*This work was submitted as a chapter in the 2019 anthology "A New Journey: Hmong College Student Experiences" and can be purchased at Her Publisher*
Foreword:
I often see myself as inadequate to fit the expectations my community and my family puts on me. I must be worth their sacrifices, and I must do everything in my power to continuously give, contribute, and lay the groundwork for my people. I think for many Hmoob youth, we see education as a means to attain success and a means to gain credibility within society (both U.S. and Hmoob) and to go far in life. The thing they don’t tell you about success is that it was never built for and never meant for people like us. People with experiences, trauma, and history like us. Systems are blessed to have us but treat us like burdens. And when we return home, we speak less of the language of our ancestors and more of the language of colonizers, for the sake of success. We feel inadequate in both U.S. and Hmoob society despite how much we believe we have gotten it “right.” There is no right way--there are only journeys and experiences that highlight the injustices of a system not built for us. And yet, we are still here.
***
Whether I choose so or not, I will always be first and foremost, the eldest and only Hmoob daughter to my parents in a sea of sons. As a daughter of refugees, I am someone whose successes are a testament to the sacrifices my ancestors have made to get me where I am today. I have always been and will be a relentless caretaker, activist, and protector, and that is a trait that carries me to my future endeavors.
My story is as complicated as my life is right now. I write this as a 24 year old bisexual Hmoob woman, with a Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Communication from a University of Wisconsin school, one of two years completed of my Master’s degree in Student Affairs Administration, and I deploy in less than two weeks to a country that has the potential to be a warzone. On top of this, I have five brothers whose lives are changing rapidly, too fast for me to catch up with and give them the support they need.
Things are changing for me fast, and they have always been changing and challenging me. I balance my life and my passions in ways that I’ve been told is both freakishly productive and unhealthy. These habits definitely formed while I was searching for my identity and my place in the world as I navigated through my college years to create the personality of the person I am today. I am so proud of who I am right now and I honestly can’t wait to see the person I become in the future. I have so much growth and further potential that I am excited to tap into. I can’t wait to be the role model that my younger self needed.
My journey to discovering my voice, my passions, and myself requires background on me. I am the oldest and only daughter in my family. My parents had 5 sons after me and these sons are mistakenly called my sons all the time by both strangers and my parents. I raised my brothers because that is what I was born to do, and it is a responsibility that I didn’t know I could refuse. The youngest right now is three years-old and the oldest is 21 years-old.
My motivation for attending college was pretty straightforward. It seemed like the next logical thing for me. I didn’t know then, but I know now that I’m in love with learning. I’m in love with how many different ways I learn and most of all, I’m in love with the possibility of a future where I will always be learning from the people around me, from myself, and from the youth.
For my parents, the decision to go to college was a possibility that was up in the air for them. They didn’t quite understand what it meant. They were indifferent because of their conflicting understandings of the role of a Hmoob daughter versus what the American Dream was to them. I remember when my mom said to me “ Mus kawm ntawv, txhob mus ua tus ruam li kuv” (Go to school, don’t be stupid/dumb like me). My mom is hard of hearing and she has been told her entire life she’s not able to do things she wants to by both Hmoob people and society in general. Her identity as a Hmoob disabled person is complicated and she motivates me to create a better life and dismantle systems that tell her what she can and cannot do.
The process for applying for college was mind-bogglingly difficult. I remember being stressed, having anxiety, crying, and just being frustrated. As the very first in my family and extended family to go to college, I had so many questions with no one to turn to for answers. What was FAFSA? What was financial aid? There’s a difference between grants and work study and scholarships? What classes did I need to take? What does an advisor do? How did parking work? My parents helped me as much as they knew how to, but again, navigating the systems and institutions of the United States is intentionally difficult for refugees, immigrants, and anyone with a marginalized identity. It both frustrated and saddened me to hear about how people completed their multiple college applications and FAFSA with ease, while I continued to struggle seemingly alone. It was a time where I wished I had a mentor to help me through this difficult and alien-like process.
