Shoua. I asked Shoua to tell me how her marriage to Bee came about. Thinking back to her decision to marry at 15 years of age, she indicated she felt deep concern for her fate in light of her present family situation: It just kind of happened. I thought for my future a lot. My parents had a good relationship, but there were always problems inside the family, too. And so I feared that if I did not get married, then people were going to know about my family’s problems, and they were going to use that against me. Then nobody would want to marry me. I don’t know; it was an immature thought or something. But he came along and we dated for a year and he is like, “I am getting old, so do you

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want to marry me?” But I think it is the reputation that made me get married. Because my parents, they have a gambling problem, too, and so I feared if I didn’t get married, then others would know about it. People who have sons who are educated they would say “Oh, don’t marry her; her family is like this. If you marry her, she might turn out to be like them.” So I was fearful. Another young woman, Mee, described how she broke up with a boyfriend because of parental disapproval. When Mee’s brother married a woman against the wishes of her parents, it caused longstanding family turmoil. From the beginning, Mee’s parents did not endorse her brother’s relationship because they disapproved of his girlfriend’s family. Since his marriage, all his ties to the family have been severed. Having witnessed this family rift, Mee did not want to hurt her parents or be disowned by them, so she decided to discontinue her relationship with the denigrated boyfriend. These personal testimonies reveal young Hmong-Americans are deeply influenced by family relationships and reputations. In these cases, I believe it is correct to assume that individual choices were contingent on family support and status. The repercussions of disregarding parental wishes and family reputation would certainly have affected the women’s familial ties and, in the end, their own status and well being in the community.

Polygyny I would be negligent in my scope, if I did not also address plural marriage, as it a hotly debated topic in Hmong-American communities. In Laos, polygyny was allowable. A Hmong man may have a second or third wife for various reasons: his first wife may have been barren, his older brother may have died and left a widow and possibly children to his care, more children may have been wanted, or an alliance was sought with another kin group. Widows and their children were left without a security net other than the contractual obligations produced through their marriages. The junior levirate custom provided continued support for the widow and her children from her husband’s kin group.

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If a younger brother was not available for her to marry, a cousin of her husband may also be considered. In my research, polygyny was seldom discussed. It rarely came up as a topic in my conversations, and I felt it would be insensitive to raise the issue out of context. I do know the practice continues and that it is growing less common, especially among the second generation. Polygyny is illegal, misunderstood, and met with contempt outside of the Hmong community. Given the contention surrounding polygyny, it is understandable why it is falling out of favor. Few young people want to deal with the controversy surrounding such a custom, and many have even adopted the ethnocentric mainstream view that it is an immoral and archaic relic of the past. In Laos, a wealthy man may be able to provide for his wives and children, given that more hands may generate more wealth, but in the United States, more children often translates into economic insecurity. The social and economic rationales for polygyny do not apply in the United States.

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The Ceremonies of Marriage A strict protocol must be followed whether a suitor chooses to elope with his fiancé or ask formal permission from her father (the proper way to start the marriage process). Dismissal of the rigorous formalities of the marriage ceremony signals disrespect for the groom’s in-laws and may bring shame on his own family and kin group. A groom enlists support from his kwvtij (male relatives from his father’s kin group) to raise the bridewealth, and he asks a male friend (the best man or phij laj) to support him during the arduous wedding negotiation phase held at the home of the bride. I have witnessed several phases of the wedding ceremony and I also asked different men and women about their experiences and ordeals during the ceremony. All agreed showing respect to both sides of the family was critical through the whole process. Upon entering the fiancée’s family home, the groom and his best man must bow to the ancestors on the bride’s side and the living elders of both families. Sometimes hundreds of bows are required and the men begin to sweat and tire. The wedding negotiation alone is typically 12 hours long and lasts until three or four o’clock in the

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morning. Many Hmong weddings require the groom and the bride to follow strict codes of conduct. If the groom fails to call the relatives by the correct name, eat an entire boiled chicken, wake up in the morning before his new father-in-law, or hold his toasting glass the right way, for example, he may have to drink another shot or pay a fine to her family. Ceremonial toasts of alcohol complicate this rite of passage for the groom and that is why the best man may be required to step in. If the bride looks directly at a single man or fails to sit with her legs touching, fines can be deducted from the bridewealth going to her family. The customs associated with the marriage ritual do vary and it is my understanding that many Christian Hmong families have done away with much of the ritualized drinking and the testing of the groom. People in this study described Christian Hmong weddings as much more simple. After the negotiation, a celebration follows, but it is not necessarily all fun for the couple. While the groom may be tested on his mental acuity while consuming alcohol, the bride is surrounded by relatives who lecture her on the responsibilities of being a good Hmong wife. She is told she has to love and obey her husband and that she belongs to her husband’s family forevermore. A young woman described her experiences while being lectured by relatives and the rationale for the intensity of the ritual: You hear so many voices talking at you, they don’t just talk to you one by one. They all just kind of lecture and yell at you. It is like they want to push so hard to you that they are confident in this wedding. They put so much into this wedding that their words right now better be valuable. You don’t want to learn any of this stuff while you were still single. You have to learn all this stuff the day of your wedding. And you have to collect all this information and keep it with you for the rest of your life. You know it is not like bits and pieces they raise and teach you. You had better get it right. It is an intense rite of passage for both the bride and groom as family members try and prepare them for their life together, not just as a couple, but as affinal relatives. One woman said she and her husband told their son-in-law at the wedding he must “love our daughter because we’ll be watching him.”

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Typically, the husband’s family dresses the bride in beautiful Hmong attire, which she then wears to the next phase of the wedding at her parent’s home. Not only does this symbolize how the new family intends to care for her, but it also marks her transition into a new life. The bride is considered the outside person who is starting a new life with a new family, and her transition is symbolically marked by the clothing she wears. The groom remains in casual American attire; after all, his role within his family is not in great transition. As the wedding approaches its conclusion, the bride (dressed in the traditional outfit her parents-in-law gave her) and her female relatives share a collective cry as she prepares to leave her family. Finally, with a straight face, she leaves with her new husband without turning to glance back at her home and family. Turning back signifies she may want to come back for a divorce or spells bad luck for the future. I was told the wife should never return to her birth family unless accompanied by her husband. Meredith and Rowe (1986) found the majority of Hmong men and women support the customs associated with the Hmong marriage, including marriage negotiators, marriage contracts between families, bridewealth, and male authority in the family. Despite significant support for bridewealth in the Hmong community, the custom provokes debate. Some view the transfer of money from the groom’s family to the bride’s family as highly symbolic and essential to the preservation of Hmong tradition. It is intended to cement the marriage and make the couple’s relationship more stable. Others say the amounts are getting out of hand and the custom is really unnecessary in the United States. Hmong people I spoke with generally agreed on the importance of marrying the Hmong way because it was a fundamental part of Hmong culture and identity anywhere in the world. Several people said explicitly in the interview, “in Hmong culture, marriage is forever.” The ceremony helps to convey the substance of Hmong marriage, and it is an indelible reminder of a change in personal and social status for the new husband and wife.

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Expectations in Marriage and Family Life

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Once married, there are unique situations faced by Hmong couples, especially if they choose to live patrilocally. Women said the daughterin-law has to work continually at making herself look good in front of her in-laws and that this pressure is felt most strongly the first year of the marriage. Shoua described her experience when she married at 15 years of age and moved in with her in-laws: I’d say when I moved in I didn’t like it. It is very strange because I had never lived apart from my parents, you know. Growing up they say you cannot sleep at your friends’ houses and you always sleep at home. The first night he took me in, I’m like, I don’t want to stay. I want to go back home. Then my mom called and she says why are you over there. If you want to come home, I’ll come and pick you up. Then you know how our tradition is, if you went [to your husband’s], then it is good that you don’t go back [to your family of origin]. If you do, then you will be called a widow already, as though the marriage did not take place. That is how people label you. So I was crying on the phone and she [the motherin-law] took it away and said, “She is staying with me now.” Like I said, it was very hard and was a big adjustment to [get used to] his family. They were very different from mine. Despite the initial shock, Shoua describes her relationship with her in-laws as pleasant and supportive, but her educational desires have tested the limits of this support. She described the discussions surrounding her aspiration to go to a university: My in-laws said that if I want to go then I should pursue it, but if I don’t then I shouldn’t go and should support Bee [her husband]. But I was doing well in school, and my husband had seen that benefit too. He said I really should go. At first his father said no, a daughter-in-law should not go school; she should just stay in the home, raise kids, and if she wants she can obtain a degree at the tech but not a university, no. My husband is really supportive of my education and so he said, “No, if she wants to go to a four-year college, let her go. She

