Why PWIs like UWEC do not deserve students of color

I am here to talk about the racist incident that happened in Towers that attacked all Indigenous students with racist slurs, and how institutions of bullshit coddling of snowflake racists have led us to this moment (again). 

Here, I will outline points that were brought up during the conversation that I would like to address for everyone, especially administrators and staff out there as to why UWEC (AND ALL OTHER PWIs) do not deserve students of color: 

1. the continuation and perpetuation of racist ideologies through policies and practices
2. the persistence of hiring and/or elevating SHITTY FUCKING PEOPLE to positions of power
3. the constant fucking repetition of “we need to do our jobs so students can be students” while simultaneously repeating the actions of doing nothing
4.  the way universities always say “change takes time” when they have the fucking power to change it and make it go by fucking faster, and finally,
5. it's been years since I fucking graduated and we're still doing/saying the same shit that they told me when I was here. 

I will leave you at the end with a list of demands that I believe students, faculty, and staff should adopt and probably send en masse to the administration until they fucking listen. But what do I know about organized protest???? 

1. The continuation and perpetuation of racist ideologies through policies and practices

 Racist incidents continue to exist, survive, perpetuate, and continue through the racist ideologies that universities have engrained in their existence. People of color (I mean, staff, faculty, administration, and students) and all marginalized folx were never meant to make it this far into the education system. It was not built for people with marginalized identities. We were just kinda added and expected to adapt. We are not here to adapt. We are here to claim what is ours. We are here to be loud, proud, and fucking annoying.

Administrators have the audacity to say “this is how we have always done it and this is how we will do it” or do some stupid shit like “this is not a value of our university.” Bitch it is now, cause it was perpetrated by one of your students. You are breeding peoples’ ability to spread, spew, and violently harass others with oppressive, hate-filled language and actions by abiding by “the rules” all the time.

FUCK. YOUR. RULES.

FUCK YOUR POLICIES.

Your bureaucratic means and ways of conducting investigations and the intricacies of the channels means literally nothing without the actions. This event is one event of the many that have been reported over the years.

Do you know what happens to the victims typically? I’ll tell you: they report, get an apology email, go through the investigation that requires them to retell their experience 39304850945 times, get interrogated about their experience, and did I mention they still have to be students? If they live on campus they still have to live on a floor that is unsafe. They have to walk the halls, walk outside like it won’t kill them. And by the end, they are just so exhausted with everything that they just want it all to stop.

That’s what administrators want, because it is always too much work to do actual social justice work in pursuing perpetrators and hunting down people. (Additionally, I’d like to add that the people who are typically responsible for actually doing the ground work for these types of Hate/Bias response organizations are marginalized folks, and the responsibility and burden gets put on them. This is shitty because they also have full-time jobs that require attending to, and Hate/bias response organizations and the people who make up these teams are only supposed to dedicate 15-20% of their time to Hate/Bias response. THIS. NEEDS. TO. BE. A. FULL. TIME. FUCKING. POSITION. IF. YOU. CARE. SO. MUCH. ABOUT. CATCHING. PERPETRATORS.) #Duh

2. The persistence of hiring and/or elevating SHITTY FUCKING PEOPLE to positions of power

Speaking of people who inhabit/are a part of hate/bias teams, we need to sit down and have a little fucking talk about this. I’d like to give you a little story time: Once upon a time, I was a student at UWEC and was almost sexually assaulted RIGHT OUTSIDE of my dorm (in front of a male RA who was at the front desk and making eye contact with me at the time and did nothing to stop it but whatevs). I remember distinctly someone within the group of guys calling to their group of friends and saying someone’s name. After I submitted a report to our response team, someone reached out and after a long string of emails, gave me a few individuals to pick out as this person whose name the group of guys called out. The individual that stood out to me was NOT the individual that tried to sexually assault me, but was a witness/friend who was in the friend group who was watching when this happened. He was a bystander. The individual who was conducting the investigation told me that in order for the team to bring in the individual for questioning, I had to accuse him of being the person who tried to sexually assault me. This individual also told me that they had gone and talked to this guy’s RA and the RA said that this guy “didn’t hang out with” that type of crowd and “would never” do something like that. Sounds like someone’s siding on the side of perpetrators, hm….

So instead of pursuing it further, I decided to fucking stop. I was fucking tired of telling the same old story again and again and getting nothing out of it but institutional road blocks.