Going through this process alone was painful, but it made me a stronger person. I’ve now become a valuable resource for my brothers, but it was also a painful and lonely process that I believe no one should go through by themselves. Being this resource for my brothers means everything to me because of how lost and helpless I felt in those moments.
My family was important to me when deciding what university to attend for my Bachelor’s degree. I toured and applied to only one school, and it was the school in the hometown I grew up in. I was not ready to leave the responsibilities that I had at home and my obligation to my brothers. I decided though, to live in the residence hall to give myself the mental distance from family and distractors in order to focus on my studies.
While I think I have a lot of unique personal growth that shaped my experiences, I believe that my experience may mirror the ones that Hmoob women go through as they navigate their space and place in higher education as well as in Hmoob society. I grappled with imposter syndrome, being a caretaker, being a “good daughter,” performing emotional labor for our families, our relationships, and the Hmoob men who demand it. Being close to home meant I went home a lot. I made it an effort to balance between my social life and family life, but I know deep down that I still feel a sense of inadequacy of how well I actually did.
As an undergrad student, I was looking for and learning about my worth, my passion, and my sense of direction for the future. I don’t think this is an extraordinary experience that is unique to just me.
Initially when I entered college, I was internalized. By this, I mean I had really adopted and adhered to the ideology that if I worked hard, everything would fall into place. That if I wanted to be successful, I had to take away as much Hmong-ness in me, and replace it with whiteness. Internalized racism has many names, most commonly used as “whitewashed.” I want to tell the people who continue on their journey to discovery that it is a process and it is a long and painful one. Some people may never go through this process and have always had a strong sense of how important being Hmoob is. But for those who have gone through this process of self-hatred, of shame, of embarrassment, please know that you are not alone in this. I thought I was the only one. I was not.
Once you learn how much your mind has been corrupted to think you are only worthy when you are less of your culture and more like white people, you will feel a sense of anger and obligation. I joined an organization that held weekly meetings that talked about all the racist shit that happened and continued to happen on campus. We talked about what it meant to exist on campus as visible people of color. We talked about how flawed the education system had to be in our town that housed a large population of Hmoob people for them to ask “What’s Hmong?” As if our siblings, parents, grandparents, ancestors crawled through bombs and blood for nothing at all. As if their sacrifices and their thirst for liberation added up to simply “What’s a Hmong?” and to be told “Go back to where you came from” and to bite your tongue instead of saying “My people wouldn’t be here in the first place if your fucking country didn’t go around sticking their nose up everyone’s business.” This group became a place where I could process my daily interactions with (mostly white) people who said things out of ignorance and unknowing, but would change none of their behaviors, no matter how many times I would call them on it.
And as more and more women spoke up in the group, we also analyzed how Hmoob men, despite their marginalization, also used tools of oppression to silence and abuse (literally and figuratively) the women in their lives. This opened up conversations about Hmoobness and queerness. My world opened up. I spoke, and people listened. People listened and they related. I had never been able to relate to people like this before; on a level deeper than just interests and likes. It was a deep, resilient, and trauma-related connection. And my connection to these people, to hear their pain that was like and unlike my own lit a fire under me to pursue the people who were the cause of it. I wanted to know why almost every single year I would experience the same shit from different people. I wanted to know why, when we reported or were victims of racist, sexist, and xenophobic things were said or done by other students, professors, or staff, why they were not reprimanded for it. I wondered if they were waiting for one of us to die before they did anything. If they would do anything at all.
I became an activist. I wanted to (and I did, and continue to) fight against systems and the people who enabled people to silence, burn out, and eradicate beauty in cultures like and unlike ours. I wanted to fight against systems and people who enabled the spread of hate without stopping it at its roots.
When I was thinking about my future (the summer before I graduated in December of 2017), I had been searching for graduate programs that fit my career path. I had come to the realization early on that I had gone through my undergrad by myself, with little institutional support from faculty and staff. The support I did receive was from other marginalized faculty and staff that were already bombarded with trying to take care of themselves as well. I realized and I saw a lack of administrators who cared about their students of marginalized identities. I looked at the executive administration of my university and saw that I’d been doing their jobs for them while they averted responsibility with words like “diversity” and “inclusion.” I recognized my worth and my relentlessness. I saw a deficiency of a sense of urgency required of an administrator when interacting with, making decisions about, and advocating alongside marginalized voices on campus. And basically, I set out to replace them.
