Novelist weaves together Hmong cultural tale
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Lia Lee dies; daughter of Hmong refugees changed American views of medicine
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Foua Yang crumpled in tears on the staircase in her south Sacramento home, just feet from the empty hospital bed where her daughter Lia Lee lived most of her life. “I’m deeply saddened that Lia’s no longer of this world, I love her very much,” said Yang, clutching a picture of Ms. Lee as a lively 4-year-old in traditional Hmong finery, running from her mother. Ms. Lee — who in July celebrated her 30th birthday in that bed, surrounded by her mother, brother, seven sisters and numerous nieces, nephews and cousins — died Aug. 31 after a lifelong battle against epilepsy, cerebral palsy, pneumonia and sepsis, a toxic reaction to constant infection. Her family’s struggles with hospitals, doctors and social workers were chronicled in Anne Fadiman’s best-selling 1997 book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” which altered Americans’ views on cross-cultural medical treatment. She became a symbol for disabled children and immigrants intimidated and confused by Western medicine. At 4-foot-7 and 47 pounds, Ms. Lee could speak only with her eyes and her cries. Stricken by seizures since she was a few months old, she battled through, singing Hmong folk songs and joyfully running around her neighborhood. At 4, she suffered a grand mal seizure that stole her speech and her ability to move. “Even though she’s never spoken a word since the grand mal seizure, Lia taught a lot of doctors and nurses to care for people from other cultures more sensitively,” Fadiman said. Medical schools and universities use Fadiman’s book, and shamans are allowed to practice in California hospitals. Doctors had predicted Ms. Lee’s imminent death after her seizure, and her parents took her home from the hospital to die. But when her parents removed her feeding tube, Ms. Lee cried out. Her sister Mai Lee, 32, said Ms. Lee’s strong will to live, nurtured by her family’s love, faith and constant care, proved the doctors wrong. “Lia’s legacy is to give families with sick children the strength and courage to question their doctors,” Mai Lee said. “We didn’t ask those questions.” Ms. Lee’s primary doctors, Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, said the girl and her family profoundly changed medicine. “Lia’s a game changer,” Ernst said. “She’s altered so many people’s approaches to dealing with patients with different beliefs.” Philp added, “We saw her life ending when she was 5, but her mother’s unconditional love taught me the value of life.” The book details the family’s odyssey. Ms. Lee’s parents, Yang and Nao Kao Lee, fled their mountain village after Laos fell to the communists in 1975. After years in Thai refugee camps, they were resettled in Merced, Calif., in 1980, and moved to Sacramento in 1996. Ms. Lee was born July 19, 1982. The day before Thanksgiving in 1986, she suffered her near-fatal seizure at the family’s kitchen table. Her father declared, “When the spirit catches you, you fall down,” meaning a powerful spirit was locked inside her body, Mai Lee said. Ms. Lee was rushed to the hospital for the 16th time. Her seizure lasted two hours. Her temperature rose to 104.9. Her blood pressure plunged. Her flailing hands turned blue. She was rushed to a hospital in Fresno, Calif., where doctors declared her brain-dead. The family looked for a funeral home and prepared Ms. Lee’s funeral clothes for her journey through the spirit world.But when family members removed the tubes, Ms. Lee’s cries convinced them that she was not ready to die. Her parents, like most traditional Hmong, believe in ancestor spirits. They asked a shaman to travel to the highest level in the spirit world and strike a bargain: “Give us our daughter’s life, and we’ll give you a life in exchange.” They sacrificed a pig and got their wish, said their oldest daughter, Zoua Lee, 48. But because of language and cultural differences, the family had trouble administering her medicine, and she spent a year in foster care. Fadiman said there are no villains here — that both the Lee family and the doctors had the best intentions. Ms. Lee was the center of every family ceremony, every birthday, smiling with her eyes and even giggling occasionally. Every day, her mother and sisters would talk to her, feed her, hold her and caress her. Over her bed, there is a photo of her father, who died in 2003. “It’s extraordinary she survived so long in a vegetative state,” Fadiman said. “It’s a testimony to the exceptional loving care her family gave her.” Source
Read more...Life Went On Around Her, Redefining Care by Bridging a Divide
In 1988, when Anne Fadiman met Lia Lee, then 5, for the first time, she wrote down her impressions in four spare lines that now read like found poetry: barefoot mother gently rocking silent child diaper, sweater, strings around wrist like a baby, but she’s so big mother kisses and strokes her The story of Lia, the severely brain-damaged daughter of Hmong refugees who had resettled in California, became the subject of Ms. Fadiman’s first book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” published in 1997. Its title is the English translation of the condition known as qaug dab peg (pronounced “kow da pay”), the Hmong term for epilepsy, from which Lia had suffered since infancy. In traditional Hmong belief, qaug dab peg, like many illnesses, is spiritual in origin, caused when the soul becomes separated from the body. A traditional cure might entail visits from a shaman, who would attempt to reunite body and soul. A work of narrative nonfiction, Ms. Fadiman’s book is a cautionary tale about the cultural chasm between Lia’s family, with its generations-old animist beliefs, and her rationalist American doctors. “In some sense, I was trying to provide a way of controlling her seizures with Western methods and Western medicines,” said Dr. Neil Ernst, who with his wife, Dr. Peggy Philp, was one of the pediatricians who treated Lia early on. “And in some sense, the Lees were giving up control of their child to a system that they didn’t understand.” That cultural divide — despite the best intentions of both sides, Ms. Fadiman wrote — may have brought about Lia’s condition, a consequence of a catastrophic seizure when she was 4. Over the years, whenever Ms. Fadiman lectured about the book, readers would press a single question on her before any other: “Is Lia still alive?” Lia Lee died in Sacramento on Aug. 31. (Her death was not widely reported outside California.) The immediate cause was pneumonia, Ms. Fadiman said. But Lia’s underlying medical issues were more complex still, for she had lived the last 26 of her 30 years in a persistent vegetative state. Today, most people in that condition die within three to five years. Acclaimed by reviewers, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” won a National Book Critics Circle Award. It has sold almost 900,000 copies, according to its publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and remains widely assigned in medical schools and in university classes in social work, anthropology, journalism and other fields. As a result, Lia’s story, as few other narratives have done, has had a significant effect on the ways in which American medicine is practiced across cultures, and on the training of doctors. “A lot of people in medicine were talking about that book for a very long time after it was published,” Sherwin B. Nuland, the physician and National Book Award-winning author, said on Wednesday. He added: “There’s a big difference between what we call ‘disease’ and what we call ‘illness.’ A disease is a pathological entity; an illness is the effect of the disease on the patient’s entire way of life. And suddenly you read a book like this and you say to yourself, ‘Oh, my God; what have I been doing?’ ” A labor of eight years, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” is also the story of the immense benefits of tradition, which can furnish, Ms. Fadiman makes clear, a level of familial devotion less often seen among modern Americans. Lia spent her entire life at home, assiduously cared for by her family, and it was this devotion, Ms. Fadiman came to feel, that kept her alive for so long. “She was never shunted to the periphery,” Ms. Fadiman, the daughter of the author and television personality Clifton Fadiman and the journalist Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, said on Wednesday. “I remember her most in her mother’s arms. Family life went on around her and in some ways revolved around her.” The 14th of 15 children born to her mother, Foua Yang, and her father, Nao Kao Lee, Lia Lee was born on July 19, 1982, in Merced, Calif. — the first of her parents’ children born in the United States, and the first born in a hospital. She was plump, porcelain-skinned, lively and beautiful. The Lees had arrived in the United States two years earlier with their seven living children, a blanket, a mortar and pestle and little else. They had been farmers in their native Laos; three of their children died there when they were very young. During the Vietnam War, many Hmong were recruited by the United States to fight the North Vietnamese in Laos; after Laos fell to the Communists in 1975, 150,000 Hmong, in fear of their lives, fled the country. The Lees were among them. It took the family until 1980 to reach the United States. Along the way they endured a perilous odyssey that included an attempt to flee their village before being forced back at gunpoint by Vietnamese soldiers, and a later attempt, culminating in a 26-day walk to Thailand, where they spent a year in refugee camps. During these five years, three more of their children died. In the United States, the Lees eventually settled in a modest apartment in Merced, about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco. By the time Ms. Fadiman met them, Merced’s population was one-sixth Hmong. Lia had her first seizure when she was about 3 months old. At Merced Community Medical Center, a resident misdiagnosed her condition. Communication was impossible: the Lees spoke no English, and the hospital had no Hmong interpreter. “My parents weren’t able to convey exactly that she was having seizures,” Lia’s sister Mai, now 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The word ‘seizure’ didn’t come out. To them, they saw it as her soul being tampered with by something of a different realm.” Lia’s seizures continued; epilepsy was eventually diagnosed and anti-seizure medication prescribed. But to her parents, qaug dab peg was literally a mixed blessing: on the one hand, Lia’s soul had been taken from her and she needed it back; on the other, her condition portended spiritual giftedness, something many traditional cultures ascribe to epilepsy. Perhaps, the Lees believed, Lia was destined to become a shaman herself. The Lees did not always give Lia her medication, Ms. Fadiman wrote, because they did not want to interfere with qaug dab peg entirely. To encourage her soul’s return, her parents gave her herbs and amulets. She was sometimes visited by a Hmong shaman, who performed a ritual that included chanting, beating a gong and sacrificing a chicken or pig. (The strings around Lia’s wrist noted by Ms. Fadiman are used in Hmong tradition to help protect people from malevolent spirits.) All this baffled Lia’s doctors. “I felt that I was trying to penetrate a very dense wall — a cultural wall — and didn’t have the tools to do it,” Dr. Ernst said. The seizures worsened; by the time Lia was 4 ½, she had made more than 100 outpatient visits to medical facilities and been admitted to the hospital 17 times. When she was not quite 3, in frustration at what he viewed as her parents’ refusal to administer her medication, Dr. Ernst had Lia legally removed from the family home. She spent a year in foster care — a time, Ms. Fadiman reported, of great trauma for Lia and great bitterness for her family — before being returned to her parents. (In recent years, Dr. Ernst and Mai Lee said, there has been a rapprochement between Lia’s family and her doctors.) In 1986, when Lia was 4, she suffered a grand mal seizure that lasted nearly two hours before doctors were able to bring it under control. At some point, amid the many procedures her condition required that day, an infection set in. She went into septic shock, and her organs began to fail. By the time she was stabilized, Lia had lost higher brain function. Her doctors expected her to die. She did not die. She could breathe and whimper but could not speak; she was capable of little voluntary movement but could still feel pain. It was unclear how much she could see or hear. Lia no longer had seizures, because she now had vastly reduced electrical activity in her cerebral cortex, the brain’s outermost layer. She grew only slightly, as is typical of children with severe brain damage: by the age of 30, she was 4 feet 7 inches and weighed 47 pounds. For 26 years, her days varied little: her parents bathed her, fed her, flexed her stiffened limbs, kissed, caressed and tenderly talked to her. There were visits to doctors in Merced and later in Sacramento, where the family moved in 1996. There were periodic visits from a shaman, intended not so much to cure Lia as to ease her suffering. “Everything that my parents had done for her is all manual labor,” Mai Lee said on Wednesday. “Carrying her from place to place, transporting her to appointments here and there, it was all done manually. They did that for a very long time.” Nao Kao Lee, Lia’s father, died in 2003. Besides her mother, Foua Yang, and her sister Mai, her survivors include a brother, Cheng, and six other sisters, Chong, Zoua, May, Yer, True and Pang. In Merced and far beyond, Lia’s legacy is pervasive. In 1996, largely in response to her case, Healthy House, a social-service agency that facilitates medical care for Merced County’s non-English-speaking residents, was founded in Merced, the county seat. Among its services is an interpreter training program, which provides medical interpreters in a half-dozen languages, including Hmong. At Mercy Medical Center Merced, the current incarnation of Merced Community Medical Center, Hmong shamans are now allowed to visit patients and practice a limited number of their traditional arts. (Animal sacrifice is excluded.) “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” continuously in print and released this year in an updated edition, has extended Lia’s reach to a new generation of doctors. At the Yale School of Medicine, for instance, the incoming class is required to read it — a tradition that was begun a dozen years ago, well before Ms. Fadiman herself began teaching at Yale, where she is the Francis writer in residence. And as hospital wards across the country become ever more diverse, seasoned doctors, too, have found there is much to be learned from Lia’s story. Among them is Dr. Nuland, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who received his medical training in New Haven in the 1950s. “Most wards were filled with Italians, Irish and Jews,” he said, recalling those years. “We had an occasional Gypsy, an occasional Chinese person and some Hispanics, and we would walk among them with our lordly presence. You’d learn a couple of words of Italian, a couple of words of whatever, and you’d use them with patients and think you were being very clever.” He added: “In our day, the whole thing was to assimilate, to look and act like a WASP. We could have provided so much comfort to patients who looked like our parents. And we just didn’t.” Source
Read more...Students honored for Hmong story book
Monday, September 12, 2011
An award-winning multicultural literary magazine is honoring D.C. Everest Oral History Project students for their creative work in promoting cultural diversity and an appreciation of nature and ecology.
The magazine Skipping Stones is awarding D.C. Everest High School students who worked on “Zaj Lus: A Bilingual Hmong Story Book” with 2011 Skipping Stones Youth Honor Awards. “Zaj Lus” is a bilingual story book that helps pass along Hmong folk tales to younger generations.
Yer Thor, one of three oral project leaders and a senior at Everest High School, nominated “Zaj Lus” for the award. “It is a bilingual book, written in both English and Hmong. It is especially important to the Wausau area,” Thor said. “It is vital to share the Hmong culture with those in the surrounding area and across the world.”
All the work on the book, including the design and layout, was done by Hmong students working with the Oral History Project. There were three project leaders, Yer Thor, Kim Yang and Anna Thor, four assistants and 13 student volunteers. The illustrations were done by Bao Lee and Noghlibelinda Yang, both graduates of Everest High. To find out more about the Oral History Project or to order this and other student-produced books, log on to http://www.dceoralhistory.com/.
Source
Book Review: Examining the Hmong in America
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Dr. Chia Youyee Vang, an assistant history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has produced a scholarly examination of the Hmong refugee experience.
Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora, by Chia Youyee Vang, $25, University of Illinois Press, December 2010, ISBN-10: 9780252077593, ISBN-13: 978-0252077593, pp. 192.
Dr. Chia Youyee Vang only has hazy, disjointed memories of fleeing Laos with her family in 1979, waiting in a refugee camp in Thailand and coming to the United States when she was 9 years old.
“I often describe it as a film one had seen a very long time ago,” she writes. “One may be able to recall the themes and a few scenes here and there; however, one cannot accurately recount the entire story.”
