The Narrative of a Hmong Child’s Unfolding of the American “Dream”
I am twenty eight years old, the daughter of refugee immigrants, a sister to twelve siblings, a STEM advocate, feminist, program director, researcher, and I am Hmong. The Hmong people are an indigenous community found throughout Asia. My parents emigrated to the United States after the Secret War and were part of the 1.5 generation of refugee Hmong who trekked the trail of Laos into Thailand and eventually made their way to the United States. My parents never discussed their childhood in the refugee camps, but if you look closely at this photo in Tragic Mountains (by Jane Hamilton-Merritt, 1992), you will see my mother. She was probably eleven years old. After finding this photo, I finally understood why she didn’t speak of her childhood.
My parents met each other in Santa Ana, California. Waves of refugee immigrants were sent to Orange County after the Vietnam War. Hmong refugees were nestled with Khmer and Vietnamese refugees — all displaced from war, all with different narratives, all of them hurting and carrying deeply rooted traumas.
We lived on Jackson street next to Russel Elementary School. My dad’s married brothers rented the complex next to ours. Our complex was a three bedroom apartment we lived in with two other uncles, an aunt, and my grandmother. My uncles had one room to themselves and my grandmother and aunt shared the other room together.
My parents, siblings, and I shared the last bedroom which had two large beds. My brother and the baby slept with my parents on their bed. My four sisters and I shared the other bed. We kept our clothes nestled in neat cardboard boxes. There were: three school uniforms, a few church dresses, a few pairs of underwear that we all shared, a pair of pajamas, a few sweats from the swap meet, each a pair of shoes to wear to school and one to wear to church on Sundays. At night, we slept side by side like crayons in a box.
We never felt we were poor because love was enough to get us by. On Sundays we would drive to the laundromat and do the laundry in the blaring heat. My parents would buy us ice cream from the store next door to reward us for our hard work. My brother always got double scoops. I used to assume this was because he was the only boy, but looking back it I remembered how my sister would also always drop her one scoop and he would share the second scoop with her. Sometimes, if there was extra money, my siblings and I would get a can of soda from Lucky’s for $0.25.
My parents worked a lot. I only saw them in the late evenings and on the weekends. My mom worked two jobs to support us all while my dad was getting his PhD. On the evenings they worked late, I would ask my grandmother to sign my school forms for me. I got in trouble one time because my teacher accused me of forging a signature. If only she knew what I knew. In my eyes, watching my grandmother sign her name was such a beautiful experience. I would have never forged it. She would grab a pen, and slowly write each letter — her tongue held up against her upper lip. She was tall, thin, lanky, and signs of war creased her fingers and face. Her hair was always tied in a bun and hidden by a turban. If you were fortunate enough to catch her unbound — you would see that her hair actually touched the ground. The Hmong people technically have no formal written language. She never read a book because she could not read. She only knew how to write her name because in the United States she had to learn to for signing forms like my school paperwork.
I learned to read through Disney sing-a-longs and was identified as “gifted” in the first grade. On gifted exam days, my dad would take an extra trip to the store and buy me a piece of chocolate to score well. He would tell me, “Chocolate is good for the brain, makes you smarter.” Not knowing the intention of the exams, I would purposely fail them so that I could get another piece of chocolate for the next exam. The results would be mailed to the house and my dad and teachers would be utterly confused. Chocolate was a delicacy — an American treat we did not get to enjoy often. In my eyes, I just wanted more chocolate. After failing my gifted exams from first through fourth grade, my fifth grade teacher finally surprised me one day and asked if I could pass a pop up test for her. She said if I did well, she would move my star name to “outstanding.” I did. I passed and was entered into gifted programs for the remainder of my school years until college.
I might have been a “model minority”, but I was never an average American. In fact, I never knew how poor I grew up until I got to college. It was in college that I learned most people had desks their own clothes drawers when they were little, they participated in extracurricular activities and had hands-on parents in their homes.
This memory still stings me: I had just received a scholarship from the Graduate School Division at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and a few of the other students were asking their fellow classmates if they were awarded. When it was discovered that I was the recipient, a younger woman walked up to me and said, “I hope you know you only got the scholarship because you are poor.” We had only been in session for a few weeks and I had never disclosed my socioeconomic status. In fact, I had intentionally hid it because I did not want the “pity” vote. I excluded my complex life circumstances from my school essays, scholarship applications, social media accounts, and so much more. No one knew I slept on an air mattress with a thin bed sheet or that I was so poor I couldn’t afford basic things like food. They did not know my parents lost all of their possessions in the great recession and their job(s). That my family was hopping from foreclosure to foreclosure.
It was in college that I realized my complex narrative and identity did not have a place in elite colleges. Although I had grown up thinking these kinds of institutions epitomized the ultimate “American Dream”, and just because I had been admitted into an institution that only accepts 2% of applicants, it did not mean these places had to be inclusive of my unique needs based on my personal background. Since graduating, I’ve spent a lot of time soul searching and discovering what it means to be Hmong in a society that is so far removed from the protective kinship provided in our community.