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is getting scholarships and financial aid and it is not a big burden on us. We don’t have to pay for it. If she wants to, I am going to let her go.” When he stood up like that, they didn’t say much. Shoua and her husband followed culturally acceptable guidelines to argue her case. Bee, not Shoua, approached the head of the family. Bee’s argument, on behalf of Shoua, reflected group logic. Within this discourse of respect, hierarchy, and group interest, the young couple was able to bring about the decision they hoped for. The parents have helped the young couple immensely as they try to raise two children and finish school. Because of this assistance, Shoua and her husband, Bee, will finish college. They plan to go home to Wausau, Wisconsin to be near his parents when they graduate and to repay the debt they feel they owe his parents. This family situation demonstrates how relatives can aid each other in an adaptive way. Secondly, it demonstrates the relative power of individuals. Had the husband not offered to support his wife’s education, or had he failed to rationalize this choice as generally beneficial to the family, the final decision may have been different. I have known other cases where women had little support from their husbands or in-laws to get an education. They dropped out of college to support the family or build up savings so they and their husbands could buy their own home (thereby moving out of the in-laws’ home). Whatever the situation, the final verdict appears to be a group decision based on the perceived best interests of the family. Studies other than this one have also noted the resourcefulness of the family structure in Hmong society. Early marriage was studied as part of the Youth Development Survey at the University of Minnesota, the only longitudinal study of its kind with regard to Hmong youth. Hutchinson and McNall (1994) found that despite the high levels of early marriage and early fertility in the Hmong sample studied, the overwhelming majority of young persons stay in high school and report high educational expectations. The authors attribute this result to the remarkable network of family resources these students can draw upon: “The cultural structures of Hmong society have been utilized to ensure that the younger generation will pursue the educational opportunities

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available to them in America, thus enabling them to become economically independent in the second generation” (Hutchinson & McNall 1994:588). Although the authors do not elaborate on what constitutes the remarkable network of family relations, people I talked with noted that the childcare provided by family and kin members was the major factor that allowed them to work and attend school and college. I asked Shoua to elaborate on common strategies in her family network:

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I would say if you do have a conflict or daycare problems, we would turn to his parents first. The first year [of the marriage], we moved over here [to Menomonie, WI], I was in high school and [he] was in college. It was very hard for day care and so we had to send Kia [their infant daughter] to live with them for a semester until we could find daycare at the high school for her. And they offered. They say, ‘we know education is very hard and day care and finances are very hard too, so if you guys need us to take care of Kia, we will.’ So we took her home to stay with them for a whole semester. In this case, the couple depended on the patrilocal family even though they lived a two hour drive from them. This example shows that kin assistance can extend across geographical distances. I found that Hmong couples of all ages expect some conflict in marriage and therefore equip themselves with realistic expectations of intimate human relationships. These normative expectations become lived experience in the context of the family, household, and kin relationships as individuals make sense of their personal roles in these human networks. From the experiences of men and women in this study, I learned how patrilineal and patrilocal ties can be at once enabling and taxing, exemplifying the ambivalent nature of kinship I discussed in chapter one. I asked women how they knew whether their conduct as daughtersin-law was inappropriate or deficient. Gossip and subtle hints seem to be the most tried and true ways of letting a daughter-in-law know that she is falling short. Hmong classmates in my language class shared a laugh when we read a story about strained relations at home. In the story, the in-laws say to their daughter, “Mai, do the dishes,” which caused uproarious laughter because all the Hmong students knew the

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parents really meant, “daughter-in-law, do the dishes.” A verbal cue to the daughter is meant for the daughter–in-law as well. Sometimes, inlaws are more direct and tell her she is “a kid” because she has to be reminded to do everything; adults are presumed to know their family responsibilities. Men’s first experiences with the demands of being a husband, head of the household, and a son-in-law, occur with the initiation of his marriage, as described earlier in this chapter. After marriage, his role as head of the household develops and he is expected to take on more responsibility in terms of making decisions, participating in family and kinship decisions and rituals, and making a living. After the birth of his first or second child, a man’s in-laws give him an adult name. This name indicates his social identity as an adult man, and it is only after marriage and fatherhood that he is bestowed this status. An adult man is expected to maintain the ancestral rites of his lineage group. The only exception to this rule would be in the case of married brothers living together where it is sufficient for the designated head of the household to hold these rites on behalf of all other members (Lee 1999b). Several young men I interviewed expressed anxiety about their future obligations as head of household. They feared they would not be able to adequately learn and perform the rituals of their lineage group because they were so busy with school, work, or both. As Lee (1999b) points out, Hmong rely exclusively on memorizing the names of all dead relatives, which is a long and complex incantation used in rituals. If a Hmong man’s skills are valued by his family, kin, and community, he will likely have a very full agenda. In Laos, experts in spiritual healing, resolving conflicts, funeral rites, or wedding negotiation, were often in great demand. In the United States, the list of needed services has broadened to include cultural brokering, translating, church leadership, and political representation in local and state government. Hmong-American male leaders are often involved in helping family members with legal immigration, finding jobs or training, resolving disputes, or counseling. Many Hmong men, and an increasing number of women, who are adept at working as cultural brokers devote time and energy to community issues affecting Hmong people such as housing needs, bilingual education for children, family support services, and job development. Given the fresh societal

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context, and the recognition of women’s varied contributions to the Hmong community, the list of eligible candidates for these positions includes an increasing number of Hmong women. Well-regarded male leaders may be involved in national or global issues affecting Hmong people such as human rights monitoring in Laos, or the repatriation of Hmong refugees from Thailand to Laos.

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Concord and Conflict Newspaper and media accounts of Hmong family life undoubtedly reinforce the idea that family turmoil and tension plague Hmong communities. Reports of domestic violence, homicides, and suicides related to marital discord make headlines in lieu of individual success stories and portraits of family stability. One of my goals in this research has been to share stories of refugee adjustment and resiliency, as told to me by men and women in the Hmong community, in hopes that the interpretation presented here has a more realistic ring to it than given in the popular media. For any refugee population, the ordeals of flight and relocation, and the socioeconomic barriers and marginalization they may experience in the adopted country, pose clear and serious threats to personal relationships. The process of accommodating different gender expectations and norms in the new country can exacerbate existing gender tensions and create new ones. Given these realties, the strengths of refugee Hmong communities, including community cohesion, strong family and kin ties, and strong marital relationships should be recognized and applauded. Earlier in this chapter, I cited the strategies individuals, couples and families have used to work out difficult situations. The participants in this study reflected the themes of being responsible for the welfare of their families and the desire to keep harmony in their relationships. Most of the people I interviewed did not mention undue trouble in their relationships with spouses, children or other family members. In my conversations, we discussed multiple ways of dealing with family conflict, but we also talked about celebration, faith, hope, and achievement. I did become acquainted with two couples who were experiencing serious difficulties in their marriage. In each case, repeated attempts

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were made to salvage the marriage by asking for intervention from the husband’s kinsmen and by seeking counseling from a non-Hmong counselor. In the end, both marriages ended in divorce. In my attempt to identify common themes, I found it helpful to ask about contexts that may give rise to marital or family tension. Several women described the first years of marriage as difficult. They mentioned challenges like discovering the true temperament of their spouse, dealing with new responsibilities in the family as well as their in-law’s, having to work, and in many cases, starting a family. “The first year is always the roughest because you think that you know him well enough but actually when you settle down together, you are like, oh my God, I cannot believe you are like that and so conflicts and disagreements come.” This statement made by a young wife and mother, echoed my conversations with other women. In other cases, economic problems like unemployment, and debt strained marital relationships. Hmong families seem to expect a certain amount of marital conflict and regard the constant airing of grievances as inappropriate behavior. My interviews revealed that individuals discussed some types of marital conflict while withholding those deemed too minor to share with anyone. Obviously, individual personalities and even the general temperament of the family in question figure prominently in any discussion of what constitutes disagreeable behavior, but the general code of conduct dictates that Hmong men and women should not complain about their personal relationships with family and kin members unless the problem is serious. Mild depression, anxiety, and frustration are not issues to share with other family members; quiet forbearance is the norm. Robert, a 19-year old man, described his mother’s way of accepting family problems as exemplary: “I can say that my mother has a long heart. 30 She doesn’t just give up like that. She knows that maybe that is just a bad time and a good time will come. You just have to wait.” Commenting about emotional stress in her extended family household, another young person said: 30

Hmong associate emotional characteristics with the liver. To have a long liver, siab ntev, is to be patient and even-tempered. In this interview, the young informant used the Western seat of emotion, the heart, as a substitute.

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I guess I’m always a quiet person, too. If inside, I was ready to explode, I wouldn’t tell anyone. I would just act normal, calm. And so I didn’t see that was a big issue. Because if you cannot handle that and you [let it out] …then they [the inlaws] might … say, ‘Oh, it’s just a little problem. How come you cannot handle that, you know. In life you will experience more. If you cannot handle that, how are you going to be a good wife?’ If problems such as infidelity, abuse, legal trouble, serious and persistent fighting, or addiction, exist in a household, the first choice for most people is to solve it the Hmong way—within the family and kin group. Reaching out to formally educated, paid experts in the wider community (counselors, therapists, legal advisers, etc.), and/or friends, is more common in mainstream U.S. culture than in Hmong culture. Living in harmony with the members of one’s family, kin group(s) and community is a commonly held Hmong value. When an individual steps outside of these networks to solve a problem, without trying the culturally appropriate methods first, he or she will likely meet with criticism and a loss of support. In the following conversation, Lia, a young married woman, shares how she has dealt with conflict in her marriage. Lia came to the United States when she was five years old. Only since she entered adulthood has she given up on trying to be as Americanized as possible. Now married into a “traditional” family, she has had to reconcile her personal dilemmas in the context of her life as a mother, wife, daughter-in-law, student, employee and soon-to-be teacher. Lia and her husband married young, and for most of their marriage he desired to spend time with his friends socializing. They have had worrisome financial and emotional problems. When I first met Lia her husband would not let her go out of the house without an escort. She told me she had not been out of the house unaccompanied, except for work or school, for over three years. Her words exemplify how HmongAmerican people strategize and contest what is happening in their lives: J: If you read about Hmong culture, they say everyone turns to the husband’s side of the family for help. I am just wondering how accurate is that? It sounds like you are close to your

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Gender, The Family and Change

family of origin. And so, I am just wondering in what situation would you do what? L: I cannot see my family unless my husband agrees to go. I can’t just take myself and go see them whenever I want to because if I do that it means I don’t want to live with my husband. Because when you go back to see your family, from the bride’s side, both you and your husband should go. Not one.