I applied to a master’s program that did not require a GRE. My philosophy is that if a program does not require a GRE, they therefore have an understanding of how standardized testing disproportionately disadvantages poor, disabled, people of color and other marginalized communities. I was accepted into a Student Affairs Administration program in the Midwest, two hours away from my family and started in the fall of 2018 on my journey to be a Student Affairs professional. I was going to embark on my journey to replace the administration that had refused to provide resources to support my journey. I was going to become the woman that I needed when I was a lonely, scared, and frustrated teen applying for college for the first time. I was going to be the visible role model that I needed for support when I was going through my undergraduate experience. I was setting my sights on and pledging my life to serve students and their needs.
My first year in the program was the hardest, most challenging, yet most rewarding experience I have ever had. For me, I felt like I had reached a peak in my life. My program was a cohort that was filled with a majority of people of color. The program had never been that diverse before, and it showed in the way they prepped the faculty and staff that would interact with us. We were relentless in our search for deeper conversations, critiques of the bureaucracy of our field, and what was required of us in order to change it.
At one point, a white woman in class had the caucasity to say that when she walked into the classroom, she felt uncomfortable and that she didn’t belong. As a person of color who had done this all my life, I laughed. I had been code-switching, keeping silent, and making my words nice enough and palatable for white people to listen to me and see me as non-threatening and worthy of listening to. Grad school was the first time in my life that I felt genuinely cared for and heard of in a classroom. I felt that my experiences were valuable and that they would launch me into the field and make it better, more accountable, and student-driven. People commented on how powerful my voice was and what it meant for them to hear someone speak the absolute truth--uncensored.
I don’t think people realized how much that statement would have an impact on me. As an activist, I had always been told (and continue to be told) that I am too much. I have been told I’m too angry, too loud, too hopeful, and wanting too much too fast, and that everyone isn’t ready for it. This gave me a sense of inadequacy. People told me I was intimidating and I felt as if my existence of being “too much” was scaring off potential relationships and connections I could have with people. I learned to swallow my words and make them more palatable, nicer, censored for the sake of other peoples’ comfort. I felt disingenuine, fake, and not like myself. It was as if someone had gutted the truest parts of me and kept only the things that made me outwardly desirable. For a long time, I became a shell of myself and tiptoed my voice around people in fear of losing relationships. This has contributed greatly to how much I guard my emotions around people and how people see me as cold. But the most important thing I realized when I became this shell of myself, and silenced my own voice for the sake of others was that I was never too much. I realize now that I am not too much and I have never been “too much.” I am only too much for people who cannot handle me. I will always be enough for myself, for my cause, and for my people. Grad school solidified this.
The people I surrounded myself with were a circle of support, love, validation, challenge, and we were all we had to survive. The institution is not built for marginalized people to succeed, so we had to lean on one another to do it. The lack of institutional accountability for the emotional labor that students have to perform for one another is uncanny and unacceptable.
In my time during my graduate degree, I worked for an office that intentionally created space, time, and resources for students to feel welcome and validated in their experiences. They are the biggest reason why I decided to attend that specific school and specific program. I saw the way that they impacted students like myself, and I wanted to be a part of that. No matter how shitty the people of the institution were outside of those doors, I always had people in that office to support and validate me. I can only hope to replicate that feeling in the future.
On top of that, I had four other Hmoob students with me. My heart has never been so full of validation before. I never had to explain myself and my experiences to the Hmoob members of my cohort. It seemed to click immediately and it was a bond that I will always cherish between us. In a sense, my Hmoob cohort saved me. My graduate school was so far away from home that I missed everything about being near my family and Hmoob people. We would get together and cook Hmoob food and play board games. For a year, they were my family and the people I leaned on.