Vang was one of more than 130,000 of her people who came to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From the early 1960s on, the United States had relied on the Hmong to fight against the North Vietnamese Army, which intruded into Laos during the Vietnam War.
After the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, the Communist victors began enacting vengeance against those who had aided the Americans, including the Hmong. Thus began the exodus of the Hmong people.
Today, Vang is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, but this is not a memoir of her journey. It is the first scholarly examination of the Hmong refugee experience to come from within the Hmong community.
In the book, she brings the experience of this ethnic group into sharp focus, retracing its origins in southwestern China, its role in the Southeast Asian conflict and the journey out of the war zones.
Setting the context, Vang notes that the Hmongs’ arrival in the United States came at a “critical moment in U.S. history” — just in time for them to share in the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement. They also benefited somewhat from American depictions of them as “freedom fighters and … victims of evil communism.”
The author focuses on the large number of Hmong who came to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area — as her family did — initially under the auspices of resettlement programs. Her first book was “Hmong in Minnesota.”
Her work also reflects her visits to Hmong enclaves in Bangkok, Thailand; Argentina; France; and her native Laos. There, Vang says she discovered that the “life I was born to lead and the life I am currently living are clearly worlds apart.” She argues, however, that her status as a Hmong “insider” uniquely positioned her to draw out and interpret some things that outsiders could not.
Her primary aim was to describe how refugees build ethnic communities “from scratch” in their new environment. Indeed, how can people who “arrive with almost no material resources” rebuild their lives and their culture in unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcoming circumstances? These are questions that should be of interest to many other ethnic groups, she says.
To find the answers, Vang conducted extensive interviews with refugees and those who assisted them, searched immigration archives and observed numerous community events such as New Year’s celebrations and religious observances.
Thirty-five years after the Hmongs’ Great Migration, they remain one of the most impoverished groups in America and suffer from bias and stereotyping. However, many lead comfortably middle-class lifestyles and are increasingly obtaining higher education, Vang says.
She concludes that the Hmong have preserved many traditions, maintained an ethnic identity and formed communities that even allow some to navigate life without the need or desire to learn English. While some aspects of the culture have been transformed, Vang says the Hmong constantly struggle to retain others, like certain religious rituals.
Perhaps most important, Vang argues, far from being the victims other observers have described, Hmong people have exercised a high degree of control over their fate. Among other examples of movement in pursuit of economic opportunity, she cites the conscious choice of some to relocate to the South to buy and operate poultry farms in the 1990s.
“Notwithstanding continuing poverty and discrimination, the American Hmong community has made great strides,” Vang writes. “Not only are they changing their own culture and its traditions in order to exist in American society but also the unlikely places in which they have reconstructed community have undergone much transformation as a result of their presence.”
Source
Book to Share Stories Rarely Told
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Some D.C. Everest High School students are in the process of publishing another history book. They create books every year through the Oral History Project, but the latest one is making sure Hmong history won’t get lost in translation.
"It's different from the other books,” said D.C. Everest junior Kimberly Yang. “This year we're writing about folktales, drawing stories and having both English and Hmong translations."
The folktales are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation.
"I've seen that a lot of the Hmong culture has been disappearing slowly and I thought it was important to have both the Hmong and the English translation because then not only can we read it in English, but we can also read it in Hmong and look back and be like, ok, this is what we used to know,” Yang said.
The book will feature four folktales parents can read to their children and that kids can learn from, like the story of the tiger and the frog. When the tiger threatens to eat the frog, the frog proposes the two race and the frog lives if he wins. The amphibian comes up with a plan and emerges from the race victorious.
"The moral of the story is...it's not always about being the strongest one, it's about how you approach the problem,” said D.C. Everest Senior Belinda Yang.
The book will be published at the end of the summer and be available for purchase during Wausau’s Hmong New Year Celebration in December.
Source
UW-EC student's research leads to Hmong children's book
Monday, April 26, 2010
Mai, the main character of the children's book "The Tiger in the Village," saves her family from a tiger by throwing hot peppers into its eyes. UW-Eau Claire graduate student Pakou Vang published the book in December. UW-Stout art graduate Jesse Edgington used acrylic paint for all of the illustrations.
Pakou Vang's attempt to make the research for her master's degree thesis more reliable prompted an unanticipated-yet-welcome result: the publication of a Hmong children's book.
"The Tiger in the Village," published in December by Lulu.com, tells the story of how family members save themselves from a tiger that invades their village during the Hmong New Year.
Source
Kao Kalia Yang aptly fulfills highest ideals of Page Scholar program
Friday, April 23, 2010
Twenty-nine years after she was born in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand, Kao Kalia Yang speaks and writes with a lyrical eloquence in her second language that most people never develop in their first.
It took me 10 minutes to compose that sentence, and about six seconds for Yang to say this: "My daddy said words are meaningless unless they touch the human heart."
I don't remember the last time I felt this intimidated.
Yang's first book, "The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir," published by Coffee House Press, won a Minnesota Book Award last year for memoir/creative non-fiction, and was also voted the Readers Choice Award as the favorite among the 32 finalists.
Yang ably fulfilled the commitment entrusted to her by the nonprofit Page Education Foundation when she was named a Page Scholar in 1999. The Foundation, founded by former Minnesota Vikings great and current state Supreme Court Justice Alan Page in 1988, provides college grants to high school graduates of color while encouraging them to mentor children.
Of the 590 Page Scholars selected for the 2009-10 school year, 64 percent are African or African-American, 21 percent are Asian-American, 12 percent Hispanic and 3 percent American Indian. According to the Foundation, over the years more than 4,000 Page Scholars have spent nearly 300,000 hours on their mentoring tasks.
"Alan and I firmly believe every child deserves an opportunity to learn, and we agree that education is the key to unlocking a world of opportunity, especially for youth of color," said Foundation Board Director Diane Sims Page. "We've seen firsthand how education creates heroes — that is, young people who pursue post-secondary education while volunteering to develop future generations through mentoring.
"We're excited about the ongoing success of the Foundation, and sincerely thank the community for its continued — and increasing — support of our unique organization."
Saturday night, Yang will attend the Foundation's annual "Hometown Heroes" gala and fundraiser at Target Field's Legends Club, beginning at 7 p.m. Tickets are $100 and available through the Foundation website.
The mentoring aspect distinguishes this program. Page Scholars don't just write an essay, ship letters of recommendation to a selection committee, accept a check and go on their merry way. They have a responsibility to help someone others.
A Page Scholarship allowed Yang, a graduate of Harding High on St. Paul's East Side, to attend Carleton College in Northfield and earn a bachelor's degree in American studies. For four years there, she tutored an elementary school-age boy from Mexico, an undocumented alien whose background she found surprisingly similar to hers.
Yang came to the United States as a 6-year-old, along with her parents and older sister, Der. Though Der picked up English quickly, Yang struggled with it until discovering, with the help of a high-school English teacher, a proficiency in writing.
"I saw in him the same story as mine," she said. "The dreams our parents had for us were one and the same."
After Carleton, Yang headed for New York City and graduate work at Columbia University, where she earned a master's in creative non-fiction writing. She will spend the upcoming academic year teaching and writing as an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.
At the first gathering of Page Scholars the year she won, Yang said she found encouragement by seeing so many students like her with similar hopes and aspirations.
"It allowed me to dream together with the community, not just alone," she said. "And that had a lot to do with making me the young woman I am."