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J: Well, what about telephone calls and stuff—would you call your family? L: Oh yes, I call them very often. Yeah, I call them. In a week, I probably call them five times. I believe that I can call my family anytime. I think there is no problem with that. And they do always ask for me to come and visit. “When are you going to come back and visit?” I don’t see them very often. I’ll probably see them three times a year. But talking, keeping in contact, is probably every day. And we don’t write because, you know, I’m not too good with Hmong and Dad only reads Lao and my mom reads Hmong so when I do call, I speak to them in my own language and their language is still kind of where you can tell they don’t speak English. When I do keep in touch, for me personally, [is when] I have problems with my own husband. You know, I always go to my father first. But that is wrong in my culture. I have to go my mother-in law-first and then his side of the relatives first. But to me, for me, I am so scared to go and confront my husband’s side of the family. How am I going to go about saying it [so as not to] make them offended that their son or their kin is doing something wrong…? I want them to see both of our views, so I do talk with my dad first to make sure how [best] to approach [and] talk with them about this problem. And my dad says there are some ways to say things in order for you to have manners. First is manners, second is not to offend them. So you want to talk kind of like professional talk in Hmong.

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But I am not too good with that because my vocabulary is so limited… where am I going to go to find the words? J: Because they are not written down anywhere…. L: I do ask my dad, how to say things. And he does help me out in that. Then I go [to my in-laws]. J: Is that helpful? L: That is very helpful. But I know in my culture, you don’t ever go to your parents, your own parents for when you have marital problems at all.

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J: And do you talk about this with people your own age? Or is this just something that you are supposed to know from growing up? L: It is something you are supposed to know growing up. And before you go off to get married, the same day of your wedding, they do like a six-hour lecture on how you deal with when you have problems with your husband. You go to his side of the family, so when I do try this it is really hard for me to just go to them. I have done it before, but I have offended the family, really bad to the fact they think I am rebellious or something. So I don’t go there right away anymore, I also go to my family first. I don’t have anybody in town to really go and talk to. Lia described in the previous passage how she is following the culturally appropriate path by turning to her husband’s relatives to help resolve their serious martial problems, but clearly she also gets support from her father in their phone conversations. She consults with her father to find the appropriate way to approach her in-laws and attempt to solve many of the interpersonal problems within her own home. Her father, whom she primarily communicates with on the phone (notice she does not violate the prohibition against going home), is now appreciated for his cultural knowledge and his efforts to teach his children the Hmong way of living.

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We talked about the transformation she has experienced since she struck out on her own and her relationship to her family now. When asked why she now appreciates the lessons her father was trying to instill, she replied:

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L: Because I am on my own now. And I have to deal with trying to be traditional…I really don’t look good in the eyes of the Hmong community because of how I go about myself. I think that it got me into appreciating my family and getting closer to them because I see that because I want to make that up to my father, to tell him that I do care about the culture, that I do want to be closer to the family like I was before. And I [have] apologized over and over again. Look, now I live by myself and I know how life is, you know, because you don’t see that, you are so blind to your own experiences that you don’t want anybody else’s, your still egoistic. And you want to be more, you want to do what you want to do, to think that how society would accept you. But as to me, I realize that no matter how much I try, I am still colored. And even if I try to be like the American society, that everyday if I look in the mirror, I am not American. Lia makes compromises and navigates within the boundaries of what she, her kin, her community, and her society find acceptable. Government, church and non-profit organizations can offer support for couples who are experiencing emotional, financial or other problems, but these sources are not the first option for Lia. In fact, if she chooses to ask for help from “outsiders” it may erode her status within her kin group even more. Nazli Kibria (1993) uses the image of walking a tightrope to symbolize the challenge Vietnamese-American women experience in adapting to new opportunities in light of their existing family relationships. She found the women in her study worked hard to incorporate the new realities of their lives into the ideological confines of the “traditional” family system. Protecting the “structure and sanctity” of the pre-immigration family and kin system can be as important as taking advantage of new resources for Hmong-American

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women. Indeed, a rejection of family, community, and culture can rupture personal identity as Lia described in the above passage. The changes accompanying marriage are always significant for Hmong men and women, but they vary in their intensity. Generally, once a man and woman are married, they do not socialize with single people, nor are they supposed to be alone with other married people of the opposite sex. In Laos, this sort of intermingling was just not allowed because it was believed to lead to infidelity. In one conversation, through an interpreter, 45-year old veteran, Khoua Lee wanted to get this point across: As you are the researcher for the Hmong culture and traditions, it is very important that you and other educators know about the Hmong culture. If you are a manager in the Pizza Hut restaurant and then we are all working for you---he and his wife, me and my wife, we all work together in Pizza Hut. You are going to order me to go with his wife or him to go with my wife to send the pizza to someone else. And [we] go alone in the car. This is impossible [in] the Hmong culture so be advised that this is a very critical issue. Maybe the young people they will not consider this is … important [in] …family conflict, but this is a real issue in the Hmong community at the present time. Khoua said in that the United States, the contact between unrelated married men and women gives rise to infidelity and is the primary cause for the rising divorce rates in the Hmong community. For American men and women, he continued, the infidelity may not occur when men and women work together, but for the Hmong it will be likely. A younger man in his thirties explained that if he went to a married friend’s house and his friend was not there, it was definitely unacceptable for him to remain there with his friend’s wife. Such restrictions are widely recognized, but there appears to be a range of responses people exhibit according to context and viewpoint. For Lia, the restrictions were particularly intense and stringent because of the way her husband, with support from his family, interpreted the correct behavior for married women. She said:

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You don’t hang out with married couples if you are not married, unless you are the family. I have never gone out with a friend, out to eat, out to a movie, or out to shopping, ever since I got married. [In] three and one-half years, I have never gone out before unless it is my husband by my side or his sisters by my side. If I go study at the library, I go take his sister with me. I don’t go [by myself] just because it’s a tradition. I have seen other young girls who are married who are my age, but the husband in the family [does not set these rules]. Socializing between married and single persons, even of the same sex, can raise suspicion because it is linked to marital problems and it is unacceptable behavior for adults. If a Hmong person is married and has children, they are considered an adult and they are expected to socialize with other married people. In the United States, there is far more opportunity for unrelated women and men to interact and this context creates numerous interpretations of what is normal behavior and what is unacceptable conduct.

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Divorce and Conflict Divorce is considered a failure of the individuals and their families for not being able to intercede and keep the families together (Ka Ying Yang 2003). The consequences for the divorced couple and their families are significant because this is a step that ends kin relationships and retracts obligations. In Laos, divorce was not at all common and in cases where it did occur, the terms and obligations of the marriage contract between the two groups were terminated. Donnelly (1994) said no place exists for divorced people in Hmong society. Presumably, if it did occur, in Laos, the wife went back to her family under the authority of her male relatives. Donnelly (1994) contrasts the American mainstream view of marriage and divorce with Hmong cultural understandings. She says in the Hmong traditional view, marriage links two families in a binding contract. In contrast, the marriage contract is viewed to be between legally recognized adults in

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U.S. society, not between families. If a Hmong wife initiates a divorce without the support of her male relatives, Donnelly argues, it disrupts Hmong social structure, which consists of links between male-headed families. An issue I investigated is how family relationships are viewed after divorce. In the American legal system, the parental and spousal obligations continue through court-mediated financial and domestic contracts that affect child support, alimony, custody, domestic arrangements, etc. This fact alone creates a great deal of controversy in the Hmong community according to several older men I spoke with. They told me that men in the Hmong community experience great loss; they see their children, material resources, and their wife permanently taken from them. At the same time, U.S. law requires them to continue to provide child support and alimony. One older gentleman shared his observations: Most of the Hmong men I know they really love their children. They don’t want to see their children go. They don’t want their children to go and have no father. And they felt too bad and they kill themselves. A lot of Hmong people kill themselves is because of that. You know, I pay a lot of money when we got married and we both agree to get married, we love each other, but she doesn’t want to get married without any problem[s] and then the judge still asking me to pay for the child support. And I have no future. Where are the six or seven children? All the money [goes] to pay for those kids. I could get married but who is going to want to get married to me? I pay a lot of money and [this] it doesn’t make sense to me. Shouldn’t the judge see who caused the problem and should follow the evidence or witnesses that say[s] he caused the problem? If the man caused the problem, let him pay for child support. If the lady caused the problem, let her pay for child support. Make the other a little bit happier. So that might solve the problem. For our Hmong people it [this] doesn’t work for us. This is really not working. Based on my conversations with Hmong people thus far, I am confident in saying that a no-fault divorce in Hmong society is really

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quite inconceivable. Someone is always to blame, and if the guilty party does not change his/her ways and a divorce commences, it is a major catastrophe involving not only the couple, but also two kin groups. Marriage and divorce must be understood according to specific cultural experiences, and this is where the challenge emerges for Hmong-American men and women today who must sort out multiple (and sometimes competing) cultural meanings. Loss of a spouse through death or divorce may be particularly devastating for Hmong women and children because of the kinship structure and ideology. For example, I have talked with Hmong individuals who consider themselves orphans because their father died and their mother remarried into another xeem. They called themselves orphans because the primary ties they had to a paternal kinship group were severed. Pejoratively, Hmong might say these are, “children in the grass,” signifying they are untended and have no roots. The man quoted above said the children in a divorce “have no father,” which is a common expression and signifies the perception that kin relationships are really terminated, even if American law says something to the contrary. If these children remain part of a kin group, their father’s brother for example takes them in or they become stepchildren through their mother’s next marriage, they may not expect to have the same kind of care they would receive from their biological parents. Children and their widowed or divorced mothers are isolated in Laos and in the United States. Lee (1999b) describes how a divorced or widowed woman in Laos can return to her consanguineous relatives, but must live separately because she no longer belongs to her parents’ lineage. Only people with the same ritual systems can inhabit the same house. After an American-style legal divorce, Hmong women and their children may be socially and economically isolated. A woman in this situation belongs neither to her ex-husband’s family or her father’s household and may have to strike out on her own, garner support from sympathetic relatives, live with a boyfriend, or find other strategies to cope with the tough challenges faced by single parents. Since the ramifications of divorce in the Hmong community are so costly, the choice to end a marriage must be carefully weighed against the kind of problems the wife and/or husband may be facing in the marriage.

