The year was 1983. I was five. The elementary school bus had just dropped me, my older brother, and my cousins Houa and Mikey off at the corner of the parking lot to our apartment complex. We’d been told by the adults that we were to wait on the corner. Don’t cross the parking lot. Send the fastest one of us home first to grab an adult who would then come to escort us all home.
I can remember clearly the heat on my back as we huddled behind the tires of an old car and Houa telling Mikey he’d have to run for it because he was fastest. I remember watching as he dashed across the lot, his blue backpack swinging. I remember watching as his feet flew across the yellow grass and disappeared as he turned the corner into the complex. I remember how Houa and my brother kept us low behind the car so that we wouldn’t be seen. I remember thinking how far the distance between the car and our apartments were. It may as well have been a desert.
Though we were scared, I was only five and I needed to use the bathroom. Every second felt like forever, like Mikey was never going to come back with an adult. I remember saying, “I have to pee, I have to pee,” before tearing out of Houa’s arms and making the mad dash across the parking lot.
But I was too slow.
I remember the sway of the girl’s large breasts in her tank top and the way the light reflected off her dark thighs as she ran towards me. She had frizzy, unkempt hair. She caught me next to the drain hole in the parking lot. I remember huddling there with my arms over my head as she rained down blows on me with drum sticks. I remember crying as the warm pee cascaded down my legs and through my corduroy pants. I remember the hot rush of pain and humiliation running up my cheeks, making my tears feel like burns down my face.
The girl dashed off when Mikey appeared with my older cousin Xe. It wasn’t until later that I found out the girl who’d beat me was just seventeen and only lived a hundred yards away from my own apartment.
This was Oklahoma in the 1980s, and back then, many Hmong families were resettled into poor neighborhoods and public housing projects. Majority of our neighbors were black. Incidences like these weren’t just particular to me and my family. Over the year that we lived there with four other Hmong families, hate crimes against us were almost a daily occurrence. It wasn’t safe to walk around alone. It wasn’t safe to keep your windows open at night, no matter how hot it was. Stories abounded within our community of battery, robberies, and intimidations by our black neighbors. Back then, there were no advocacy groups for the Hmong. There were few translators and even fewer people who understood or knew why we were in their neighborhoods.
One morning, my brother and I woke up to our room covered in powder. Someone had used a ladder to get to our second floor window to throw powder into our room. Terrified that the powder could be toxic, my parents called the cops, but nothing was done. It was after this that my parents were determined to get us out, to move us away, because they hadn’t survived a war and left behind their home country to just have their family terrorized here too.
In all honesty, I don’t know how the Hmong survived those first few years. They spoke no English. The majority were uneducated. They had no one to advocate for them or to truly protect them. Civilization was a new concept to many. I remember my mother’s story about how dryer sheets were confusing and they thought you used them to bathe with.
Yet somehow, my parents found jobs, they saved money, and they begged and borrowed from relatives to move us away.
Often, the story of Hmong people will start and end with the Secret War. We rarely delve into the immigration experience. We don’t often talk about what it was like those first years of resettlement.
When we talk about race relations within the Hmong Community, there are many nuances. Just like with all groups, there are racists within our group too. There are people who outright hate black people and feel superior to black folks. There are Hmong people who knowingly align themselves with white supremacy and white adjacency; but then there are those who’s opinions were formed through personal experiences, whose only interactions with black people for any extended period were these experiences where they were terrorized. Imagine how difficult it must have been thinking you escaped genocide and a war only to be settled into a place where you once again had to face violence. It can’t be easy to overcome and to see beyond.
The stereotype of Asians being weak and meek made us easy targets. The belief that we won’t fight back made us prey. Our PTSD from the war made it so that we didn’t fight back because we’d learned that fighting back meant rape, beatings, torture, and death. Even to this day, the ripples of the Secret War can still be felt and seen in our mothers and fathers cautiousness, in their non-confrontational mannerism with the outside world, and their dependency on us.
When Hmong people first arrived in America, we were small due to malnutrition. We were poor, wearing baggy hand-me-downs and church thrift store clothes. Our neighbors — black, white, and other Asian — knew next to nothing about us. They didn’t know the Hmong story is so different from the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. They didn’t know that it was because of our sacrifices to the US that we were now here. They had no idea that we were fresh from the battle fields. For black and white Americans, the Vietnam War had ended over a decade ago. It was a war their fathers and grandfathers fought. For the Hmong however, the war still wasn’t over.