Source
Hmong writer tells story of her family
Monday, April 19, 2010
Minnesota-based writer Kao Kalia Yang said her voice was exhausted -- but her heart wasn't -- as she spoke to about 200 people Saturday afternoon at John Muir Middle School in Wausau.
It was Yang's third engagement in Wisconsin this week to speak about her book "The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir," which is about her family's experiences as Hmong refugees living in Minnesota.
The Marathon County Public Library brought Yang to Wausau as a part of its National Library Week celebration. Yang's appearance also coincided with this year's Hmong History Month festivities.
Yang spoke candidly about her childhood, living in refugee camps in Thailand and struggling to fit in to both Hmong and American cultures when her family moved to Minnesota. She also took questions from the audience and spoke about the lessons she tries to impart to students when she speaks at schools across the country.
A teacher in the audience asked Yang whether she should encourage her silent Hmong students to speak in class. For many years as a child, Yang said she did not speak to her family or in school.
Yang recalled one of her teachers who asked her questions without expecting an audible response. Even though Yang never answered out loud, the questions made her think for herself.
Some members of the audience choked back tears as they told Yang how much her book helped them understand the Hmong culture. Yang said she hoped members of the audience would leave with a "little more understanding in their hearts."
Melissa Wilke, 47, of Wausau said the cultural understanding that comes from reading Yang's book is something that is needed in the predominantly Caucausian population of Wausau.
"This was great," Wilke said. "This is something Wausau needs to learn more about."
Wilke said she was assigned to read "The Latehomecomer" for a class she is taking at Northcentral Technical College.
Ong Vang, 30, of Wausau said she plans on reading and reflecting upon the "The Latehomecomer" after hearing Yang speak.
"As a speaker, she is a good role model for Hmong women," Vang said.
Source
Book teaches understanding of Hmong culture
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
As with every family, culture and country, many stories encompass its history, some privately tucked away and others shared — a means to encourage understanding.
Concordia University Professor Paul Hillmer recently published a book on the experiences of the Hmong, a population that has reached 60,000-70,000 in the state.
The Hmong experienced a surge in immigration into the United States during the mid-1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War, and continue to endure the critical eye of far too many Americans, says Hillmer.
“All of us, whether recently or hundreds of years ago, have immigrants somewhere in our family tree … But somewhere back in our past, whether still recorded or long forgotten, our families underwent experiences that resemble what present-day immigrants and their children are going through now,” says Hillmer.
Hillmer’s book, “A People’s History of the Hmong,” is the result of more than 200 interviews and chronicles the Hmong history, immigration and life experiences. And it all began with a simple question to a Hmong student of Hillmer’s during a car ride to the young man’s intern site.
“I asked him about his father, family, the war, and he said his parents were always busy working and didn’t talk about it much,” said Hillmer.
But the student wanted to learn more about his Hmong history.
Intrigued, Hillmer met with a handful of Hmong students at Concordia and together they created a list of interview questions to discuss with their families.
“The parents were remarkably open and grateful and surprised that their children were taking an interest,” said Hillmer. “That’s what got me hooked — in the process of teaching students, I learned that there is a real story here.”
The process of interviews eventually expanded to include Hmong people from the Twin Cities and Wisconsin to Florida, Washington D.C., the east coast and even Australia; those who have served during war, embassy staff, people young and old.
The book includes first-person accounts of life in the hills of Laos, experiences of war and refugee camps, the trials and triumphs as citizens of new countries, ancient cultural practices and modern-day life existence, and religious beliefs unusually foreign to most people.
“A deeply important book,” says Vint Lawrence, former CIA agent stationed in Laos. “Instead of skimming the glossy highlights of America’s involvement with the Hmong people during the ‘Secret War’ in Laos, Professor Hillmer has given us a stark and vivid picture of the Hmong in the war’s tragic aftermath and ultimately a testament to the strength of these remarkable people.”
Throughout American history, immigrants have suffered indifference, hate and scorn of so-called natives, said Hillmer. But his hope is that through this introduction to the Hmong experience, Americans will both gain understanding and be understanding to a population that is a part of the collective experience.
“Especially in areas like Minnesota where there are so many Hmong, there are so many misunderstandings about who these people are. To quote a colleague, ‘It’s hard to hate someone when you know their story’,” said Hillmer.
IF YOU GO
WHO: Paul Hillmer, professor of American history and director of the Hmong Oral History Project at Concordia University
WHAT: Discussion of his book “A People’s History of the Hmong”
WHEN: 4 p.m. Thursday in St. Olaf’s Buntrock Commons, Viking Theater
COST: Event is free and open to the public
BUY THE BOOK: St. Olaf Bookstore, $27.95
Source
Book - "Taking the gamble"
Sunday, March 28, 2010
This is an honest and personal look at modern matrimony.
A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Publisher: Viking Adult, 304 pages
ISBN: 978-0670021659
AT the end of her Eat, Pray, Love memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert met and fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who had been living in Bali. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but as post-traumatic-divorce syndrome sufferers, they also swore to never, under any circumstances, get legally married.
In Committed, Gilbert the Commitment Phobic shares, “We had ... learned that marriage is an estate that is very much easier to enter than it is to exit. Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you – the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love – may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you leave.”
However, providence intervened. The United States Government – after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at a border crossing – gave the couple a choice: get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.
“Sentenced” to marry, Gilbert faced her fears of marriage analytically. So she takes us through a conversational stroll as she tries to talk herself into matrimony the second time round. She concocts a weird but wonderfully bittersweet marmalade of personal memories, literary walkabouts, political arguments, economic reasoning, historical and theological query; all mixed together with wry wit and careful, though seemingly casual, research. The result is a mostly smart and sobering analysis of the role marriage plays in our different cultures, consciousness and ecologies.
The discourse starts with Gilbert’s interaction with the Hmong tribe in Vietnam, for whom romantic love has very little to do with reasons for marriage. Here, she notes that “there is one critical gift that a traditional Hmong bride almost always receives ... which all too often eludes the modern Western bride ... the gift of certainty. When you have only one path set before you, you can generally feel confident that it was the correct path to taken.”
She says that Western-style “love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based or an asset-based marriage” as “by unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons, it can always unchoose later.”
The book takes us to modern revolutionary Iran where young couples can ask a mullah for a special marriage permit called a sigheh that permits them to be married for just one day, and to China where “ghost” marriages were sometimes effected between a young girl of rank and a dead man from a good family to seal clan bonds.
Gilbert also introduces us to psychologist Shirley P. Glass, who specialises in marriage infidelity and has a theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls (barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets) and windows (necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends). She also provides a refreshing perspective on prenuptials: “It’s better to set your own terms than to risk the possibility that someday, unsentimental strangers in a harsh courtroom might set the terms for you.”
While I did not always agree with her arguments, I enjoyed Gilbert’s writing style and trademark wit, compassion and intelligence as well as her clever analogies; classics such as “Marriage has a bonsai energy: It’s a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free climbing vine.”
In the end, Gilbert achieves her personal peace, for “sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes too good to be alone”. She consoles herself in that with the second marriage “at least you know you are gambling”.
The book is part marriage manifesto, part feminist mantra, part marriage manual and wholly personal.
If you can forgive the fact that she does not always present a balanced viewpoint on marriage – only those facts that serve her own purposes and intentions – you will enjoy this honest look at modern matrimony and should learn something new about marriage.
Source Read more...
