We don’t talk about what happened to Hmong people as a genocide, because Hmong are often bunched with other Asian groups. Due to their involvement in the war,Īnd are still killed by the government to this day. left Vietnam, Laos and other parts of Southeast Asia after the war in the 1970s, they left many Hmong, Cambodian and Vietnamese people helpless to the communist regimes. Hmong history is a history of war, genocide and displacement. Thao will graduate this week with a bachelor’s in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies, and a minor in global public health. Through different Asian American and ethnic studies classes, and conversations with other like-minded students and professors, I was exposed to the history and trauma behind the intergenerational conflict that impacts Hmong American families to this day. And it wasn’t until I came to Berkeley that I began to really understand him. I didn’t know why he didn’t understand that. He was always very aggressive, and I didn’t fit into the gender roles and that mold of a submissive young Hmong woman. In high school, I feel like I even resented him for a while. For instance, in Hmong families, once the woman marries, they no longer have family outside of their husband’s side of the family. A traditional Hmong man, he practiced a lot of patriarchal traditions that I just didn’t understand. (Photo courtesy of Julie Thao)Īs I got older, my father and I became more distant. Here, her extended family shows support at her high school graduation, in spring 2017, when she was selected as valedictorian of Valley High School in Sacramento, Calif. Thao said her family have given her strength through her academic career. He would always stress how important getting a good education was. I feel like he was trying to show me how much he was struggling, working long hours driving day and night. Sometimes he would talk about what life was like in Laos, but as a little kid, I really wasn’t as curious about it at the time. I remember taking long road trips with my dad when he would drive to the Bay Area or other parts of California. My mom assembled window blinds, and my father worked as a truck driver transporting shipments across the state. My mother would also knit and sellĪ few years later, they moved to Sacramento to settle down where most of my siblings were born.
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They grew fruits and vegetables to sell at markets to make a living. They came to America in 1980 and moved to Seattle. My parents met while staying in a refugee camp in Thailand, after escaping the war in Laos. Big families and parents that were refugees. I had a lot of Hmong friends in Sacramento that I could relate to because we all had similar households. I didn’t know at the time, but that was really my first introduction into hearing about Hmong stories and folklores. We didn’t really read books at bedtime, but my grandparents would tell us Hmong folk tales about tigers and mythic creatures that like to eat human flesh. The older kids would take care of the younger kids while our parents were out working long hours, helping cook meals, do school work and put each other to sleep. He is my biggest supporter.” (Photo courtesy of Julie Thao) He would attend all my school promotions. Thao (right) and her sister Linda (left) in kindergarten. In a lot of ways, we grew up in a typical Hmong American household. I, myself, was born and raised in South Sacramento, the middle child of 10 kids. We have a unique and nuanced history that others can learn from. But it also made me want to make sure people know more about the experiences of Hmong people. When I told him I was Hmong, he said, “Oh, well, I don’t know what that is.” And he walked away.Īs a first-generation Hmong American, that moment really made me feel invisible. To cut to the chase, I asked if he was referring to my ethnicity. “No, I mean, where are you really from?” the student responded. As a freshman at UC Berkeley, I remember attending an outreach event where a fellow student asked me, “Where are you from?” withdrew their support from Laos, ceding control to communist forces.Ī lot of people don’t even know that the Hmong are from Laos and group us into other Asian ethnicities. Tens of thousands of Hmong died in this war, and thousands more were displaced after the U.S. Secret War,” when America’s CIA used Hmong people in Laos to fight against communism in the area, during the Vietnam War.
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Archival photo of anti-communist Hmong troops in Laos in 1961.