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Suicides and homicides associated with domestic conflicts underscore the seriousness of newfound gender tensions and social challenges that exist in Hmong-American communities. Hmong people are working it out, drawing from familiar internal ways of resolving conflict and using American legal means when necessary. One unmarried woman described her perceptions on domestic abuse and resolving marital conflict: J: Do you think if you ever get married that you would be comfortable with family [helping] work it out? Would you try it that way? Or does it just depend on what the issue might be? I think it would depend on the issue. For a fact, I know that if my husband was ever to abuse me, I wouldn’t even think twice, he would be locked up so fast. Because I just don’t believe in that. If my parents don’t have the nerve to hit me, what in his mind would make him think he could hit me?

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J: If there is a marital dispute …does the family get together and really try to work it out? Yes, they do. Sometimes it goes on for weeks. Maybe even the two people would just end up working it out themselves. Or else, they don’t even end up working it out and she just goes home. Most of the time they try to make it so that they stay together because like I said, once you get married it is proper and you never want to really break up. J: Does it work out for both sides usually? Or does the woman get the short end of the stick? I think the short end of the stick all the time. I mean even if she was getting abused she would probably have to go back. So, I guess it’s most likely the case. But I see men trying because you know in this country, women do have rights. If you touch me, I am going to call the police on you. J: Do you see more people calling the police?

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I do and I think they are using their rights and I am proud of them because they actually have the courage to do it. J: Do you think it takes a lot of courage?

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I think it does. Because you know your husband’s family doesn’t think of you the same way. I mean when I debate with my guy friends I know we are just debating for fun, but they always bring up the subject “Oh, you know in this country you women have too many rights.” I glad I am living in this country. That is all I can say. I also wanted to ask for men’s impressions of marital conflict and how best to work out these problems, given the options provided in American communities and the legal system. I asked a Hmong elder who often serves as a mediator in marital conflicts, how he goes about helping couples. He said in the previous two months, he had helped in six cases. Five couples are better now and the last one “should be divorced,” he said. In conflict resolution, he said they listen to both sides to “see who caused the problem.” Once that is determined, he said the mediators explain to the person how his or her behavior hurt the spouse or family and how they should change. He said if something isn’t working in the marriage, they try to help the couple make the marriage better. He said he “trusts this way.” When outsiders are called in, like the police, it often makes things worse he said: If you go through the law, through a judge, to the police officer, they have to do [things] according to their job. But, you know some people, they don’t want to get divorced, they don’t want to separate, they are just very angry. If I get too angry, and me and my wife are fighting …and we have our family come help us, that doesn’t mean we want to get divorced. It doesn’t mean that we want to put one [another] in jail. We’re just fighting, and if somebody is [called from] outside of the family, they don’t understand. If the police officer is called, he reads me my rights because I got too angry

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at that time. If he is called, then it is too late. You can’t solve the problem and it hurts me. So, it should be the family helping. …It doesn’t mean they will always help one-hundred percent [of the time], but they will try to help. That doesn’t mean we don’t’ follow the law. We are going to follow the law, but we negotiate the problem, work it out. Contentious dialogue about how best to handle gender tension in families is underway; some speculate that in the United States the security net of extended family is often inaccessible; therefore, extended family are often unable to help couples work things out and thereby prevent domestic violence. Others say societal challenges to male authority (more independence for women, women’s rights under the law, etc.) destabilize traditional patriarchy in the home, and men are seeking to reaffirm their control by physically abusing their wives (Ka Ying Yang 2003). In my research, I found such statements to be deterministic and formulaic. Reaching to a glorified past where traditional measures always worked, or disparaging Hmong culture and community, are both insufficient responses and neither will evoke strategies that work for everyone in the Hmong community. The complex gender relationships and strategies I observed and have tried to present in this chapter defy simplistic interpretation and steer me away from (mis)representing Hmong-Americans as a group.

Conclusion Why do culture, family, and community play such a large role in the choices and strategies individuals make? An anthropological perspective on social control tells us that in societies without formalistic legal conventions and institutions, such as Hmong communities in Laos, human behavior is often regulated by informal means such as gossip, shame, ostracism, and community criticism. In Hmong-American communities, informal, group-centered techniques of Hmong social control and formal, individual-centered American approaches co-exist. Consequently, the process of securing a respected status in the Hmong community and finding a meaningful place in United States society is delicate and complex. Different people report different experiences growing up Hmong in American society but the

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common challenge is that each individual must eventually come to terms with their personal identity in light of larger familial and societal interests. In the next chapter, I address the future. I have noted several patterns regarding family and kin networks that seem to point to new directions in terms of kinship solidarity, dependency, and gender relationships. I will also continue to elaborate on what it means to be Hmong-American and how people are using these conceptualizations to forge a unique identity in a country touted for its cultural pluralism. Lastly, I will specify the lessons that policy makers and social service providers can learn from the support networks I have observed in Hmong communities.

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CHAPTER 6:

Lessons For The Future

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Applying Ethnography The intent of this chapter is to address the future of Hmong kinship in the United States and to draw policy-oriented lessons from the diasporic experience of Hmong refugees. The lived realities shared by the participants in this study should serve to defy characterizations of refugees as unchanging, victimized, or passive participants in their own existence. Their experiences make clear that human resistance, resilience, and adaptability in the face of such ravaging forces as war, dislocation, and forced migration are possible. But at the same time, these case studies also point to very real hegemonic institutions and processes that limit the kinds of strategies individuals and their families can develop. This summation is predicated on my personal belief that social scientists have the responsibility to produce knowledge toward social and material transformation. Through the written word, I hope that the heart and soul of this research—the shared conversations with participants—provide grounded information that may help to break inaccurate stereotypes, promote positive dialogue, and support continued self-determination in Hmong-American communities.

Debunking Assumptions and Generating Improved Frameworks Before I attempt to address the future of Hmong kinship in the United States, I must address two complicating factors. First, I find it necessary to debunk two dominant paradigms in the social sciences that would presuppose answers to immigrant adaptation even before 151

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looking at the ethnographic evidence. And, second, I want to briefly explain how I have tailored existing theoretical frameworks to interpret and summarize the information gathered in this study. Many observers of Hmong culture and many Hmong people themselves believe future generations will lose time-honored traditions and practices as they chase career opportunities and seek to merge themselves into the dominant culture. In other words, they predict Hmong people will inevitably become Americanized through the process of assimilation. This scenario may very well be the case, but it is based on American mythologies about assimilation and success as represented by two popular metaphors. The melting pot metaphor describes an American amalgamation of diverse ethnic groups. The archetype of the rugged individual, capable of finding his or her version of the American dream through mere self-determination, also infuses the national mindset. Assimilation theory and the focus on the role of the individual in creating the “model American success story,” reify the immigrant in popular culture and politics. Moreover, these paradigms have also galvanized the theoretical orientations of scholars both past and present. The paradigms feed off one another. In order to show the problems with some of these views, I will discuss each separately. Scholars who subscribe to the theory of assimilation assume a process exists by which diverse ethnic groups enter the United States with their respective indigenous cultures intact, experience conflict and confusion, and adapt by taking on the way of life of the dominant culture. In this process, immigrants lose much of their native culture that was assumed to make adaptation difficult. Distinctive ethnic traits such as native language, religion, dress, and behavior are understood to be hindrances that negatively affect assimilation. This basic model guided research on European immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and flourishes to this day despite nearly a century of criticism and contradictory research. Recent research, like that of Fungchatou T. Lo (2001), on the Hmong in Wisconsin is informed by assimilation theory. For the purposes of this study, a full critique of assimilation theory is not in order, but several key assumptions need to be addressed. First, assimilation scholars often neglect to consider the way racial/ethnic hierarchies and the incoming immigrants’ status in them affect the adaptation experience. Proponents assume that all immigrants will essentially follow similar adaptive paths, ignoring the fact that immigrants and refugees face very

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different conditions of exit from their homeland and usually have very different attitudes, experiences, and skills that affect their adjustment to the new society. Second, assimilation theorists advance the simplistic idea that immigrants, especially those from less developed nations, must “modernize,” and conform to Euro-American culture to be successful citizens. Part of the problem with this paradigm is that it also imparts an underlying belief that Euro-American culture is progressive and that any new immigrant or refugee should want to conform to the dominant culture. The theme of rugged individualism colors recent immigrant and refugee scholarship as well. Young Yun Kim (1989) writes the following about Southeast Asian refugees:

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In the end, it is largely the refugees themselves who determine their adaptation. It is a matter of their conscious (or unconscious) decisions that contribute to the extent to which they will accomplish their own life goals in the United States. If they hope to become functional members of the American society, they must work toward improving the individual aspect(s) of their personal, social, and economic conditions, and, ultimately, toward creating an integrated adaptation of all these dimensions. Kim advances the idea that it will take individual determination and dedication, rather than group efforts, for Southeast Asian refugees to realize an “American dream” of their own. Missing in her analysis is a consideration of structural forces that may impinge on refugees’ abilities to improve their personal, social and economic lives. Moreover, she seems to believe individual self-interest should reside front and center in these considerations, with little or no regard for family, kin or community. My research indicates that family concerns often outweigh individual matters, or at the very least, figure prominently in the strategies devised by individuals. This is also true in American mainstream culture and causes difficulties for people. Sociologists and historians offer contradictory evidence to the assimilation and rugged individualism models. Numerous studies demonstrate that factors above and beyond individual motive and skill

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significantly influence actions and achievements of immigrant groups. Research also shows that large “ethnic pockets and intergroup differences exist for several generations and can even be beneficial to the process of adaptation and socioeconomic success” (Morawaska 1990: 189). The gamut of personal adaptation stories featured in this study illustrates the phenomena of inter-group and intra-group variation. Moreover, the strategies developed by Hmong refugees illustrate that adaptation may require a careful blending of preimmigration cultural attributes and adopted ones. Research studies based on theoretical formulas designed to measure “successful assimilation” by asking what is left to discard or what remains to be adopted are ill suited for evaluating immigrant adaptation. Furthermore, the network and collectivist strategies illustrated in this text defy rugged individualism as the only model for success in America. In fact, if I were to draw a hypothetical model of a welladjusted Hmong immigrant, he or she would be someone who resides in a Hmong community enclave and migrates, works, and reciprocates in a kinship network. The main criticism leveled by anthropologists against assimilation models is that they are based on the ethnocentric assumptions that all immigrants seek the same goals, have the same desires, and will follow a one-dimensional, prescriptive path on their way to American homogeneity. Alternative, multidimensional frameworks, like the one advanced in this study, posit the view that pre-immigration cultural attributes do not flow into a melting pot, nor do they exist outside the border of a core culture. They constantly interact with it (Zhou 1997). Ethnographic researchers attempt to study cultural transitions from the perspectives of those who are experiencing it firsthand. The emic perspective allows for individual, group, and cultural distinctiveness to emerge in the analysis. Some interesting case studies challenge assimilationist assumptions straight out by examining the ways in which ethnic communities are, in various ways, better for immigrants than rapid assimilation. A growing body of evidence indicates that increasing familiarity with U.S. culture and society can leave immigrants and their children far more susceptible to mental and physical ailments, even if they are upwardly mobile in terms of socio-economic status. Increasing social isolation and the loss of stable religious affiliations may herald health declines, proposes Arthur M. Kleinman, psychiatrist

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and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School (Bower 1998). Kleinman cites his own work and the work of other immigrant health researchers who have linked immigrants’ health deterioration to their assimilation to U.S. society. The authors of Habits of the Heart (Bellah, et.al., 1985:6), assert that American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that “leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation.” The individualistic orientation found in mainstream American society stands in contrast to many ethnic communities that maintain cultural traditions of support and reciprocity, and advance a more collectivist orientation.31 Throughout the research process, I listened as participants continually evaluated the merits and pitfalls of becoming Americanized. Some mainstream cultural patterns, like high divorce rates and “deserting” elders in nursing homes are seen as abhorrent to nearly every Hmong person I know. Cultural accommodation for survival and relative success is one thing, but unequivocal assimilation is quite another.

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Theoretical Eclecticism: Feminism, Kinship Theory & Generation Research on kinship in Hmong communities supports new theoretical models that help explain the value of collective action and cultural pluralism for new immigrants, but this research also demonstrates the need for improved theoretical frameworks to understand the complex relationship of gender, generation and kinship. As I have consistently underscored in my analysis, gender, and generation do have a bearing on a Hmong participant’s perspectives and experiences. Extended families, multi-adult households, kinship solidarity and reliance, and patrilocal living, while functional and even adaptational in many cases, do not always result in egalitarian relationships. The Hmong 31

For an excellent, comparative discussion of refugee and immigrant communities in the United States, see Refugee Communities, by Steven J. Gold (1992).

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immigrant family and community become zones of cultural resistance and accommodation as many women and young people try to develop strategies to their advantage without damaging their Hmong social status and identity—in fact, in the majority of cases, as individuals strive for American success, they must keep an eye to family and kin relations or face reproach. Feminist perspectives in immigration and kinship studies guided me to be more aware of the gendered dimensions of adaptation strategies and to be alert to conflict. As the stories in this text illustrate, families and kin networks can be sources of strength and refuge, but they can also be sites of conflict, negotiation, and resistance. Women interviewed in this study did not say they experienced feelings of social and economic emancipation with resettlement, nor did they experience more oppression. A binary cultural integration model, with pre- and post-immigration markers, might lead some to believe Hmong women are becoming liberated from patriarchy after resettlement, but I find this model fails to explain complex gendered relations in HmongAmerican communities. Men and women experience immigration differently as their roles and responsibilities take on new meaning and undergo change upon resettlement, but, as the women and men in this study explained in their narratives, they may also experience ambivalence, contradiction, and new forms of oppression. If one equates Hmong society with patriarchy, then it follows that liberated Hmong women must cast off their culture, hence, compromising their ethnic identity and even their own sense of self-worth. Women in this study agreed certain collective cultural norms do exist, and these norms can be constraining, but how these ideals were interpreted and practiced depended on the individual, her family and her own unique set of circumstances. The women I interviewed showed no intention of abandoning their Hmong cultural identity, although some had tried in the past. On the contrary, they were forging new paths within their own dynamic cultural schema. In terms of kinship theory, I have taken a rather eclectic path by applying several frameworks to aid in the interpretation of the ethnographic data. Kinship, as Ladislav Holy (1996:170) states, must be conceptualized “as a particular kind of social relationship,” if it is to remain useful as a meaningful analytical category in anthropology. Kinship, I believe, does serve to define unique human relationships, but it must be identified according to specific cultural criteria. Kinship

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anthropologists by tradition have studied societies as stable systems, and the body of anthropological theory they created made kinship seem as if it was an irreducible, static domain of social relations that help societies function and reproduce themselves. This study evaluates how social relationships and responsibilities are organized and negotiated in the context of social upheaval and transformation. I am seeking answers to an unusual question in the field of kinship studies. How does kinship allow a people to change and be resilient at the same time? Through ethnographic illustration, I have explained ways in which kinship is a useful, a meaningful, and an ambivalent force for a group of people experiencing rapid cultural change. I posit the view that collective norms and practices of Hmong-American kinship constitute a socially constructed, systematic, and adaptable schema that Hmong people recognize mainly through social ties. Hmong notions and patterns of kinship are identifiable and transferable to distant geographical locations. This way of understanding and expressing social relationships was and is imparted in the cultural repertoire of diasporic Hmong people. Hmong kinship has staying power because it is helpful for maintaining Hmong social relations over time and space and because kinship solidarity and networking have served Hmong refugees well in their attempts to adapt to a new country. My interpretation reflects recent epistemological trends in anthropology: from structural causality to people-driven strategies of process and negotiation; from externally produced concepts to variable and culturally defined ones; and from androcentric to gendered interpretation. Lastly, I also include the dimension of generation in my framework because this variable is so important in the study of immigrant and refugee populations but is rarely discussed as a dimension of kinship. In Hmong communities, experiential departures exist between the generations, and hierarchies based on age and status are traumatized. In conclusion, this research demonstrates the need to view immigrant and refugee families in more complex, relational terms by studying actual material and social conditions and by conversing with men and women of varying ages. That being said, what do Hmong refugees believe the future holds for them? What does kinship have to do with their future?

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Hopes and Concerns At the close of each interview, I asked participants to address both their concerns and their hopes for the future. The following themes taken from their responses demonstrate a concern for preserving culture, maintaining ethnic identity, protecting familial and kin cohesiveness, and exploring new opportunities in the United States.