This person who told me I had to accuse a witness of sexually assaulting me is still currently on the BIRT team at UWEC. This person also has a history of threatening students of color with their future endeavors and implying that they can jeopardize it.  I’ll just let that speak for itself.

BUT ADDITIONALLY: we have to fucking stop elevating shitty fucking people to positions of power where they do EVEN MORE DAMAGE. I’m calling out the entire campus for its lack of diversity in hiring unless it’s for a diversity position. I’m looking @ u UWEC Housing and Res Life.  I’m looking at the ways in which WE PROTECT SHITTY FUCKING ADMINISTRATION AND FACULTY WHO DO NOTHING BUT DO THESE THINGS:

• -          play devils advocate. Last time I checked the devil didn’t need a fucking lawyer
• -          show graphic and traumatizing video for the sake of trauma porn (aka traumatizing people into believing racism/genocide existed and STILL EXISTS). It is only for the benefit of the majority population at the detriment of marginalized folks.
• -          Entertain the idea of “both sides.” You want to entertain the “good side” of slavery? How about you meet my fucking fist? Or better yet, meet a letter calling for your resignation!
• -          Sit back and do nothing. (“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” –Desmond Tutu). You are just as bad as the perpetrators of these crimes if you let them happen ON YOUR WATCH, IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES, AND ON YOUR DAMN DIME! Stop paying pieces of shit.
• -          Rely on students to do the educating. (I thought you got a PH.d? Why the fuck are you having students teach? Are you paying them to do your bidding?)
• -          There’s probably more. Feel free to add.
• 
  

3) the constant fucking repetition of “we need to do our jobs so students can be students” while simultaneously repeating the actions of doing nothing.

Faculty, staff, and admins are always saying “we want to do our jobs so students can be students” but then continue to do nothing? If students are doing your job so well, why don’t you just give them your job?

Students are constantly performing emotional, mental, and educational labor for the sake of everyone else and rarely for themselves. The reason why students of marginalized identities are advocating for themselves is typically because their lives are at stake and their own humanity is on the line if they do not speak up.

During the panel, we heard students say that they are willing to educate others on it. This should not be their jobs. This should be the jobs of the administrators and faculty who have students in their class, to do the fucking educating. Students should not be performing labor FOR FREE for the sake of the university and giving a “cultural experience” for their white counterparts. We are not knowledge machines that shit bricks of cultural awareness.

When I say PAY STUDENTS FOR THEIR LABOR, I fucking mean it. I don’t mean with shitty food, I mean cold hard fucking cash (in a way that in no way, shape, or form, fucks up their scholarships or financial aid awards).

This I the fucking least you can do.  

4) “Change takes time.”

It wouldn’t take so much time if you did your job correctly, and you held your colleagues and supervisors and bosses to a higher standard. It wouldn’t take so much time if white people were willing to sacrifice their jobs and legality for the sake of a better future for their students that they claim to care about so much.

“Change takes time.” Is a copout. It is a FLAT FUCKING LIE. If you think about it, realistically, if you threw the bureaucracy out the window and had enough people to back you up on it (*cough* unions) you would be able to change the fucked up policies and make change go fucking faster.

Change takes time is a copout because it is THE NUMBER ONE WAY UNIVERSITIES WILL WAIT STUDENTS OUT.  IT’S WRITTEN IN STONE FOR UNIVERSITIES TO SAY THIS FUCKING SHITTTTTTT. THEY WILL WAIT YOU OUT BECAUSE THEY KNOW THAT AFTER YOU, THE PEOPLE AFTER YOU WILL BE QUIET, AND THAT EVEN IF THEY’RE LOUD THEY JUST HAVE TO PRETEND TO MAKE LITTLE CHANGES UNTIL YOU GRADUATE AND ONCE YOU GRADUATE THEY’RE OUTTA THE CLEAR OR THEY JUST HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THEIR CRUSTY ASSES RETIRE AND THEN THEY’RE OUTTA HERE SO THEY CAN REPEAT THE SAME BULLSHIT OVER AND OVER AGAIN BECAUSE “THIS IS HOW WE’VE ALWAYS DONE THINGS” AND “THIS IS WHAT THE POLICIES SAY” AND “WE ARE TRYING OUR HARDEST” AND “CHANGE TAKES TIME” IT ALL COMES BACK FULL CIRCLE AND WHY DO I SAY THIS?

5) because the events that unfolded in the Woodland Theatre on September 18^th, 2019 were the exact (I mean like almost 200% verbatim) words and promised actions I was given when I was a student.