Hmong memoirist Kao Kalia Yang is on the neverending book tour
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
A year ago, with her new memoir, "The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir" (Coffee House Press), in hand, it dawned on Kao Kalia Yang that her work on this book was only beginning. As one of the first-ever published Hmong writers (the Hmong people did not have a written language until the 1950s), she found herself on a book tour that, like Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, just keeps on going. Her intense schedule includes near-daily appearances, and in classrooms, auditoriums, and homes across the Midwest, she’s taken the sometimes-uncomfortable position of explaining and defending her people.
“This year and a half has been perhaps the most challenging year of my life so far,” says the expressive young woman who wrote about her childhood in a refugee camp in Thailand, about moving to an incomprehensively different country, and fighting to not just learn English, but to attend college — Carleton College and Columbia University, no less. She wrote about families torn apart by war, and the terror of living in safer but unwelcoming communities. But the real hot seat, she found, was in Midwestern living rooms.
“I visited a book club (and I love book clubs), and a woman has a question for me: How is it that a man, so ‘uneducated’ as my father, could speak to such wisdom? And I had to fight myself against defending the sure intelligence and heart of the man who loved me and had raised me for the work I was doing, and to slow down so she could appreciate the depth of the education life offers,” she says.
At a high school event in Wisconsin, she was warmly received by the English Language Learning classes. “The regular ones, however, didn't quite see what I had to offer them. In the auditorium, the closing event of my visit, the very last question of all comes from a hand in the far back, a Hmong girl, one of the new refugees, asking in Hmong why I hadn't written the book in Hmong so she could read it, too. I responded in Hmong — that was the only way to get at the meaning,” she says.
Suddenly, English voices begin chattering throughout the audience, tuning out. “I had to ask, ‘How can we begin to be aware of a bigger world, if we cannot hear ourselves? Is this really how short your patience is with languages other than English?’ It was hard. I said words I hadn't expected from myself. In the end, I was shaking — I saw how much work I had to do yet, and also, its impact.”
At the end of the event, she says, there was a standing ovation, “and a long line of young people — across different cultures and languages — who had understood.” And so the tour goes on.
Events
St. Catherine University, Women of Substance Series, 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, O’ Shaughnessy Auditorium. Adults $10. 651-690-6700.
Source
Book shines light on Hmong recipes
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
By JOAN OBRA
The Fresno Bee
Quick question: Can you name three Hmong dishes? If you can't, that's no surprise.
For even in the San Joaquin Valley, home to one of the country's largest Hmong populations, the cuisine of this Southeast Asian group largely remains a mystery.
But a new book could change that. "Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America" (University of Minnesota Press, $29.95) is a landmark work that chronicles the Hmong experience -- from traditional foods in the mountains of Laos, to dishes they share with other Southeast Asian cultures, and finally, to new meals that evolved in America.
Most of these dishes aren't served in restaurants.
"It's very much a cooking culture," says co-author Sami Scripter. "I learned from just being involved."
"Cooking from the Heart" is the fruit of a long friendship between Scripter and co-author Sheng Yang. The two met more than 25 years ago, when Scripter worked at the elementary school Yang attended in Portland, Ore.
Scripter's daughter was the same age as Yang, and the two families became close. Yang even lived with the Scripters for about a year to improve her English.
Their book notes that they prepared meals together: "Sami learned to cook rice the Hmong way using an hourglass-shaped pot and woven basket steamer, and Sheng learned how to make (Sami's husband's) favorite dinner: meat loaf, baked potatoes and peach pie."
As Scripter learned more secrets of the Hmong kitchen, idle talk of penning a cookbook turned into a project that took her to Hmong communities across the country.
Recipes include ones from Fresno, such as the salty, spicy, tempura-battered shrimp made by the mother-in-law of Yang's daughter.
Indeed, the Valley is an ideal place to use this cookbook. For it's one of the few places in the United States where the ingredients are widespread.
Browse through the Asian sections in Save Mart supermarkets, and you can make stir fries with beef, string beans and oyster sauce, or chicken wings stuffed with vegetables, vermicelli noodles and ground pork.
If you visit farmers markets, ask Southeast Asian growers to bring fresh lemongrass and Thai chili peppers. With these staples and Save Mart's Asian condiments, you can cook dishes such as chicken drumsticks with Hmong-style barbecue sauce and cracked crabs flavored with chilies, coconut milk and herbs.
And if you shop at the Valley's Asian markets, you're in for a treat.
Buy Hmong sausage and cook it with cabbage. Or look for toasted sticky rice flour and make larb, a popular Laotian salad of ground meat or fish that's mixed with lots of seasonings, then served with lettuce and sticky rice.
Local resources can help you move beyond the book. For example, Scripter and Yang describe some of the herbal medicines used extensively by the Hmong, but they don't delve deeply into it.
Herbal medicine "is as much about the practitioner as it is about the herbs itself," Scripter says. "You go to that person and that person says, 'When did the rash start? Tell me about this, tell me about that.' Almost always, (the treatment) is not just one herb but it's several of them together."
At the University of California Kearney Agricultural Center in Parlier, a new garden offers the public a rare look at about 50 of these herbs. As perhaps the only Hmong research garden in the country, it includes common and scientific names for the plants.
"They're not really common on California farms," says UC farm adviser Richard Molinar, who created the garden with his field assistant, Michael Yang.
A recent tour with local Hmong herbalists showed the overlap between the culinary and medicinal. To treat a rash, bruise some garlic chives and rub them into the skin, May Xiong says.
Vietnamese coriander (also known as Vietnamese mint, laksa leaf and luam laws in Hmong), helps blood clot, she adds.
Xiong and others collected a mix of herbs and tied them into a bundle. Combined with chicken in a soup, it helps mothers heal after giving birth, they say.
In their book, Scripter and Sheng Yang include a recipe for this soup.
"Women who eat this soup after bearing a child also maintain strong bones in old age," they write.
Still other herbs are strictly medicinal, with an unpleasant flavor. "Cooking from the Heart" describes such a soup that Sheng Yang's sister ate after breaking her leg and pelvis in a sledding accident. She healed so quickly, it "astounded" the Western health professionals.
Of course, using these herbs properly requires the expertise of a Hmong herbalist. Visit Xiong in XC Supermarket (formerly TC Supermarket) at East Kings Canyon Road and Winery Avenue.
It's just one more reason to explore local Asian markets.
"A person has got to be willing to step out of what they are accustomed to," Scripter says. To experience all that Hmong cuisine has to offer, "you've got to be willing to go into an Asian grocery store and figure out what you're looking at."
Source
At last, a wealth of Hmong recipes has been collected into a cookbook, 'Cooking From the Heart'
Thursday, July 23, 2009
From egg rolls to noodle soups, Hmong historically have passed recipes through word of mouth, not recipe cards. But as more time passes, there's fear things might get lost in translation.
So, Sheng Yang, who is Hmong and grew up in the United States, decided to write a cookbook and record the recipes. 'Cooking From the Heart' (University of Minnesota Press), co-written with family friend Sami Scripter, was released this year.
Ilean Her, executive director of the Council for Asian Pacific Minnesotans, agrees it's important to record Hmong culture. St. Paul has the largest Hmong population — 25,000 — of any city in the country.
'In Minnesota, Hmong culture has gone mainstream. You can easily get ingredients you need at stores and farmers' markets,' Her says. 'You can even find people to ask for cooking advice. It's one of the best places in the country for Hmong cuisine.'
Hmong food is influenced by Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and southern China, countries where Hmong have lived. So, Yang thinks people who like those cuisines may enjoy Hmong dishes.
