A Laotian Immigrant Bucks Cultural Taboos to Help Hmong Women
September 6, 2007 | Read Time: 6 minutes
In 1976, when I was 8 years old, my family and I came to the United States as refugees from Laos. We are Hmong,
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which is one of the ethnic groups in Laos that acted as allies of the Americans during the Vietnam War.
We lived in an area that saw the Communist forces moving arms from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. Consequently the U.S. Army recruited the Hmong to act as a proxy army, actually fighting the Communists who were infiltrating Laos from Vietnam. My father, who was a teacher in Laos, was recruited to fight, and he spent time in the United States in 1972, receiving officer and language training.
When the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, the Hmong were seen as traitors and forced out of Laos. Because my father had been an American ally, the U.S. Department of State airlifted us out, and we landed in a refugee camp in Thailand. My father decided that we should go to the United States. Our first stop was Hawaii.
So my family and I had a very different situation than most Hmong families. We did not see any of the atrocities that my clients at the Hmong Women’s Heritage Association remember and still talk about, and my father knew the language, so we had somewhat of an easier time. But it was still very, very difficult, especially for my mother, who didn’t speak English.
For us kids, Honolulu was great: The weather was similar to what we were used to. There were mango and palm trees and a lot of Asian faces.
By the early 1980s, a lot of Hmong refugees had relocated to the mainland. We moved to Orange County, California, where my father worked for the Department of Welfare.
I had a unique upbringing and was sandwiched between two older brothers and two younger ones. I wanted to be like my father and my brothers and get an education, and I let my parents know that they were going to have a hard time trying to make me take on the role of a traditional Hmong girl. I just wasn’t going that route, and there were plenty of challenges from my parents for me wanting to do something so untraditional as go to college.
After I got my degrees in business and education from California State University at Sacramento, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. During college, I had also been working at the Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance. The county has the third-largest Hmong population in the United States, and my caseload was made up predominantly of Hmong families. There were a lot of needs with this population that weren’t being met.
So in 1993, a colleague of mine, Maycho Lo, and I began forming an association that would help people do more than just fill out a form.
We wanted to work with the school system, assist when there were crises in the families, help with mental-health issues, deal with chronic health problems, finding employment, and so forth. And because Maycho and I were bilingual and bicultural, people started coming to us for everything.
Because our culture is very patriarchal, we knew that a lot of things stifled women’s voices. For us, as young mothers trying to build our careers, we felt we wanted to address the things in our culture that held women back. We wanted to form an organization to empower women to speak up and do things, such as go to school or learn how to drive.
On the other hand, we wanted to keep the good things about our culture, such as the importance of family and the wisdom and respect we feel for our elders, but to add new values and new beliefs. Consequently, we named our group the Hmong Women’s Heritage Association.
Of course, from the beginning we knew we were going up against the established norm. We had death threats, and my name was absolutely dragged through the mud. Many men did not like our message, that we are here to help the Hmong women with their needs and dreams and hopes — whether that meant not having 10 kids or going to school — and become productive members of society.
Our mission is very broad and very much focused on health. We knew from the beginning that access to counseling was going to be very important because these women were dealing with very different norms and values than they had grown up with. We knew that these women who came to America suddenly had opportunities that were going to lead to conflicts, whether that was with their husbands, their parents, or their children. Even the idea of counseling was very new to this community. We had to work to find a culturally sensitive way to deal with the issues that arise.
The association provides a range of other services, such as our family resource center, which offers interpretation, counseling, and crisis intervention.
When it comes to health care, we provide education — how to navigate the system and access care. We do a lot of partnering with the Asian American Network for Cancer Awareness, Research, and Training regarding cancer education. For instance, according to the California Cancer Registry, Hmong women’s No. 1 killer is cervical cancer, and we’re trying to address this with education and access to clinics for Pap tests.
The third component of what we do is our youth program. We implemented a Hmong Women’s Circle, which is a school-based program for girls between the ages of 12 and 19.
This group tries to address the needs of Hmong adolescents. We developed a curriculum that looks at the girls’ values and at issues that affect young people, such as how to deal with depression and how to avoid sexual predators. The response to this program was so great that we have been asked to pilot a similar program for boys.
When we started out, it was only Maycho and myself. Today I have a full-time staff of 14 people and an annual operating budget of $800,000. Our funding comes from federal grants and foundations, such as the California Endowment, which has been a godsend, the California Wellness Foundation, and the James Irvine Foundation.
One of the things I’ve learned is that one person can change many lives. When I hold a workshop and only a few women attend, I don’t get discouraged. I know that these few women will take this information back to many, many others.
Much of our success is due to women putting their hearts out there for others — word gets around, and this ripple effect will continue to spread and spread.