I also leaned on the community within the town to ease my loneliness. I remember how full my heart was when we did a dinner with all Hmoob faculty and staff at my university and how much collective wisdom there was to go around. I attended a weekly outing called “Paj Ntaub Circle” that also saved my life in my darkest times. All we did was eat, do paj ntaub, tell ghost stories and/or gossip. It helped me with speaking Hmoob and it eased my homesickness. It took my mind off of things that stressed me out and brought me back to my roots.
I finished my first year on a high. I learned so much about myself and I couldn’t wait to learn more with my cohort. But alas, I like to consider my life a series of trials and challenges and that my resiliency is what makes me so strong. After completing my first year of graduate school, I was called on to deploy.
For the longest time after being told I was deploying, I told no one. I sobbed in my car on the way home and that took all the strength I had. One day, I told my therapist while in a session and she asked about it a few weeks after, questioning if I’d told anyone yet. I hadn’t. I was doing it out of selfishness. I was afraid that people would see me differently. That my relationships would be a series of “lasts” and that they would lack the spontaneity of living in the moment. I remember the question she asked me that forced me to think. She asked me: “Don’t you think they deserve to know, so they can take time to grieve as well?”
I don’t speak much about the military. It’s something that I don’t speak about often because the military is just a part of my life; I don’t consider it something that I’d like to be a part of me, especially when I leave it. I love the skills I have learned and continue to learn. It has enhanced my confidence, my voice, and my ability to be concise and precise. I don’t see being in the military as a part of my life that I enjoy disclosing because many of my beliefs do not align with the bureaucratic structure that the military operates under. But when I joined in my first year of my undergraduate degree, I did it out of curiosity and the appeal of money. I am thankful for how the military has contributed to my financial stability, but it always comes at a cost. I am gone frequently, away from loved ones. I am burnt out when I come back from drill weekends. And I consistently have to code switch between the real me, and the person the military wants me to be. But I have met so many amazing people through the military. I’ve heard stories of loss, pain, strength, resiliency, and a means to change the world. These stories are with my heart and they inspire me to be better alongside my soldiers. My biggest fear is that I will change unknowingly and unwillingly while I am deployed. This is always a fear of mine. How deep can I infiltrate and how much survival can I do until the values I oppose become a part of who I am?
As I continue on my journey, I’ve come to the realization that I cannot always take people with me. People grow apart, grow into different people that do not align with our goals, or just simply lose touch. I pray and hope though, that those who matter will stay. I use the analogy of the door for my relationships. Doors may close, but I do not lock them. All it takes is a knock and we can grace one another with our presence again.
***
As I continue into my future of uncertainty, I am still learning to love the parts of me that I do not speak of. I find solace in spoken word, written word, but mostly, I find the most validation when there are words to describe my experiences, my feelings, and my pain and joys. That is why I do the work that I do; to have others/my own experiences validated by words that show that what I’m feeling is not normal and what we feel as a collective is what creates who we are. Hmoob people are a collectivist culture, not an individualistic one. We must come together to fight for injustices not just for ourselves and our people, but for others as well. If I can feel the pain of others as my own, that empathy will pave the path for us to want change not just for people who look, think, and identify as us, but to all marginalized peoples. Black, Indigenous, Latinx, trans and nonbinary, queer, disabled, poor, immigrants/refugees..the list goes on and the list will always go on. It is our collective duty to disrupt systems for the sake of all, not just ourselves.
What we feel deeply amongst ourselves is extraordinarily groundbreaking for the children we were and the changemakers that we are and will become. When the youth ask us what we were doing in times of hate, turmoil, and concentration camps, we must give them an answer that will bring us peace. We are the people we have been waiting for. We must be the heroes of the stories--yes, even if it is our own.
No matter what, your journey whether linear or non-linear, always remember these things:
Be kind to yourself.
Healing is messy. Do it at your own pace, and don’t force it until you are ready.
Your ancestors see, hear, and believe in you.
Sib pab thiab txhawb nqa.
Some people are not ready for you, and that is not your fault.
You belong here.
Laugh.
Thank the womxn in your life.
Do not apologize for voicing the way you deserve to be loved.
If you set yourself on fire to keep others warm, I hope that when you meet the sun, you will both fall in love.
And lastly, angry bitches get shit done.