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Maintaining Hmongness Participants often told me that the “loss of culture” was disconcerting. What it means to be Hmong, both in terms of substance and form, is believed to be slipping away. By substance, participants referred to personal identity, codes of conduct, and relationships with others. In terms of form, they mentioned dress, ritual, and language fluency. In Chapter 4, I shared some young peoples’ thoughts on losing their culture and how this dismayed their elders. Knowing that language is preserved in writing and is being taught in universities reassures some Hmong people that it will not be lost entirely, but many parents are still worried that their children may not be able to speak Hmong fluently. The parents of one young woman in this study warned her that when she really needed her culture, she wasn’t going to have it: Well, they tell me that you should speak Hmong because you are Hmong and should learn the Hmong culture because one day you will [want to] be able to use it and you won’t know it. One day you are going to have to pay to learn your own culture and your own Hmong. I realize it now, because I am taking that Hmong [language] class! That comes back to me, I realize what he said was true, because I have to pay to take that Hmong class. Some cultural traditions may be easier to maintain than others. The textile art form, paj ntaub or flower cloth, carries tremendous cultural and personal history. Elaborate needlework is devoted to significant life events such as birth, marriage and death, and stitched story clothes tell historical narratives about the Hmong. The intricate techniques take years to learn and are traditionally passed from

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grandmothers and mothers to the next generation of girls. A young mother told me she thought it was very important to maintain these customs, but she did not know a lot about them herself so she thought the art form would be lost in her family. On the other hand, she said she would be able to teach her children to read, write, and spell Hmong because she was exposed to spoken language at home and learned the written language in college. As luck would have it, just as I am writing this final chapter, a Hmong embroidery class is being offered for the first time in a local school district, alongside a Hmong traditional sports class and a Hmong language class. Learning Hmong cultural traditions and language in the context of formal education is an exciting and promising development in the community and it heralds a new approach to Hmong cultural resiliency. Hmong marriage and funeral ceremonies seem to be flourishing in the United States although certainly the form has changed to fit the demands of the new society. The ceremonies are more compact than in Laos and participants often incorporate traditions or material productions from U.S. or Lao weddings (clothing, food, decorations, etc.). Younger people generally expressed the desire to have a Hmong wedding ceremony out of respect for their parents, while parents wanted their children to have a traditional wedding because it was meaningful and would help the marriage last. Distinct opinions exist regarding bridewealth, not in terms of its purpose and meaning, but because some people feel the costs are getting out of hand (about $7,000 on average in the Wausau area, for example) and because bridewealth causes conflict in families if the couple gets divorced in the American way (as discussed in Chapter 5). Hmong funerals in the U.S. are exceedingly important because they show respect for the dead and their families. On these occasions, community solidarity and reciprocity are quantitatively and qualitatively expressed. Hmong funerals can draw hundreds or even thousands of mourners from all over the country. The ceremony lasts for days (they could last for weeks in Laos), and calls for great hospitality, decorum, and ritual. “In Minnesota,” one man explained, “the funeral home costs alone are between ten and fifteen thousand dollars, but most of those costs are paid by Hmong people, not the family. Other families come help each other; they will come to the

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funeral, bring money, and help. So I think that is important for the people to continue.” Even younger people noted that Hmong funerals were unique: Hmong people help each other a lot and they are there for each other no matter what compared to the American society. Especially at funerals, I see a lot of support from Hmong people, even if they don’t know that Hmong person. They come there and they support them and give them money and that is something that you see. J: Are they virtually strangers?

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Yeah. Sometimes they don’t even know them, they may have never seen that person around, but they still go for respect. And the thing is they all follow them to the cemetery and wait until that person is buried and they go back to the family’s house and make sure the family is okay before they leave. That is just something different. Many Hmong are purchasing their own funeral homes in cities that have a substantial Hmong population so the community can conduct the rituals as they see fit, within the confines of American health and burial codes. Although no one in this study talked extensively about indigenous Hmong health care, researchers in Minnesota have found that cultural attitudes and behaviors still strongly influence how, why, and with whom Hmong-Americans access health care (Managed Health Care Info, July 15, 2002). They found that more than half of the patients interviewed used both “traditional” healers and western physicians for their health care, regardless of their age, gender, or length of time in the United States. Unless the knowledge is constructively passed on to the next generation, it seems the numbers of Hmong-Americans utilizing indigenous health care will certainly diminish. One young woman described how many people her age saw the Hmong culture in the United States rather one-dimensionally. Consulting a Hmong healer seems impractical to some of her peers, and she gets chastised for continuing to follow the ways of her ancestors:

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But most of them [peers] have been saying, “That’s just the Hmong culture.” [Their interpretation] of Hmong culture, it’s flat, there’s nothing else to it. And a lot of my friends … have turned themselves into Christians. When I talk about going back [home to do healing ceremonies] they’ll be like, “Why are you doing that? You know, it doesn’t help at all. Like with sickness—you should just make an appointment at the doctor.”

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The societal pressures to advance one’s career and increase material wealth or status stand as obstacles to learning language, spending quality time with elders and with children, and in general, just having the time to learn customs, folk tales, and art forms. The same young woman quoted in the previous passage spoke about the pressures to conform to American society: I see the Hmong going out into the world and being so Americanized. They are starting to own their own businesses, you know. I think in a few years, the generation now, when they have their own children, they are going to know less about the Hmong culture. And that generation when they have their own offspring, they are not going to be able to teach it on. They will be focused on how to make a living and how to adapt to that culture, how to speak the language, how to understand how the culture works, that they are not going to focus on how their own culture was. Most certainly, in my opinion, Hmong community enclaves are necessary to support language retention, Hmong funeral homes, Hmong artistic traditions, and religious specialists. Moreover, Hmong youth must seize the initiative to learn the traditions before the bearers of the cultural knowledge are gone. Reaching out to elders will require special initiative in a societal context that seems to devalue their skills and knowledge. Because of the second generation’s desire to fit in and do well according to American standards, it will take soul searching and effort for young Hmong immigrants to reinvigorate their first culture in ways that have meaning in a new societal context and then to

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pass it on to their children. One woman explained how difficult this effort can be:

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I think that a lot of [Hmong] families now are so Americanized, even the older ones, the parents, they come here and get Americanized and they don’t teach their children. I mean, a lot of times, when we do meet each other, we are all Hmong, but then when it comes to understanding what Hmong means or what the culture means, they are just blank, they don’t know. And you know that is because their parents are so Americanized, too. But it is also the same thing when it comes back to you being Americanized, and your parents being culturally traditional, and you don’t want to be [like them]. If Hmong continue to practice kin clustering as they have in the past, it creates a context for enculturation; cultural traditions and the Hmong language can be transferred to the next generation. If Hmong extended families break apart to form nuclear family households, less opportunity exists for Hmong children to learn culture and language from their elders. If kin groups separate and move to distant cities to follow their careers, Hmong communities, cultural rituals, and traditions are less likely to flourish in the future. Lastly, even though interethnic marriage is growing more common in Hmong communities across the U.S., many people in this study expressed preference for ethnic group endogamy because they believe Hmong marriages are more stable and the couple and their families will be more compatible. A consequence of Hmong ethnic endogamy that was not discussed by participants, but that is also important for the future, is that HmongHmong marriages also increase cultural homogeneity and promote cultural continuity.

Community Fewer Hmong people are moving within the United States; they are settling down in several cities and regions, particularly in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California. This demographic trend combined with

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increasing household wealth is resulting in a surge in Hmong home ownership. For example, sixty to seventy percent of the Hmong in Milwaukee have purchased their own homes (Lo 2001). Investment in Hmong communities through home and business ownership will last for several generations and heralds an improved context for cultural retention, ethnic solidarity, and Hmong political representation. The numbers in the 2000 census show that Hmong families are nearly 50 times more likely than whites to be living in households of seven or more, which can include grandparents and other extended family (Leslie 2002:14A). More importantly, the extended family household has held steady over several decades, indicating it may endure for several generations. Wayne Carroll, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who has studied Hmong demographics, predicts Hmong families will eventually decrease in size, but he is surprised by the staying power of large, extended families (Leslie 2002). Most young people I interviewed said they wanted to stay near their families even though it would limit their job choices. Young men and even some young women told me they were obligated to take care of their parents. In the United States, a young Hmong woman may occasionally return home to help her natal family if her brothers are unable or unwilling to take the responsibility. One young woman said her brothers were “screw-offs” and were too involved with their “homeboys and having fun” to care for their parents. Since she was the most responsible sibling, her parents were counting on her. Another young woman told me her family situation was enormously difficult and stressful. She knew her mother and nine siblings needed her at home because her biological father died and her stepfather and mother were now divorced, but she fought so badly with her mother that she wanted to stay away from home and did not intend to move back anytime soon. Hmong refugees have made significant progress in adapting to American life while at the same time managing to maintain a sense of ethnic identity and solidarity. From the information gathered in indepth interviews and participant observation, it appears kinship has enabled many Hmong families to be successful in rebuilding their lives and their kin networks, and to move ahead (by mainstream American standards) in many ways. Significant numbers of Hmong refugees and

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their children have finished high school, obtained advanced degrees, reached self-sufficiency, landed professional jobs, and cleared a trail for young people. Of course, this progress had not always been easy or conflict-free. Concerns having to do with adaptation and the loss of their culture are plentiful, but efforts to maintain identity and culture are also widespread. The Hmong refugee experience in the United States does provide lessons for continued Hmong self-determination and for creating better policies and institutions to serve uprooted people.