'People will be surprised to find they're already familiar with many of the ingredients,' Yang says. 'But some of the cooking techniques will be different.'
Q&A WITH COOKBOOK AUTHOR
Sheng Yang, a California mother of six, worried Hmong cooking traditions would die out. She set out to preserve the recipes and the traditions behind them in Cooking From the Heart," a collection of classic Hmong recipes. Here, Yang, 39, talks about what it took to get it all down.
Question: What made you decide to write this cookbook?
Answer: (Co-author) Sami Scripter and I used to live in Portland, Ore. I introduced her to Hmong food, and she loved it. Hmong culture doesn't write everything down, so there weren't recipes to pass on. We decided to record them for the next generation of Hmong as well as those who want to try cooking the cuisine for the first time.
Question: Without any previous recipes to build on, was it tough putting together this cookbook?
Answer: It was quite challenging. Hmong people don't measure things when cooking. We had to guess how many tablespoons or cups something was until we got the flavors right. Some of the dishes took a few tries.
Question: Hmong food isn't celebrated in the culinary world. Why not?
Answer: Hmong people haven't had tons of opportunities to introduce people to our cuisine. There aren't a lot of Hmong restaurants or recipes. Hopefully, that will start changing a little with this cookbook. Title: "Cooking From the Heart"
ABOUT THE COOKBOOK
By: Sheng Yang and Sami Scripter
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Price: $29.95
Where to find: Widely available, including at Barnes & Noble bookstores or online at www.upress.umn.edu
For more information: hmongcooking.com
Source
'Story Cloth' book hits home in Burlington
Monday, July 13, 2009
Children, adults enjoy reading of book tackling Alzheimer's.
By WILLIAM SMITH
When Linda Gerdner wrote a bilingual storybook last year about a Hmong grandfather struggling with Alzheimer's, her intent was to educate children about a disease that touches every culture.
But when she read her book "Grandfather's Story Cloth" during a children's story time at the Burlington Public Library Saturday morning, it was Burlington grandfather Ed Whitham who was most moved by the reading.
"My wife's mother right now is in the Alzheimer's unit, so we understand what's going on there," he said. "It's tough. It's surprising. She'll remember things back from the '30s and '40s, and two minutes later, she won't remember she was there."
Ed and his wife Marsha Whitham brought along their 4-year-old grandson Jace Whitham and 2-year-old grandson Brock Whitham, who did an admirable job of staying in the their seats during the reading.
Before the reading began, Gerdner of Burlington gave the children a brief summary of the Hmong people and where they came from.
"A long time ago, they lived in China," Gerdner said. "There was a lot of fighting in China, and they didn't like it. So they moved to a country called Laos, and it's a lot smaller than China. They lived in very different homes than we live in. They had dirt floors and thatched roofs."
A number of the Hmong people fought against the communist Pathet Lao during the Secret War in Laos, where they were trained by the CIA as a special guerrilla unit. The Hmong people were singled out for retribution when the Pathet Lao took over the government, forcing them to flee to Thailand in the late 1970s.
Many of the refugees resettled in the United States. Most moved to California (where Gerdner is a consulting professor at Standford), but the largest single community of Hmong in the nation is in the Twin Cities.
It was there Gerdner got to know the Hmong people and discovered the dearth of research on dementia concerning them. That's why she it took it upon herself to write "Grandfather's Story Cloth."
"I taught at the University of Minnesota," she said. "Often times, if they (the Hmong) had an elder with Alzheimer's, they thought it was a normal part of the aging process. Or they thought it had a spiritual origin."
The book is about a child, Chersheng, coming to understand his ailing grandfather medically and culturally and learning to relate in new ways.
One of those ways is through a story cloth, which is a kind of thin quilt that tells the story of a Hmong's life through illustration. During the reading, Gerdner showed off a few story cloths of her own, which can easily be purchased in the Twin Cities.
"I've got over 50 of them. I'm addicted to story cloth," Gerdner said with a laugh.
No one was more fascinated than 5-year-old Talia Goody, who continually leaned forward out of her chair to look at the book's illustrations.
"Grandfather was a simple farmer, and every day, he woke up to the second crow of the rooster. He didn't have an alarm clock. Roosters crow when the sun rises, and what does a crow sound like?" Gerdner asked the children.
"Ka-ka-ka-ka," Goody promptly answered.
Gerdner has spent the past year promoting and reading the book around the country and is planning another children's book about Alzheimer's in the near future.
"Grandfather's Story Cloth," which wad co-written by Sarah Langford and illustrated by Stuart Loughridge, has won numerous children's book awards, the most recent being a gold medal in the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Children's Picture Book category.
Source
Andover author Kao Kalia Yang awarded for family memoir
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Kao Kalia Yang was the recipient of two awards during the 21st annual Minnesota Books Awards ceremony April 25. She received top honors in the Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction category and the Readers Choice Award. Her book “Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir” tells the story of her family’s escape from Laos, their time in a Thai refugee camp and the transition to American culture in Minnesota. Photo by Eric Hagen
Kao Kalia Yang, 28, was born in a Thai refugee camp and stayed there for over six years until her parents were able to come to Minnesota 22 years ago.Yang, who now lives in Andover, pulled from the memories of her family, herself and many others to write “The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.”
The story reveals the hardships her family went through escaping from Laos and living in a refugee camp and the joys that came when they moved to America.
A panel of judges for The Friends of the St. Paul Library and readers across Minnesota thought very highly of the story and Yang’s writing. The book won top honors in the Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction category and the Readers Choice Award during the 21st annual Minnesota Book Awards April 25.
“In my mind, writing has always been a reckoning of experience,” Yang said. “There are of course the memories that we have and then there are the memories that we’re born into and then there are the memories of a bigger world.”
The book is about how the Hmong were impacted by United States’ bombings and covert operations in Laos and the Laotian Civil War between the Royal Laotian government and the communist Pathet Lao.
During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army used Laos as a staging ground and supply route to attack South Vietnam. The United States responded by bombing the North Vietnamese positions in Laos and it supported anti-communist forces and an invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese Army.
According to a Dec. 3, 2008 newspaper article published in The Guardian, an average of one B-52 bomb-load hit Laos every eight minutes between 1964 and 1973.
The war in Laos resulted in heavy casualties and many Hmong fled the country in hopes of finding a better life. Yang said more than 100,000 of 300,000 Hmong in Laos died during the war.
“How much of the world remembers? What is the cost of forgetting? What are the consequences of our stories untold? That is what the book is about,” Yang said.
Yang’s parents and their families fled into the jungles of Laos during the late 1970s to escape the armed Pathet Lao soldiers and bombings. They crossed the Mekong River into Thailand in 1979 and went to a refugee camp where Yang was born in 1980.
It was not until 1987 that the family was able to get out of the refugee camp and go to America. Yang was six years old at the time.
Writing the book
When Yang went to Carleton College in Northfield, her plan was to become a doctor. By the time she graduated in 2003, she felt that what was more broken were people’s spirits and not their bodies. Writing would accomplish her healing goals, she determined.
Yang went to Columbia University in New York to earn her master of art s degree in creative non-fiction writing and during this time started to organize her thoughts and her notes.
The manuscript eventually became “The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.”
“I didn’t know that it was going to become this book, but all of the people who taught me knew,” Yang said. “They knew about the potential reaches of the work. They knew about the story waiting to come forth. They didn’t know what it would be, but they knew there was one there.”
Yang loved to read at a very young age. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding books about the Hmong. Once when she asked a librarian for books about them, the librarian came back with books about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans and the Vietnamese. There were no books about the Hmong.
