Hmong Thesis Statement

Being a Hmong-American in the United States was hard. Growing up in a community that was full of Americans, and being in a private school in my early years, (consisting mostly of Americans and little diversity) was difficult. In that kind of environment, I never saw each person differently. The characteristics that I saw were our skin color, and another distinction that I saw was our religious and cultural backgrounds. I started to lose touch of my own culture and identity as a Hmong-American girl. My family told me that in the stages of my toddler years, I used to be good at speaking my native tongue until I started school.

Richard Rodriguez article, “The Chinese in All of Us (1944)”, argues that many different cultures have contributed to making up the American culture. Rodriguez backs up this claim by sharing

Love exists as an emotion that continues to be challenging to comprehend, but once one feels it, it seems problematic to let it go. Kao Kalia Yang wrote the memoir The Latehomecomer, which tells of the toils the Hmong people faced in their excursion from Laos to the United States. Yang uses the story of her parents to convey the sufferings of the Hmong people and their journey. Her parents make a fitting example of a typical Hmong family fighting to survive and find love in a time of war. Although Kao Kalia’s parents met in unfortunate circumstances and had no home to live in, love kept them and their family together, even when times seemed their darkest.

     The Hmong had trouble adapting to American life. With no driver’s license or bank account, they had to make a living doing whatever they could. Not knowing the language in a foreign land doesn’t help either. The Hmong women adapted much more quickly than the men did because of the fact that they interacted more with English-speaking people. While the men were at work, the women were spending time interacting. The Hmong men also refused to change more that the women did. This shift of power caused a lot of changes in Hmong households. What even caused more of a power shift was the fact that the Hmong children learned about the culture easier than the women did. Instead of the father having control over the family like it was back in Southeast Asia, the children now had the upper edge. The children could communicate, interact and even drive with Americans. You could see a 16-year-old Hmong

What do you think of traditional Hmong birth practices (pp. 3-5)? Compare them to the techniques used when Lia was born (p. 7). How do Hmong and American birth practices differ?

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, her American Dreams, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

3. Modernization has affected the Kung in regards to gender roles and relations in some very interesting ways. I was not surprised to learn that the Kung are a predominantly

The history of the Hmong people is one of the more predominant factors in the formation of the Hmong culture. Through all the fighting and migrating that the Hmong had to

The Hmongs are an ethnic race, originally migrated from Eurasia and settled in river plains of China. The Chinese hated them, calling them ‘Miao’ or ‘Meo’ meaning barbarians and tried to gain mastery over them but the Hmongs wanting to be left alone began to migrate. By the beginning of the 19th century, half a million Hmongs had migrated to Indo-China. Disliking persecution, some settled in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. They detest being ordered or bullied, do not like to lose, are fighters who would rather die than surrender. Though they never possessed a country of their own, they have marched through the pages of history as free men desiring personal liberty. The Lee family travelled to Merced, California along with other Hmongs who fled to Laos in 1975, when their country became a prey to communism.

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, there are many different intercultural misunderstandings. A Hmong girl’s life was forever changed because of these misunderstandings and some things could have easily been avoided, had each side taken the time to better understand the other.

As the immigrant population currently projected to overtake latinxs and hispanics as largest group of residents in the United States of America, Asian Americans have shown their will to survive in a way that many groups have not, and that is by banding together in order to achieve the life they deserve. Taking the overgeneralization of pan-ethnicity and using it as a device for increased numbers and support for the causes of a group of people who otherwise may not have much to do with each other, is a testament to how vulnerable they must have felt as well as how successful they have managed to be many aspects of progress. What I have gained from this course is the understanding that at the root of ethnic studies and the Asian American community is the “for us, by us” sentiment that contributed to the blurred lines between the different part of their communities as social, political and cultural, structures, collectives and groups which came out of an obligation and necessity to protect those immigrants and their future generations from a country which has always pushed European superiority in all aspects of society.

The Hmong community resettled both in America and France proved their efforts to maintain a collective memory about their homeland and ethnic consciousness while facing the difficulties of being integrated in a new culture. As a cultural minority, the Hmong of Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Hmong community of Aubigny-sur-Nère, France are two successful examples of said integration. These two large Hmong community, while immersed in a new environment, succeed to maintain their own culture, inherent to their identities,

Starting off this class I too shared the popular western perspective on Oceanic culture, but it has been changed to due the influx of knowledge I have gained from material covered in the class. I agree with Malcolm X’s contribution in the activist world. He declares that the issues in communities should not be called “civil rights” rather “human rights” because the term creates a cooperative world wide effort to find a solution. Although I am not of Pacific descent, I too have drawn out similar misconceptions western countries have implemented on my culture. Hau’Ofa’s essay has encouraged me to analyze any production from the west that is portraying an aspect of Oceanic life and think if the community is accurately being represented.

I was fortunate to sit down and interview with Juhi from Gujarat, India and Nico from the Philippines. Both interviews were in person and recorded on separate days. I took notes as they answered my questions and made sure they were comfortable with answering the questions I asked before we conducted the interview. Before I asked about the opinions they have on their culture, I asked about their culture’s values, food, language, and traditions to get a better understanding of their culture. Following my introductory questions, I began to ask Juhi and Nico about what they like, and if applicable, what they dislike about their culture. In addition to these questions, I also asked them questions that focused on their perspective of how others may view their culture; how they view their own culture, and things they would like to see improve within their culture. Juhi and Nico trusted me with their most honest opinions on their own culture and the cultures that surround them. The insightful answers they gave on how they view their culture explained how there personal identity affected their cultural identity.

As a prerequisite for Culture Interview Assignment for my Sociology class, I interviewed Xolo Thulani Msomi, a sophomore at Westminster College on the 1st of February 2016. He comes from the Zulu culture, a South African Culture. Xolo grew up in a small family – his parents and his older brother. Xolo traveled to India for his high school, where the students came from 60 different nations and lived there for two years. Not only Indian culture, but Xolo also got exposed to other 60 different cultures from all over the world which provided him with an opportunity to understand and have perspectives on various cultural values and ways of life. However, I have only gathered the information about Zulu Culture through the detailed interview.