My name is Kab Vwj and I was a student at UWEC from Fall of 2013 to the Fall of 2017.

Before I come to UWEC, there was an incident in Towers that was publicized that targeted Hmoob people. It was a sign that was taped to a bathroom mirror that said Hmoob people made smelly food, take Hmong pictures, and only hang out with Hmong people. When I was at UWEC, I was aware of even more incidents that had occurred before my time, and during my time, some of which was directed towards me. Signs written on doors, signs being slipped into showcases,  n words being screamed across the halls, Trump enthusiasts spewing their BULLSHIT all over campus, being spit on, being told we needed to calm down, being told we were threatening, making people cry and having them come for us, staging protests and being told we were “fire hazards”, experiences in class being invalidated, faculty and staff being told to take on more mentees of color, white saviors coming out of their White Savior bat cage to save us poor POC, a merging of OMA and BB that ended only with horizontal oppression of the most vulnerable and visible students of color on campus. All orchestrated and perpetuated by the institution.

This incident is not new. Racism, sexism, xenophobia are not new to UWEC. It is woven in the fabric of UWEC and their policies.

These policies have not changed, though people have come and gone.

During my time at UWEC, I died. There are deep, dark, parts of me that I will never speak of when it comes to UWEC. UWEC haunts me to this very day in the ways that it forced me to change who I was to become stronger and more resilient. My personality is not something I am proud of, it is something I had to morph myself into in order to survive and stay alive. My spirit, my soul, and my well-being was damaged there in ways that are irreparable. I wanted to die when I was there; UWEC is a black hole of trauma, and its ancestry can be felt through every inch of its fake beauty. Every time I come back to UWEC, I am drained by simply being there. That place has a lot of reconciliation to do with the spirits that it has trapped there and the hauntings of the ancestors they have pissed off. A part of my spirit still exists there and it is not a piece I enjoy visiting until reconciliation has been done.

I want to leave a part of me at UWEC that is good though. A little nugget that I hope people continue, not as a part of my legacy, but the legacy that Mizzou taught me when I was at UWEC.  

During my time at UWEC, we created a list of demands that were never met. It may have been the vague nature of the bulletpoints, but I have better ones now. @University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, please see below.

• Create a CAMPUS WIDE land recognition statement, but only if you’re actually committed to the lives and well-being of your Indigenous students. If you aren’t, then don’t even fucking bother. If you want to be super high speed, you might also want to add something about recognizing that the US is built on enslaved Africans and genocide of Indigenous peoples…???

• Update your policies on smudging in the residence halls. Actually, jk, do better than that. You are on Ojibwe land—enable smudging for all buildings on campus.

• How can you honor Indigenous peoples? Give them back their land.

• Wearing the Washington team’s mascot is hate speech. Simple as that. White people wanna be angry about not being able to be racist? Hmm I thought you said you supported your Indigenous students. @Chancellor Schmidt.

• I do not care about the processes that you have in place for finding justice. Tear down those policies and processes that do no good to victims, and only protect the racist.

• Expel students for being racist, sexist, xenophobic pieces of shit. You want to increase your diversity on campus? Let racists know they will not be tolerated there.

• When hiring, you might want to know how candidates will contribute to a safe environment for students of marginalized identities to thrive. Just a thought. MAKE. IT. A. MANDATORY. QUESTION.
• When hiring individuals to teach EDI courses, they should have the correct qualifications to teach it such as: demonstrating an ability to do anti-racist work within communities, have members on committees that are already invovled in these efforts (not just your typical joe) AND INVOLVE STUDENTS. 
• WHEN YOU HIRE DIVERSE FACULTY AND STAFF, YOU TAKE ON THEIR DIVERSE ISSUES. YOU MUST BE PREPARED TO FUCKING PROPERLY SUPERVISE AND MENTOR THESE FACULTY AND STAFF AND NOT FORCE THEM TO LEAN ON EACH OTHER FOR EMOTIONAL SUPPORT *ALL* THE TIME. THERE SHOULD ALREADY BE POLICIES IN PLACE TO PROTECT THESE FACULTY AND STAFF BECAUSE THEY WILL BE SCRUTINIZED FOR EVERYTHING THEY DO AND SAY. 
• WHEN HIRING, CHALLENGE YOURSELF TO MOVE BEYOND "QUALIFICATIONS" AS REQUIREMENTS, AND LOOK AT BACKGROUND EXPERIENCE AS A SUPPLEMENT TOO. 
• This is just general good practice and accountability for you shitbags who just hire people cause you know them and overlook qualified candidates: When you do not hire a candidate for a position, write a statement for that individual as to why they did not receive that position or why they were not selected. This is just a professional courtesy. 