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Lessons Learned Given the growth of socially applied ethnography and the proliferation of ethnic sensitivity training in human service organizations, educational institutions, and other formal institutions, one might anticipate ample cross-fertilization between anthropology and the applied social sciences. As changes in the ethnic composition of the United States proliferate, numerous cultural issues such as religion and cosmology, beliefs about health and illness, gender roles, and death and dying have emerged in the social work literature, but surprisingly little constructive synergism between cultural anthropology and human services exists. The management of contemporary human, educational, and judicial services for refugees and immigrants is a particularly critical topic. People are on the move worldwide, and whether through political or economic strife or voluntary relocation, it is expected immigrants and refugees will continue to cross borders at record numbers as long as wars, acts of discrimination, and economic injustices persist. Migration often causes hardship for the refugees and immigrants and for the countries that take them in. Initially, culture shock and adjustment issues may seem overwhelming to refugees and their newly adopted communities, especially if both parties have been ill-prepared for the new situation, as was the case with the waves of Southeast Asian refugees in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The effects of refugee dislocation can last for decades and are complicated by other adjustment issues and structural forces that are difficult to overcome. Sociologist Jeremy Hein points to discrimination as a major factor

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affecting the adjustment of Hmong and other Southeast Asian refugees. He writes:

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…international migration and racial and ethnic hierarchies produce distinct forms of inequality: the unequal allocation of social rewards and problems. Migration can lead to inequality between newcomers and minority and majority groups (Hein 1994:285). These sorts of adjustment problems may not be addressed because their onset occurs after the designated reception period where funding may have been available to help with language, housing, health screening, transportation, etc. Service providers, educators, and other people who regularly work with immigrants and refugees may be unprepared to deal with the complexity, longitude, and sheer magnitude of adaptation issues. The need for cross cultural understanding and applied research is clear because many of the problems, for immigrants and for their hosts, are rooted in culture. In particular, many social workers and social work scholars now advocate for more effective services for refugees that match the specific religious, psychological, linguistic, and social organization characteristics of each group (Canda & Phaobtong 1992, Hirayama & Hirayama 1988, Sanders 1978). If educators, health professionals, and social service practitioners believe in a philosophy of cultural and ethnic pluralism and want to make their services more effective, they must utilize intercultural skills and adopt culturally responsive goals and approaches to meet the needs of their clients. Drawing from what participants told me about their adaptation experiences, I provide the following suggestions for building more culturally sensitive and successful human policies and practices.

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Find Out What Helps Families Adapt To Stressful Events This study demonstrates that maintenance of cultural values and practices can serve as a means to promote cultural and human survival in tumultuous times. If a people believe they “know the way to be human,” it does little good to disparage their methods or their ways of coping; in fact, encouraging assimilation may cause more frustration for the group and even promote hostility between refugees and the institutions designed to assist them. Ground-up policies should be developed that aid in promoting self-determination as well as selfsufficiency. Providing ways for indigenous systems to be maintained or integrated with other systems may be a desirable option to consider. The use of indigenous mutual assistance organizations and non-profit agencies, for example, creates specialized services that might not be available through government social service organizations (Le-Doux & Stephens 1992). A progressive effort in St. Paul, Minnesota is underway that offers one example of how American family law professionals and timehonored Hmong conflict resolution practitioners may find common ground through cross-cultural education.32 A workshop conducted in 2001 brought attorneys, interpreters, and Hmong elders together at Hamline University School of Law to address family conflict and resolution (Hayes Taylor 2001). At this state-certified family mediation training, Hmong elders were asked to participate, to learn more about American family law and mediation, and to start building bridges. This was a first–of-its-kind effort designed to explore ways to foster understanding between different, and often opposing, systems for handling marriage and divorce. The goal of Hmong family-mediated conflict resolution is to keep the couple, their family, and their kin groups together. Support and intervention from kin members is customary. Elders, who are typically all male, listen to the vested parties, decide who is at fault, and then determine what course of action will help rectify the situation. American mediation methods, which are 32

Another example of a community based initiative is the non-profit, Hmong 18 Council of St. Paul that works on settling family disputes through traditional family-based mediation.

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still not widespread, help families reach a resolution on their own, with support from non-kin professionals. Mediation and divorce in the United States since the 1960s are based on a no-fault principle. No one is required to have proof of wrongdoing and either party can initiate a divorce, even if the spouse wants to stay married. What I find thought-provoking about Hmong conflict resolution is that it is very similar to goals established by 1960s reformers in the United States who wanted to promote marriage reconciliation and at the same time, improve the court’s handling of divorce. They called for the creation of comprehensive court-run reconciliation services to help partners work on keeping their marriage intact. In 1969, California enacted no-fault divorce, minus the marriage saving devices called for by the reformers, calling them too expensive (Parejko 2002). In the 1960s, before the no-fault transformation, the divorce rate was 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women, it peaked in 1980 with a rate of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 wives, and in the year 1998, the rate was 19.5 per 1,000 married women (The National Marriage Project, Rutgers University 2000). Hmong conflict resolution can be intrusive and even judgmental in comparison with mainstream American methods, but it is free and does have certain success in keeping families together, even in the United States. Of course, Hmong marriage resolution does not stand apart from a socio-cultural milieu; divorce is still viewed with stigma in the Hmong community. When Hmong couples part, from my observation, the individuals are often very bitter and their families suffer. No reliable statistics are available on divorce rates for Hmong couples because many marriages are not registered through formal governmental channels, and Hmong are lumped in census and survey data with countless other Asian groups, but we do know from anecdotal evidence that Hmong divorce rates are considerably lower than the national average. What makes Hmong marriage relationships more resilient than non-Hmong marriages? Stigma, kin counseling for reconciliation, and individual forbearance are possible answers, but a thorough, cross-cultural comparison of marriage attitudes and patterns could provide useful answers. More efforts should be made to integrate elements from the American system and the Hmong kin-based system

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to ameliorate family disputes, repair marriages, and make less acrimonious divorce settlements. A key question to ask in the development of any human service policy or project is, “Whose interests are served?” Funding for refugee services is often provided on the basis of the government’s perception of the refugees’ needs versus the refugees’ own felt needs. Policies such as these have been called elitist (i.e. Le-Doux and Stephens 1992) and I would add, ethnocentric. What we learn from the Hmong refugee experience is that institutional preoccupation with economic selfsufficiency and self-reliance can overpower other integral problems such as family reunification, intergenerational conflict, and mental health support—problems which are still lingering in Hmong communities. Rugged individualism and self-reliance are just one way to be human, and those who have had to struggle against adversity often overcome their situation by a reliance on their own group and their own value system. Educators, human service providers and others who work for the improvement of the human condition in cross-cultural environments need to set goals in collaboration with members of the community and with their clients and then seek to find the means to reach those goals by asking for input from the clients themselves, based on their individual situations, and their interpretation of their cultural norms and values. One recommendation is to have clients develop their own list of available resources to help them reach the agreed-upon goal. I hesitate to label this list “indigenous assets,” but it would be a list of assets belonging to that individual or family. A second suggestion is for agencies and institutions to develop improved relationships with ethnic communities following the lead of Hamline University professionals who sought to reach out to Hmong elders concerning family law. Professionals can draw from a wide array of alternatives and resources if they work more effectively within and across communities. Youth and family centers, churches, residential organizations, political associations, non-profit groups, and professional organizations may be outward, formal manifestations of family and community strength. However, as this study illustrates, it is extremely important to acknowledge the mundane sources of everyday support that empower people and the communities they reside in. Family and kin networks and extended families compose a valuable,

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although often unacknowledged, resource in Hmong-American communities.

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Avoid Generalizations People working across cultural borders must take into account both the individuals and their entire social environment. Too frequently refugee culture is viewed by outsiders as a static force that can be understood if one goes back in history or to the country of origin, or reads a book, to see the “true” or “authentic” culture. This has been called the “ethnic cookbook style” of cross-cultural training—i.e., teach these cultural ingredients and, voilà, the students are prepared and able to understand the actions and behaviors of individuals from that culture. While preferable to no training or understanding at all, the cookbook approach does have its shortcomings. First, differences obviously exist within cultural groups. For example, not all Hmong people rely on kinship networks and not all Hmong parents are reluctant to brag about their children’s accomplishments. As one woman described Hmong people in the United States, “In the end, I think that we all think alike, only differently.” Second, all cultures are dynamic; they are always in the process of being reshaped and reinterpreted so that a people’s cultural schema helps conform to meet the needs they experience in a particular time and space. To begin to understand the role that kinship plays in Hmong society, it is essential to place kinship in the proper context—as a powerful, collectively held, cultural institution that informs Hmong people because it lies at the very heart of Hmong social life. At the same time, the cultural institution of Hmong kinship is not a monolithic force; it is people-driven, and always in the process of change and negotiation. Developing mutually reliant relationships with relatives, as Hmong immigrants demonstrate, can provide individuals with abilities they may not have on their own. While recognizing that Hmong kin relationships are a valuable resource for many Hmong people, I want to emphasize the strategies Hmong people choose are situational and also dependent on political, economic, and social contexts. In many cases, networks of relatives have come to serve as a socio-cultural resource, but this is not always the case.

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If cross-cultural training occurs, participants should be made well aware of cultural change, intra-group variation, and the continuum of social factors that influence any community such as poverty, political representation, and education levels. Inviting a cross-section of speakers from the community to participate in professional development training is an effective way to demonstrate cultural continuities and incongruities and I would argue, far more effective than the ethnic cookbook approach.

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The Culturally-Neutral Approach Culturally-neutral policy and practice may sound like an oxymoron to most anthropologists. I first heard the term from Mai, a HmongAmerican marriage and family therapist. Initially, I was dubious of its feasibility, but as I listened to Mai discuss how it might be applied in social policy and practice, I began to see its built-in value. She was describing how her discipline and profession were culturally loaded with pervasive Euro-American norms and values. As the only ethnic minority in her graduate classes, Mai said she was often asked to speak for all people of color. She described some graphic examples of cultural snafus she observed during her graduate practicum training. In one therapy session, a white American marriage and family therapist asked a Hmong client to tell one of his children how much he loved that child. The father told the child, “I work 65 hours a week for you.” The counselor was shocked and dismayed by what she perceived as an insensitive response. She evidently was not aware that this father was expressing his love. In Hmong society, love is measured in actions rather than words (Culhane-Pera, et. al. 2003). Working for the benefit of one’s family, caring for siblings, or tending to sick family members are all important expressions of love. In another therapy session, Mai observed as a white counselor advised a parent to, “Tell your child you forgive him and hug him.” Seemingly unaware that physical demonstration of emotion is culturally variable, the counselor pushed her perception of forgiveness and made her clients uncomfortable. The chronic ethnocentrism in Mai’s graduate program caused her to be very frustrated, but she said she eventually came up with a strategy for her peers—be as culturally neutral as possible. In

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retrospect, Mai suggested the therapist working with the Hmong father could ask, “How might you let your son know you care for him?” Or, even better yet, “How does your family let its members know they are cared for?” Rather than asking a client to demonstrate affection in a way that might be uncomfortable or atypical, the second counselor could have taken a culturally-neutral approach and asked the parent to demonstrate understanding to his or her child. This tactic is not the same as a culturally-blind approach, which assumes universalities exist and disregards cultural differences. Nor does this approach assume professionals with enough multi-cultural training can be experts in cross-cultural counseling situations. The culturally-neutral approach suggested by Mai asks professionals to be mindful of their own cultural perspectives, and to recognize the cultural underpinnings of their discipline and the institutions they work in, and to seek effective means to heal human relationships that are initiated by clients.