Yang wanted to write the book so that one day another little girl could find books written about the Hmong’s history.
Coffee House Press published the book in 2008.
Yang has been a guest speaker at various workshops on the craft of creative non-fiction writing. Last month, she was one of three speakers at the Loft Memoir Writing Festival in Minneapolis.
Yang has shared writing tips with countless students as an adjunct professor at numerous institutions such as Columbia University in New York and Concordia University in St. Paul.
Yang will be the writer-in-residence at Century College in White Bear Lake this fall.
“About 4,000 (people) of the school will read the book, from the janitor all the way up to the president,” she said.
The book is also utilized by professors at Century College, Winona State and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, she said.
St. Paul Public Schools has expressed interest in including the book in its curriculum. She has also heard of individual teachers at junior highs, high school and universities including the book in their curriculum.
An additional 25,000 books are being printed, Yang said.
Eric Hagen is at ateric.hagen@ecm-inc.com
Source
A little fish sauce helps create big flavors
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Lynne Rossetto Kasper
Syndicated Columnist
Lynne Rossetto Kasper says fish sauce may not smell great when you take a whiff of it in the bottle, but it adds a magic flavor to many recipes.
Ah, fish sauce is the cook's cure-all. Take a sniff of fish sauce and you're convinced that you'll never let it pass your lips. Nothing matches the smell of old socks like this fermented, salt-fish concoction from Southeast Asia.
But magic lives in that bottle. Fish sauce, and a long list of other foods, contains umami, called the fifth taste. Consider it savory-ness. Magic is in what umami does for your food. With it other flavors open up, blossom and meld together. That's why knowing the umami trick is such a plus, especially for summer cooking, when you want a little effort to pay back big with a lot of good eating. The trick is a few drops of fish sauce in a dressing, a spoonful in a soup, a stew, a marinade or a rub, to make flavors better.
On the science side, umami is glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, also known as naturally occurring MSG, and it was first discovered in Japan in 1908.
Here's one way to put umami to work for you. A little inexpensive this-and-that (as in a lot of vegetables and a little meat if any) stretches a long way when you serve them with lettuce cups for rolling, and a dipping sauce for spice. Besides, finger food always engages people and gets conversations going.
Any protein or favorite vegetable can be the main event in these rolls. They are a hybrid of the Southeast Asian Hmong people's favorite meat or fish salad called Larb (see the book "Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America," University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and my own imaginings.
In spite of the lists, this is an easy dish. If you'd like, do the pickle and dipping sauce days ahead. The Sweet-Sour Dipping Sauce with Tomato recipe makes extra and it will keepin the fridge for three weeks and can become a dressing, a marinade, a dip and even a cold soup base.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper hosts "The Splendid Table," American Public Media's weekly national show. The program airs at 2 p.m. Sundays on KUOW-FM (94.9). Contact Kasper at www.splendidtable.org.
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
Source
Meet the Market // Hmong farmers
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
June 1, 2009, 3:12pm
By Zoie Glass
The Hmong farmers are an important part of the Mill City Farmers Market, bringing a beautiful array of produce and flowers, and a window into new tastes in food.
Noryeng and Che Xiong Chang
Noryeng and Che were the first farmers to call asking for a spot when the Mill City Farmers Market opened in 2006. As they planned their crops for the spring, they wanted to be sure that they had enough for this new market — which they learned about from Brenda Langton. They lived in Green Bay, Wisc., and grew cucumbers for a local pickle company. When they moved to Minnesota, they started their own farming business, and they now grow quite a bit more than cucumbers. At their stall you’ll find rare Asian greens like Malabar spinach, beautiful fresh herbs and fresh red raspberries — both summer and fall types!
Der’s Flower Farm
Der was the first large scale flower producer to join the market. Every week she brings gorgeous fresh bouquets to the market. Her daughter Ge and son in law Chee run the stand at the market. They also grow fresh vegetables including onions, potatoes and green beans. While they used to grow traditional Asian vegetables, they soon realized that it was too difficult to sell them at local markets. Stop by Der’s Flower Farm for a beautiful bouquet to brighten your home — the offerings change weekly, and the fall selection is wonderful!
Mai Thao
Mai and her family were farmers in Thailand but grew food just for the family, not for sale. Today, Mai runs the farm with her whole family, including her sister’s Maidoua and Maihang, and their parents Vang and Cheu. Their stall at the market overflows with colorful peppers and eggplants — and on some days, they have so much produce that they use two stalls to accommodate it all.
Kao Sheng Vang
Kao runs the farm with her whole family including her mother Chue and father Neng, and her brothers and sisters. Kao’s sister, Pa, likes to help out at the market on Saturdays. At the market, they sell everything from cucumbers and tomatoes to beautiful fresh herbs and healthy greens. They also grow a striking array of peppers in all shapes, sizes and colors.
Zoie Glass owns the Mill City Farmers Market vendor Lucille's Kitchen Garden.
***
Market menu courtesy Lucille's Kitchen Garden
Market shopping list
Oil Seed Rape
Onions
Cilantro
Baby dill
Garlic
Garlicky Chinese Green Flower (Oil Seed Rape); Zaub Ntsuab Paj Kib
Co-author Sami loves this vegetable better than any other Asian leafy green. It has a delightful sweet and crispy quality, and has a beautiful glossy, deep-green color. Because oil seed rape in not imported, it is only available “in season.” Chinese broccoli, bamboo mustard cabbage or bok choy can be substituted for the oil seed rape.
Makes 6 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds oil seed rape, cut into 5-inch long pieces; 5 green onions, white and green parts, cut into 3-inch long pieces; 1/2 bunch cilantro, cut into 3-inch long pieces (about 2 cups); 1 bunch baby dill, cut into 3-inch long pieces (about 2 cups); 1/4 cup chopped garlic; 2 teaspoons salt; 1/4 cup vegetable oil; 1 tablespoon soy sauce
Preparation
You need a wide-bottomed, no-stick pan with a lid for this dish. Be sure to have all of the ingredients prepared and ready to use before you begin cooking.
Clean and cut up the oil seed rape. Cut up the green onions, cilantro and the baby dill and toss them together in a bowl. Chop the garlic. Heat the oil in the pan until it is quite hot, but not hot enough to smoke. Stir-fry the garlic until it is fragrant and golden brown. Add the oil seed rape, salt and soy sauce. Stir-fry quickly for a few minutes, making sure it does not stick to the bottom of the pan. Add a little water and cover the pan for 3-4 minutes. Remove the lid, add the green onion, cilantro, and dill and then stir again. Do not over-cook. The leaves should be limp, but the stems should still be a little crunchy.
Source
Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America
Friday, May 29, 2009
Lori Writer / Heavy Table
Lori Writer on May 22, 2009
“In the isolated mountain villages of their Laotian homeland, cooking was… the stuff of tradition, not the written word. Good Hmong cooks learned from their elders which ingredients to use, and how much of each, by sight, feel, and taste. Recipes were never written down and followed ‘to the letter.’ Cooking, like other Hmong arts and crafts, came ‘from the heart.’”
(From Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America by Sami Scripter and Sheng Yang, published this month by the University of Minnesota Press ($29.95; 248 pages, hardcover with color photos, available at Hmong ABC Bookstore at 298 University Ave. W in St. Paul).