• When admitting students, it’ll be easier off of the bat if you just ask “Are you a white supremacist/racist/Nazi piece of shit/rapist or a sympathizer to any of the above?” to save you the heartache of having to expel them later. (You might also want to reflect the demographics of the community that surrounds your university...hmm what a fucking thought). 

• Hire more staff/faculty of marginalized identities. These marginalized faculty/staff/administration will more than likely be seen as mentors for the marginalized identity that they inhabit so…why don’t you just offer them more money off of the bat???

• Want to hear student voices? Put them on your committees, your hate and bias response teams, and pay them for it. Give them class credit. Stop asking for student voices and shrugging when they have to leave because you’re inadequate at retaining them.

• Recruiting is not the same as retention. You should be more worried about retention at this point. Students of color are telling other students of color not to come to UWEC. Be worried.

• Mandatory training for everyone. Every. Body. HR will make it work. And not a ONE TIME deal. CONTINUOUS. Talk about Queer theory, Critical Race Theory, and the complexities of identities within the 21st Century (IN AND OUTSIDE of the US) 

• Education is not enough. Education paired with action is necessary. We are beyond the point of letting racists be safe or comfortable anymore. If you claim to want to make it safe for HISTORICALLY MARGINALIZED FOLKS you have to be okay with taking risk on the white people you will lose in the process. Your actions will speak louder than your words. 
• Allocate proper funds to the offices that serve marginalized folks. We all know they're always fucking struggling. 
• Take a stance. Are you anti-racist or not? Are you a sanctuary school? 
• The student and faculty code should have a section on anti-racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/classist...ETC. behavior and SPELLED OUT consequences that come with the violation of the code. Too many "types of behavior" to count? Why don't you use your hate/bias response team to highlight the most common and start from there? 
• Police accountability. Have you thought about what that relation looks like to students/faculty/staff/admin who have been historically abused at the hands of the police? What does that relationship look like on a campus and what is the role? 

(If anyone wants more ideas for Lists of Demands, please visit thedemands.org)

These points are not just for UWEC. They are for the entire UW system, the entirety of the United States education system too. I am exhausted with having the same fucking conversations ever fucking year about the same fucking shit. Of being told by my peers who are still at UWEC that nothing has changed. I thought that by now, everyone on campus who has had to live through these conversations would be fucking tired too. But I guess they’re just waiting for the next incident to tell us how sorry they are, or they’re waiting for us to fucking die before they do anything about it.

Universities are lucky to have students of color choose them. We bring color into their lives and celebrate life in ways that white people can only yearn for (that's why they're so keen on stealing so much fucking shit...and people). We were never meant to be here and yet we are, and we are fucking killing it. We are ready to replace the administration that enabled racists to get away with taking our humanity, and we are not letting anyone, anything stand in our way (so get the fuck out of the way). PWIs may need us, but we do not need them.

And lastly, for those of you who read this far, I want to point out this: I’m not doing this out of hatred for my alma mater. It may seem that way. I am doing this out of love. I am doing this out of disappointment for the glorious university that I thought would know by now, how to answer the call when it comes to accountability and justice. I see and seek out so much more potential out of UWEC than I ever got out of it. I made it a point to make that place better than when I arrived, and I feel disappointed in every administrator I’ve come into contact with since graduating that they are still upholding practices that I thought had died when I was a student. I’ve had such negative experiences at UWEC and I grew into a badass bitch despite all of the trauma (no thanks to the individuals who attempted to and/or inadvertently tried to stop me from succeeding). But if it is true that y’all are on a new path to accountability, transparency, communication, and true change…then you need to get rid of your bureaucratic legacies and replace them with truth and radical policies that will make racists afraid, not empowered. 

The complicated relationship between poor, refugee fathers and their children

*note: a previous version of this was titled "The complicated relationship between poor, refugee fathers and their daughters" I have since changed this title from "daughters" to "children" in order to acknowledge the different experiences of children and their fathers that may parallel my experience.


Father’s Day is an excruciatingly difficult time for me.

For those who have had absent, nonexistent, or toxic parents/fathers in their life, I think we all know best what these days conjure up for us.

As the eldest daughter of Hmoob refugees, growing up poor, growing up as non-citizens, and not speaking English, my parents had to sacrifice a lot to give me the opportunity to be where I am today.