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Focus on the Positive Ethnic minority families in the United States all too often are portrayed in popular literature and by social scientists as unstable and dysfunctional. Murders and suicides in the Hmong community make headline news, but readers rarely hear about family reunification, stable marriages, and time-honored family support systems. Even Hmong scholars often fail to present a balanced picture of Hmong families. Fungchatou T. Lo (2001), Associate Professor of Social Work, assesses the socio-economic progress of Hmong people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in his book, The Promised Land: Socioeconomic Reality of the Hmong People. In his discussion of Hmong family problems, he laments Hmong refugees have fallen into the traps of adultery, divorce, and gambling in America. Concerning adultery, he proceeds to describe three incidents all involving cheating wives. In two cases, Hmong women caught cheating were killed by their husbands who then took their own lives as well. Lo (2001:200) comments about the third incident, “the Milwaukee woman ran off to live with her Internet lover and left her three small children behind with her husband without any concern for their well-being.” In Laos, the children in most instances

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of marital separation and/or divorce would stay with the father’s side of the family. The twist that seems to upset Lo is a culturally “new” phenomenon. Hmong women are increasingly free to have adulterous affairs. Lo falls short of describing men’s extramarital affairs in the United States and the complex, gendered adjustments that are occurring in the United States. Views of adultery for both men and women are changing. In Laos, all extramarital affairs initiated by a married woman were adulterous. Men’s extramarital affairs were not considered adulterous in Laos unless they involved a married woman; an unmarried woman could always be brought in to his home as a second wife. In any case, the man involved in an affair would pay a fine to his lover’s natal family or husband. Hmong women in Laos who cheated on their husbands would likely be divorced, scorned, and isolated. In the United States, women are viewed as equals under the law, and even if they initiate the extramarital affair and divorce, they often collect alimony and keep the children. The number of women engaging in extramarital and adulterous affairs is thus compounded by the new legal context in the United States. Lo fails to discuss how Hmong men’s affairs can also tear families apart in the United States, but what is even more disappointing about Lo’s study is that it fails to give equal attention to stable Hmong families, secure marriages, and fidelity in Hmong communities, which would provide a more balanced, realistic picture. It has been my attempt in this study to interpret a broader picture and to ask questions about what promotes improved family relationships, brighter economic futures, and stability in Hmong communities, as well as to limn the problems refugee families experience. This study demonstrates how many problems have been avoided by using supportive kin networks and by practicing family role adaptability, reciprocity, and delayed gratification. What lessons could be gleaned if, instead of asking, “What’s wrong in Hmong communities,” researchers and observers asked, “What’s going right in Hmong communities?”

Conclusion Exploring the role of kinship and its meaning in the lives of HmongAmericans tells us about a people’s efforts to overcome great adversity,

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armed with their own brand of cultural resiliency and flexibility. My research, conducted against a backdrop of cultural change and reflection, revealed generational and gendered experiences as they relate to kinship. The personal stories shared in this text are only a small reflection of the wealth of ideas and discussion going on in Hmong-American homes and communities every day across the United States. Certainly, this study does not satisfy systemic questions about the effects of religious change or the influence of the political economy on Hmong refugee lives, which are vital dimensions of social change in Hmong-American communities. Quite honestly, I have as many new questions about kinship, gender, and generation now as I did when I first launched this project, but today I am more aware of how interactions and relationships formed with people in the course of doing fieldwork are inspirational, eminent, and powerful. I am forever grateful to those mentors who made this study possible. Sutty, the main actor and historian turned anthropologist, in Ursula Le Guin’s (2001) futuristic novel, The Telling, captures the spirit I hope to share as I close this chapter with a reflection on what, if anything, we can learn and share from our ethnographic endeavors. She says her mentors taught her this: “To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune. A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than a suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than a conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance” (Le Guin 2001:90-91). This dance has left me with a stronger belief in the power of human experience. With that thought in mind, I hope the stories and experiences shared in this text will generate continual information gathering and inquiry into the many ways to be human.

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Index assimilation, 34, 84, 152, 166 bridewealth, 1, 14, 131, 159 loan from bank, 90 negotiations, 129 caj ces. See lineage children as caregivers, 65, 114 childcare, 134 discipline, 102 importance, 51 opium overdoses, 65 school experiences, 106 socialization, 112, 118 clans, 10, 47 origin legend, 49 table of names, 47 coj dab. See religion community, 24, 162 concentration camps, 62 demographics, 33, 163 dialect groups, 29, 46 discrimination, 55, 164 divorce, 4, 143, 145, 167 elderly, 41, 57, See intergenerational relationships filial respect, 101 ethnic enclaves, 24, 39, 90, 99, 161 family, 21, 54 definition, 12

focusing on the positive, 171 hierarchy, 102, 103 role adaptability, 65, 69 role changes, 57, 100 fertility rates. See large families fobby, 123 funerals, 159 gender. See women, men socialization, 114 generation. See younger generation, intergenerational relationships genocide, 36 health care, 160 Hin Heup massacre, 62 history colonization of Laos, 34 Hmong, 33, 34 Southeast Asian conflict, 35, 60 intergenerational relationships, 99, 100 kin networks, 30, 66, 76, 163, 168 adjustment to market economy, 89 aid in adaptation, 21, 154 and immigration, 84 191

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192

economic influences, 93 enculturation, 162 gendered perspectives, 156 in refugee camps, 67 lessening influence, 93 mapping relatedness, 48 rebuilding, 72 refugee flight, 63 kinship ambivalence, 19 and diasporic peoples, 19 and Hmong political organization, 60 core values of Hmong, 69 definition, 8 durability, 54 feminist perspectives, 17, 156 Hmong conceptualizations, 9–14 Hmong social structure, 46–50 Hmong terminology, 48 reckoning, 56 social ties, 10 theory, 14, 156 kwvtij, 12, 76 language retention, 55, 158, 161 large families, 88, 114, 125 legend origin of the Hmong people, 49 lineage, 11, 50 living standards, 41 marriage, 14, 52, 122 Americanized weddings, 7

Index

as rite of passage, 7, 130 catch-hand, 4, 53 ceremonies, 159 conflict resolution, 147, 166, 167 cross-cousin marriage, 51 customs, 7 early marriage, 53, 125 endogamy, 162 family considerations, 127 importance of, 50, 103 infidelity, 142, 171 intra-group endogamy, 122 marital conflict, 136, 137 plural. See polygyny Mee Moua, 43 men, 51, 116 adultery, 172 in kin groups, 10, 12 obligations to parents, 163 roles in community, 135 roles in family, 135 Menomonie, Wisconsin, 21, 24 mutual assistance associations, 25, 43, 74, 91 neejtsa, 12, 73 Pathet Lao atrocities, 62 plural marriage. See polygyny political organization, 43 polygyny, 27, 53, 128 population. See demographics poverty, 41, 126 public assistance, 40, 41, 85 refugee camps, 37 conditions, 67 refugees, 59

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193

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Index

2004 arrivals, 39 from Indochina, 39 hardships, 164 recent numbers, 59 resettlement, 39 U.N. definition, 59 religion, 44 and culture, 98 and kinship, 55, 56 Christianity, 45, 56 Christianity and kin alliances, 95 church as family, 96 importance of ethnic enclaves, 98 religious change, 95 txiv neeb, 44 young people and family rituals, 97 repatriation, 38 resettlement, 71 secondary migration, 23, 39, 72 self-sufficiency, 39, 40 limiting factors, 87 policy of refugee assimilation, 84 social divisions. See dialect groups social work, 164, 171 sponsorship, 69, 85 and self sufficiency, 86 tsev neeg, 13, See family txiv neeb. See religion United States evacuation of military personnel, 61

pledge of commitment to Hmong, 61 withdrawal from Vietnam War, 61 Vang Pao, 60, 62, 68, 72, 91 war, 33 broken promises, 37 Hmong involvement, 35 Ho Chi Minh Trail, 35 human cost, 36, 64 U.S. alliance, 35 welfare. See public assistance widows, 65, 128, 145 women, 52, 92, 111 adultry, 172 changes with immigration, 156 daughters-in-law, 134 in combat zones, 60 in kin groups, 10, 12 obligations to parents, 163 polygyny, 53 premarital sex and infidelity, 119 waiting to marry, 118 within kin groups, 113 xeem. See clans yim. See family younger generation, 57, 92 adolescent problems, 101 crime and gang involvement, 105 living between two cultures, 104 retention of language and religion, 98 second generation revolt, 99

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