What does it mean to be a bad Hmong womxn? Does the label pluck at a strand of your heartstring which seeks to serve justice for the good ones? Why must the fire of bad Hmong womxn be fearfully extinguished by the saviors of goodness?
To be a bad Hmong womxn does not take away from the goodness of your mother or your grandmother. To be a bad Hmong womxn means hearing the sighs of the womxn around us who buried their voice in exchange for survival.
To be a bad Hmong womxn does not mean forgetting the history or trauma of our people. To be a bad Hmong womxn means carrying that weight on our backs while “challenging our community to do better.”
When bad Hmong womxn put pen to paper, text onto screen, or words into voice, our empowerment is not a dismissal of our Hmong-ness. Our identity is our strength, our sense of love, and our passion. If not, we could have chosen to just write “bad womxn.”
You see, everyone simply wants to witness equality, but not enough bodies want to be part of the fight for it. Many who have been able to obtain some form of bliss (read: equality), have embraced ignorance in the midst of injustices. Is bliss not to be shared but to be earned, then? Unarguably, no.
Just like a family the bad and the good can exist. Just like sisters we should support and uplift. Our bad-ness will never trample on your good-ness — it only seeks to promote courage, ability, safety, and revolution. All of this isn’t to say good Hmong womxn cannot do the same. As individual souls with our own brilliant minds, our same goals just have different approaches. Womxn empowerment means acknowledging and respecting a spectrum of voices, even if you would not have done certain things their way. Thus, our bad-ness is not an attack of your good-ness, but a declaration of our capability to co-exist.
