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)

The Emotional Bullshit of Graduate School for Marginalized Identities

To those of us who have been on “survival” mode for our entire lives, we yearn for the days where we no longer have to put on our faces and pretend we are okay.

We wait for the days where we can finally thrive, or we wait for the days where those who come after us will not have to suffer the way we did.

If our undergraduate degree wasn’t exhausting enough, those who continue for a higher degree face the barriers of graduate school.

For me, graduate school is an entirely different beast than undergrad. If not, worse. I find myself reliving the same institutionalized and colonized dynamics of the classroom, find myself having the same conversations with white people about their fragility, same conversations with my nonwhite folks about how frustrating it is to exist in an institution where their voices are not valued.

The easily exploitable uniqueness of graduate students is that graduate students are not employees…and not students. No one knows what the fuck to do with graduate students. Graduate students who have assistantships are overworked, underpaid, told to create barriers between The Graduate Student Professional and The Undergraduate Student while simultaneously being told they don’t have “enough experience” to have a seat at the table, or to have an opinion on administrative and institutional matters.

Being a graduate student means being nor a student nor an employee. It means having to carefully draw the line between what you want to say and do versus what you have to say and do because the people you interact with are future employers and recommenders. Employers of graduate students exploit them with this power, and that’s what makes it hard to fight back.

Being a graduate student means consistently pushing yourself to go above and beyond expectations even when you’re simply trying to stay afloat. The unnecessarily competitive (*capitalistic*) culture of graduate school means that if you aren’t contributing, working, or doing something at all hours of the day, it means you aren’t doing enough. It means feeling the need to do everything, but not having the ability or the power to do anything.

Being a graduate student means having to compartmentalize HOW and WHEN your personal life shows up, whether it’s because it’s not safe to share in the environments you’re in, or because if you bring them up, you feel like you will never stop sharing, and never stop crying about it.

It means the things going on in your personal life must be put on the backburner to all of the things you have to complete at work and school. It means coming to work with your baggage and carrying it with you throughout the day, and having to face it when you go home for the night as well.  It means you can never escape it, and it will continue to eat away at you.

Being a graduate student means consistently watching the way you spend your money. It means taking a second and third job in order to pay your bills, your meals, your rent, your school, just to barely break even, or sometimes, not even breaking even.

Being a graduate student means that if you have children, or are a primary caretaker for your family, that your time with them is limited, or your mind is with them during the work/school day, and the physical space between you and them creates a hole in your existence.

It means working with faculty and staff and thinking “why do you have a fucking job, you incompetent fuck?” It means not feeling like you will be (or are) ever enough, nor do you have a purpose due to the barriers you face, disillusioned people you meet who have become silent or coopted by colonization and whiteness. It means being burned by people who you thought had your back, it means people who will choose silence over justice, who will choose comfortability and cater to those in power over challenging them.

It means when you speak out, you are met with people who try to tone police, who try to silence you. People who will tell you to “watch yourself” and to “spend your institutional likeability” wisely. People who will tell you to learn how to “play the game.”

Being a graduate student means carrying the emotional burden of the students you interact with and feeling you will never do enough to ensure they can thrive. It means feeling a sense of responsibility to fight back against institutions who perpetuated the same shit in your undergrad, and seeing it manifest into the lives of your students. It means seeing reflections of your own institutional traumas in students and despising the fact that they must learn through these experiences.

Being a graduate student means gravitating towards people whose experiences are like yours; it means clinging onto them for support, and them leaning on you for support. It means trying to keep each other afloat and alive. It means asking them to live, when you can barely do it yourself.

Being a graduate student means feeling like you are never enough nor will you ever find AND fulfil your purpose because of the fatigue that comes with all of the barriers you face DUE TO the identities you hold. It means questioning your purpose.

Being a graduate student means physical ailments that manifest from institutional violence, it means negative coping mechanisms and the inability to forgive ourselves through alcohol, drug use, isolation, depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Being a graduate student is people telling you to “self care” but the institution never recognizing what violent systems are in place that force people to take time to take care of themselves AND others, rather than systems taking care of their people.  

To be a graduate student who is a person of color and/or mixed

To be a graduate student who is Indigenous

To be a graduate student who speaks more than one language

To be a graduate student who has a physical, emotional, mental disability

To be a graduate student who is trans

To be a graduate student who is queer

To be a graduate student who does not fit in “conventional beauty” standards

To be a graduate student whose religion (or lack thereof) have been stigmatized

To be a graduate student who does not have a typical “US nuclear family”

To be a graduate student who comes from a low socioeconomic background

To be a graduate student whose close and loved ones are undocumented and/or refugees

To be a graduate student who is a survivor

To be a graduate student with a history of drug and alcohol abuse

To be a graduate student with any one or multiple marginalized identities is revolutionary.

It means your success echoes throughout your ancestors, the people who came before you, and the spirits of those to come after you. Your existence in graduate school and your successes (REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT YOU GRADUATE) are acts of resistance.

Because your successes are for you, but they are also for your ancestors. To be worth their pain and their sacrifices, to be more than what they sacrificed—to be more than what they were forced to be—for you to be a result of that tenacity, that passion, and the relentlessness that comes with being an embodiment of a fucking hurricane.

We may never see the day where we can finally thrive, and maybe survival is all we can ask for, for now. We must lay the groundwork and do the work for ourselves, for everyone. For liberation, because we are fucking hurricanes from the east coast to the west coast, to the south, to the north.

The Midwest may never have seen hurricanes, but the nation better prepare themselves because we are fucking hurricanes and climate change is coming.