The longer the Hmong occupied poor black neighborhoods, the higher the racial tension became and the more crime against Hmong people became common place; and because of this, Hmong gangs were born. Menace of Destruction (MOD), one of the most prominent Hmong gangs, rose in the mid 80s as a direct response to the hostilities from the black community and black and latino gangs in California, soon spreading across the nation to wherever there was a large enough Hmong population.
Our tensions with the black community didn’t develop the same way as those of other Eastern Asians, who’d settled into American society for over a hundred years already when the Hmong arrived. When we were thrust into American society, it was already a powder keg of hundreds of years of racial tension and hate. We had no concept of this, no understanding of the oppression that marred the fabric of America.
So to understand Hmong perspective on African Americans, we cannot group Hmong people under the same umbrella of white complacency and adjacency. It’s just not the right story. It’s dismissing the Hmong immigrant experience. It’s perpetuating exactly one of our own points in fighting against prejudices and racism towards Hmong people, in that Asians and Asian stories are “all alike”. Even now, in places like Oklahoma and Minnesota, Hmong people live side by side with their African American neighbors in poorer sections of town, with generations of misunderstanding and stereotypes still strongly entrenched on both sides.
I can’t help but see the disconnect between many Millennial and Gen Z Hmong and their older Hmong counterparts. I can feel both of their frustrations. What I wish the younger set would see is that your advocacy is admirable. Your openness and strength is so essential, but also understand that you speak from a point of privilege. The generations before you worked hard to remove you from the harms they suffered so that you can have the opportunities to live in a more forgiving and accepting world. Through their sacrifices, you were given the opportunity to be educated, to explore and expand, to go beyond your parents’ box and befriend people of all backgrounds. If you really want to reach them, change their mind, tell them it’s safe now, then you must understand their history. You must understand where their fear stems from. Dismissing the hurt, anger, and frustration of a large swath of your people will only fracture us more.
As Asians, one of our major issues is the dismissal of our feelings and experiences by the larger society; and yet, we are doing it to our own. One of the hardest things to do is to actively listen and understand. Everyone wants to be heard, but no one is listening.
I often find myself in the middle. I’m not part of the millennials, but I’m also not part of the OGs either. My peers and I straddle the bridge between the old country and the new. We were part of the original struggle, but we are also privileged to have access to education and the ability to explore beyond just our communities. Perhaps it is then our responsibility to help seal the divide. Perhaps we’ve been remiss in not telling our children the stories of our settlement, of the truth of our struggles and not just of our victories.
The fight for racial justice is double-edged. It is both an internal fight as well as an external one. All of their fears have validation and while we try to build a bridge with that part of our society to show that we have more similarities in our struggles with our black brothers and sisters than differences, we must also find allies in black communities who will be willing to accept and help us fix where these fears come from. Dismissal and invalidation of people’s fears and feelings no matter what side you’re on only increases the divide.
Some would say forget the past, it’s the future we should focus on and we need to move forward. However, if we lose sight of the past, if we forget the reasons why, we will never be able to fix the future. History is the ultimate teacher. It is the power of hindsight that allows us to move forward. Those who choose to forget the past repeat the same mistakes in the future. These problems will arise again and again if we erase our history and misconceptions will continue to flourish if we don’t dispel them with truth.
If you were in the Hmong group who never faced these racial tensions, consider yourself lucky, but it also doesn’t remove the fact that it was reality for many, many of us. I know the later groups of Hmong immigrants were spared many of the difficulties that we faced because we were here to receive them, to teach them, and to protect them.
The first adult Hmong immigrants are now elderly in their seventies and eighties, but sometimes they’ll still recount these experiences to me, asking me if I remember. Yes, I remember, but instead of having it instill hate, I accept it as the truth it was, full knowing that it isn’t necessarily the truth now. Change and acceptance is a horizon we’re all reaching for and that our history — all of the good and the bad — are lessons to remember and to pass forward. But most importantly, to do better.
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© 2020 Yia Vue
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