Unfortunately, the sacrifices that our parents make come at the cost of time with their children, showing them love and kindness, and raising them to be conscious of themselves as they venture into adulthood.

These lessons are lost and stripped away from children when their parents must adhere to the gruesome hours of factory work. When parents must learn how to navigate systems by keeping their head low, their voices quiet, and their children obedient.

These lessons of life are lost when parents come home and do not have the emotional or physical capacity to show care, love, and patience when they are exhausted.

My parents, and more specifically, my dad, has always chosen his work over his children. When I was a child, I used to be jealous of children whose parents would show up to school events and fully support and love what their children had to show them. I remember choir concerts where I walked home afterwards at night, wishing that my parents could come see and support me. I remember how painful it was to see that even when my mom attended my events, she was confused about what was going on, because she did not speak English. For an internalized child who has grown up surrounded by white people, what else could be expected, other than to hate her culture, her language, her skin color, and resent her parents?

My mom did the best she could. She is a powerhouse of a woman and is one of the strongest women I know. Her ferocity is not only contagious—it’s hereditary.

But regardless, I had to support myself and my brothers through my childhood. When Mother’s day and Father’s day rolls around, I always celebrate myself for raising my brothers.  I never asked to be a parent for my brothers, nor was I ever told what made my leadership/leading style right. I was always told what I did wrong by my parents and my relatives. I was responsible for their behaviors and their grades. Again, what else were my parents to do in a country whose education system they had never navigated? I was the only one who had the experience. I was the only one who had the answers. Anything short of that was a failure on my part.

I made it a priority to show up to my brothers’ concerts and events because I never wanted them to even question whether or not what they did was important. When I entered my college years, I still drove to see my brothers’ events. This past month, I drove with my brother to go see the university he would be attending this fall.

I have not been a perfect “parent” for my brothers. I have a page in my bulletjournal that lists all the topics I have yet to discuss with them. My brothers and I have come a long way despite the absence of our parents, especially our dad.

The absence of my dad was never questioned in my childhood. It was a given that he was the moneymaker in the family, therefore, his parental obligation finished there. The only times I remotely remember affection from my dad is in pictures of when I was a kid, in pigtails. I had very few pictures with my mom, but a multitude of pictures with my dad and me at the park. He used to take me to the park to feed bread to the ducks (please don’t do this it’s bad for them…I know better now). I think I noticed the change in my dad’s affections when he was laid off from the company he’d been working at for well over a decade. He’d had that job since I was born, and I remember that I wrote my first resume as a 12 or 13 year old to help my dad find a job. It was a dark time for my dad, and I remember being frustrated with him for consistently asking me to file his unemployment paperwork.

On the day of my graduation from my undergraduate degree, I told him months prior to take off of work the night before. I reminded him consistently. He ended up taking a shift the night prior and the morning of my graduation, he did not attend my graduation. The complicated feelings I had to grapple with were 1) that he was working to make money and 2) as the first and only daughter in our family to complete a bachelor’s degree AND commission into the military, I didn’t see how he couldn’t make my accomplishments a priority. I still grapple with these feelings to this day.

I resent my dad for a lot of reasons. He is an avid supporter of policies that directly go against the policies that allowed him into this country (he supports the deportation of immigrants and refugees, when he himself was a refugee after the Vietnam war). He is patriarchal in everything that he does (believes there is a difference between men’s work and women’s work), and I remember he said to me, straight in my fucking face that if any of his children were gay or trans, he would disown them rather than be shamed by our community. He fetishizes young women from Laos and Thailand, and especially women who adopt White beauty standards (blue eyes, fair skin, and “thick” in the right places).

My dad’s situation is complicated and I continue grappling with these complications. There is trauma that runs through his veins that he has never voiced. He is healing and these are things he cannot talk about, and chooses not to talk about. None of which gives him a pass to be a shitty piece of shit when it comes to the bullshit he supports about immigration and cisheteromisogyny.

What does it mean for us Hmoob daughters to love our parents when they do not extend the same to us? What does it mean when the Hmoob men/fathers in our life treat us like shit and we, as Hmoob womxn have to reason with it and use their trauma as an excuse?

I cried a lot while writing this piece. I’m still crying now. I’m writing this piece mostly for me, to reconcile with the complicated emotions I have towards my dad on this Father’s Day.

If I could, I would say to him today:

I forgive you for being the father that you are.

I will not resent any of the sacrifices you have made to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads, and electricity in our home. I will teach my children the same work ethic you have taught me. And I will also teach them everything that you failed to teach me. 