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Sheng Yang, and her parents and four siblings, immigrated to the United States — first to Kentucky, then Oklahoma, and then, Oregon — in 1979, when she was nine. Sami Scripter, married and tending to her growing family, was Sheng’s neighbor in Portland, OR. Sami worked as an educator at Sheng’s elementary school. Speaking to a small audience at the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul on Thursday, Scripter recalls, “One year you didn’t know what Hmong was, and the next year a quarter of the children in school were Hmong.”
Yang says that over the years their “two families have become almost one.” Scripter adds, “We got to know each other the way neighbors know each other.” They gardened together in the Scripter’s backyard using seeds Sheng’s mother had carried from Laos and Thailand. Sami taught Sheng and her mother how to preserve raspberry jam.
As a sixth grader, to improve her English, Sheng lived with the Scripters, rooming with Sami’s daughter, Emily, in a bunk bed Don Scripter built for the two girls. “Sami learned to cook rice the Hmong way using an hourglass-shaped pot and woven basket steamer, and Sheng learned how to make… meatloaf, baked potatoes, and peach pie,” the authors write.
Out of their friendship and years of cooking together and jotting down ingredients grew Cooking from the Heart, which is as much a “celebration of Hmong culture as it is lived in the United States” as it is a cookbook, Yang says. “We wanted to remember who we are… to store the heritage and cooking and pass it down to our children to keep and treasure for years to come.” Scripter adds: “There are many ways of remembering: the Hmong oral tradition is one way; the paj ntaub [Hmong embroidery, pronounced "pa dao"] that women sew is another way. And a cookbook is a way.”
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
In their book, Scripter and Yang touch on eating etiquette and table settings; herbal medicine and healing traditions; and weddings, New Year’s, and funeral customs, and the role food plays in each. Of funerals, the authors write: “The haunting notes of a Hmong bamboo pipe, called a qeej [pronounced keel, pulling your lips tight and speaking almost from your throat], and the rhythmic tum, tum, tum of a special wooden drum constructed exclusively for the service pervade the atmosphere of a traditional funeral.” (Txu Zong Yang plays the qeej and performs the complex dance movements in the photo to the right).
“Three times a day a gong signals meals for all attendees. The deceased is symbolically fed. Then everyone attending the funeral is also fed… It is common for a family to have one or more cows or buffalo butchered and cooked each day to feed the crowd. Cauldrons of boiling meat… are prepared. Mountains of rice are steamed… As with many rituals and events, food is an essential component contributing to the solidarity of Hmong people.” The authors devote an entire chapter, “Cooking for a Crowd,” to dishes commonly served at Hmong gatherings.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
The book is sprinkled with Hmong poetry and essays, such as May Lee-Yang’s “The Year My Family Decided Not to Have Papaya Salad and Egg Rolls for Thanksgiving,” that convey the joys and challenges of growing up Hmong in America.
One side-bar, Ka’s Journal, tells the story of a Hmong woman who, unbeknownst to her family, painstakingly recorded the events of her life, including drawings of Hmong cooking tools, in a spiral-bound notebook she kept in a basket under her bed, wrapped in a skirt. Her children discovered Ka’s journal only after her funeral.
Rather than try to document Hmong cuisine in general, Scripter and Yang focused on “what individual Hmong cooks do,” coaxing recipes out of family and Hmong cooks around the US. Recipes include Saly’s (Yang’s mother-in-law) Rice and Corn Pancakes; Der’s (Yang’s sister) Egg and Cucumber Salad; and Chee Vang’s (a woman who lives in Denver, CO) Stuffed Chicken Wings.
“We wanted to write about Hmong cooking everywhere,” says Scripter. “We cooked in other people’s homes.” The dish that everyone loves, in spite the “startling array of differences” in the ways it’s prepared, says Scripter, is Chicken Curry Noodle Soup or Khaub Poob (pronounced kah-poong). “Some put quail eggs in it. Some make it with garlic, some without… It’s all very good.”
The book includes an extensive discussion of cooking tools, packaged ingredients, and vegetables and herbs used in both cooking and healing. Rather than trying to gloss over ingredients that may seem out of favor, such as MSG, or unfamiliar to non-Hmong or Hmong who have grown up in America, Scripter and Yang take the challenge head-on. Of Traditional Beef Soup, “cow-poo soup,” made of beef stomach, intestines, and organ meat, they write: “Contradicting its name, the soup is made of healthy ingredients and is very nutritious. However, this dish may not be for people who are one or more generations away from having to eat whatever is available in order to live.”
“We wanted to write about Hmong cooking everywhere,” says Scripter. “We cooked in other people’s homes.” The dish that everyone loves, in spite the “startling array of differences” in the ways it’s prepared, says Scripter, is Chicken Curry Noodle Soup or Khaub Poob (pronounced kah-poong). “Some put quail eggs in it. Some make it with garlic, some without… It’s all very good.”
The book includes an extensive discussion of cooking tools, packaged ingredients, and vegetables and herbs used in both cooking and healing. Rather than trying to gloss over ingredients that may seem out of favor, such as MSG, or unfamiliar to non-Hmong or Hmong who have grown up in America, Scripter and Yang take the challenge head-on. Of Traditional Beef Soup, “cow-poo soup,” made of beef stomach, intestines, and organ meat, they write: “Contradicting its name, the soup is made of healthy ingredients and is very nutritious. However, this dish may not be for people who are one or more generations away from having to eat whatever is available in order to live.”
Source
Jenny Lo Publishes Book based on Hmong Experience
Thursday, August 28, 2008
The Hmong community is gradually making its way into the world of publishing. Y. Jenny Lo has now added her voice to the number of young Hmong people sharing their experiences with the world. Her book Husi: A Clouded Future is Still Translucent follows a fictional Husi through her experiences in Southeast Asia.
As a child Husi sees her family killed. The book follows her transformation from a, "scared and traumatized little girl to a beautiful and strong young woman." While she plans revenge she "learns how to forgive and love."
While Lo is clear that, "This book is fictional, it's all in my imagination. There were no personal experiences of myself or any living person in my novel. All the events were created to make the book more interesting." She adds that, "I believed my book represents a lot of the Hmong people. In some ways, we experienced similar hard times (but not all of them), separation from loved ones, and loneliness in a new world."
Lo was born in Long-Cheng and like many of her generation experienced early childhood in a refugee camp. At the age of 11 she came to the U.S. with her family. She recalls that learning English was very difficult for her, "It was like placing a baby in six grade. I had to start from scratch-learning my ABC's and 123's." However she excelled and is now writing whole books in English.
Husi is written in a narrative fashion, alternating between Husi directly speaking to the reader and the reader "looking in" on the events happening around Husi.
After trying her hand at fiction Lo plans to incorporate more personal experiences into her next novel, "I have a rough draft of my next novel which will be based on my life experiences as a war-child. I want my children and the next Hmong generation to know where we (the first Hmong immigrants) came from and how hard it was for us to get to where we are today. The draft (as of now) is entitled, 'The Crying River'."
Lo has experienced a lot of support within her family, "My family has been extremely supportive. Writing this book has been a long, and difficult experience for all of us, and they were very patient with me." However Lo knows very few people in the larger Hmong Community know about her book yet. But she hopes that, "they will support my writing. Writing has been a long time dream. I want to share my gifts as a writer. I hope every reader will be inspired by my book (Husi) to live their lives to the fullest and to accept who you are."
Lo is also the author of a children's book entitled Disobedient Ducklings. She lives in Bethel, MN. For more information on purchasing her books go to www.outskirtspress.com/husi or http://www.amazon.com/
Read more...
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