But I will not forgive you for showing your sons apathy when they beg for your love and attention. I will not forgive you for instigating conversations with me only for your own amusement. I will not forgive you for refusing to acknowledge when you are wrong, or when you are being lazy in your parenting tactics.I will not forgive you for not trying to search for the answers on how to be a better father, husband, role model.

I will not forgive you for bringing me into this world to do your parenting. I will not forgive you for bringing my youngest brother into this world when you were well aware of how hands off you would be with him. 

I am your daughter.

You are lucky to have a daughter like me.

My brothers are lucky to have me.

I am lucky to have me.

Happy Father’s day to me.

2022 Edit: 

- Many folks have approached me/commented on this article on social media platforms, and this blog to say: "You should be grateful" and to that, I say this: Nah. 

To be a homebody, to be a Hmoob daughter

Tonight, I should be home.

I promised my younger brother that I would take him to see the Lego Movie 2.

Tonight, I should be home.

I haven’t been home in almost a month, and I haven’t seen my youngest brother, held him, laughed with him, explored trains and animals with him, and spoken to him in Hmoob.

I haven’t been able to ask him to say “thov” when he is asking for a treat, his toys, or when he asks to go with me.

Tonight, I should be home.

I miss sleeping on the floor of my brother’s room as he snores. The room is too small for us both, and I always create a mess, but he just got accepted to UW-Steven’s Point and he will be gone soon. This room will be empty soon. I just want to cherish it while he is still here.

Tonight, I should be home.

My parents are in the middle of one of their biggest fights ever, and months before were headed towards divorce. Things have calmed down since I told them I would not be coming back for quite some time. Maybe they finally realized what I meant when I said I was tired of being a parent to my parents, and a parent to my brothers.

Yesterday, my mom called me over Facebook and told me not to come home. The roads will be bad. The snow will be dangerous. I know that if I come home, my parents will dump the last 4 weeks onto me.

I am my parents’ eldest and only daughter.

I am my parents’ hopes and dreams, I carry their sacrifices on my shoulders. Sometimes their sacrifices carry me in my darkest times. These are the demons we refuse to talk about. When I talk about them, I can never stop the tears.

I am my parents’ eldest and only daughter. I was born to raise my brothers, I was born and bred to be a nyab. I was born to be the success story that my parents dreamt of when they ran from war.

I think Hmong daughters know best, the burden of carrying their entire family on their shoulders. Carrying their emotions, their hopes, their dreams, their love, their traumas. We carry their love, even when we know it does not even amount to the love that they give to the sons they wish we were.

Hmoob daughters know best, that we are never completely our parents’. We will go when we are married. We will become a part of someone else’s family.

I am rejecting this idea to say that I will always be a part of my family, and someone who cannot respect this does not deserve my love. I reject this idea because my brothers will still need me, my parents will still need me, and I will still need them.

Tonight, I should be home.

I am a homebody. Every time I leave home to go back to the town where I am pursuing my studies, I feel my heart break. I feel the distance between my heart and my soul when I leave. I hear my youngest brother saying my name, asking to go with. I see the way that he waves goodbye to me through the window in our living room. I see the way he doesn’t leave the window until my car is out sight.

I hear the way my mom asks me when I am leaving, the moment I step foot into the house. I hear the way she tells me not to worry about her as she misses another dose of her medication for depression.

I hear my brothers ask me to take them to the store, ask how to get rid of acne, how to do their taxes, how to apply for college, how to apply for jobs, how to interview.

Tonight, I should be home. But instead, I am crying.

I have always had to choose between my career, my future, and my family, as if there will always be a rift between the person I am supposed to be and the person I want to be. I am waiting for a day where I do not have to choose between the two.

My mom says to me when I leave, “Mus kawm ntawv kom zoo nawb mog, txhob txhawj txoj peb.” I do well in my studies. It is not my studies I am worried about. It is how much life I will have missed out when my studies are done, how many birthdays I will have missed, graduations I will miss, family talks, tears, laughter, smiles because of the military, because of school, because of work, because of weather, because of the distance between me and my heart and home.

I will be home soon again.

My parents have never agreed with the decisions I have made in my life and they have been vocal about it. My parents have never voiced their support for my future, for my current studies, but they have always been there. I know I will make myself proud. To be the person I want to be for myself, my brothers, my parents, my Hmoob community. I have succeeded thus far, I will continue to.

(Nayyirah Waheed)