Hmongs, Laotians, Cambodians, etc.

[kasia]

i'm not sure if we have any hmong, laotion, cambodian, mein (i know there's more but i can't name them all) members on yw, but if there are, now's the time to speak up! what other groups are there?

do you often find that your interests are overlooked by society because of the larger Asian groups that exist? what, specifically, would those interests be? what comes to mind first would be education. i would think that the model minority myth probably impacts this group the most, because of the refugee background of most of their families.

are you tired of being considered a subgroup of Vietnamese or Chinese people? do you often get mistaken as such? how would you like to be identified? for those of you in college, do you have organizations or clubs that represent your identity? at u.c. davis, i remember that we had a hmong club as well as a mein club (which consisted of 6 people). does sharing with members of your ethnicity make a difference?

also - random question - on surveys, what box do you check under the question about ethnicity?

[SunWuKong]

honestly, i think many people from those groups, as well as many Vietnamese people, face different problems than East Asian people, because many of them are from refugee status, and the US government sometimes ignore special needs they may have. and i think this is especially true for the Hmong. the bad thing is that they don't really have a political voice of their own.

[Emperor_Mike]

To some extent it's true that East Asians tend not to pay a whole lot of attention to Southeast Asians. It's a shame, really. I think it has much to do with the fact that East Asia gets more exposure media and culturally. You go to CNN's homepage and quite often you'll find big stories on China or Japan or Korea, but very rarely anything newsworthy from Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and the like.

[kitty]

Because of their refugee status, many Hmong, Cambodian, etc.. communities don't have as much access to political vocalization as the pan-Asian American community in general. Unfortunately, because most activists are middle to upper-middle class Asian Americans, the issues of those in the lower-classes or of Southeast Asian origin are usually lost in the shuffle.

One thing I learned is that in D.C., they are now trying to break down the category of Asian Pacific Islander in the Census (etc) into these different sub-ethnicities... in order to try and bring more of the focus on the marginalized Asian ethnicities.

[thaite]

Here's an interesting story you might want to read.

In a Homeland Far From Home (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/magazine/16CAMBODIA.html)

[SunWuKong]

Here's an interesting story you might want to read.

In a Homeland Far From Home (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/magazine/16CAMBODIA.html)

you need to be registered to access the article in that link.

[seanp]

I don't think there are any south east asian people here except for vietnamese.

[thaite]

It's a long story, but here's the first page.



In a Homeland Far From Home

By DEBORAH SONTAG

Published: November 16, 2003

One witless day forever changed the life of Loeun Lun, a Cambodian-American who fled the killing fields as a baby and grew up in a crime-ridden housing project in Tacoma, Wash. It was not even a whole day, really, but an afternoon, a costly afternoon at the mall.

Lun himself doesn't remember the exact date. With his wide eyes and steady gaze, he is a gentle, somewhat passive guy who doesn't bother with facts and figures, even if they are the data that define him. Is he 27 or 28 years old? Lun gets it mixed up. His life, from the time he was a baby, a bag of bones in his mother's rucksack on a forced march through rural Cambodia, has been profoundly disorienting. Most of the time, Lun just tries to go with the flow.

According to court records, the particular day on which he stumbled into his fate was Aug. 20, 1994. Lun had been in the United States since kindergarten, one of the lucky Cambodians who survived Pol Pot's genocidal regime, a harrowing flight through a mine-laden jungle to Thailand and years in squalid refugee camps before making it to America. By 1994, he was a rudderless teenager, acculturated, like so many of the Cambodian refugee children, to the American inner city.

On that particular afternoon, Lun bumped into a drifter selling a nickel-plated .25-caliber handgun for $20. Unlike many other Cambodian-American guys his age, Lun had never sought refuge in a gang like the Loko Asian Boyz or the Royal Cambodian Brothers. He was a loner by nature. He had no criminal record and an aversion to risk-taking. But he was tired of being harassed in the projects and worried about his widowed mother's security. He bought the gun.

Lun then set off for the Tacoma Mall in search of basketball shoes. Once there, Lun said, a group of black teenagers began ranking on him and a friend, saying ''stuff about how we like to eat cats and dogs.'' Lun and his friend insulted them back, but outnumbered, they headed for an exit. Lun said one adversary raised his shirt to flash the butt of a gun. Lun and his friend ran outside. In a rare act of impulsiveness and violence that he has never stopped regretting, Lun punctuated his departure by firing off his new gun. Lun told me that he shot into the air; several witnesses, who were using a cash machine by the exit and found themselves in the line of fire, maintained that Lun had aimed at the black teenagers. A glass door shattered. Lun ran. The black teenagers ran, too, and the police never located them. But officers easily tracked down Lun.

Although many were endangered, nobody was hurt by the incident -- except Lun. In 1995, to the shame of his refugee mother, he pleaded guilty to assault charges. He spent a sobering 11 months in the Pierce County jail, and when he emerged, with what he thought was a clean slate, he pledged to set his life straight.

In no time at all, Lun got himself a minimum-wage factory job and fell in love with Sarom Loun, his younger sister's best friend. She was a smart, robust Cambodian-American young woman and a great influence on Lun, who never again committed another crime. Quickly, the couple settled down. Sarom Loun graduated from college and began an M.B.A. program while working in sales for a Boeing subcontractor. Lun continued on in factory jobs. They had two daughters, Emilee and Ashley, rented a suburban house and bought two cars and an enormous wide-screen TV. Lun's mother began to believe that the negative karma hovering over her son -- Cambodian Buddhists take karma seriously -- was dissipating.

As fate would have it, though, Lun's wife, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and had never set foot in her homeland, desperately wanted to visit Cambodia. She urged Lun to acquire citizenship so that he could get a passport. He had been eligible for naturalization since childhood, but his parents, like many Cambodian refugees, knew little about their rights and responsibilities under American law. America had granted them permanent residency, and that's all they thought they needed. They never knew that there was any advantage to acquiring citizenship and passing it on to their children. They never knew that a teenage refugee who got in trouble with the law would be protected if he were a citizen and might face deportation if he weren't. After all, the United States had not returned any refugees to Cambodia (or Vietnam or Laos) since the Vietnam War, and most Cambodian-Americans believed that refugees were protected from such punishment.

[SunWuKong]

I don't think there are any south east asian people here except for vietnamese.

there are a few Thai members.

[Spikey_Hair]

I'm Cambodian. I don't even know what hmong, laotion, or mein are. Almost everybody I worked with asked me what I was. When I said I was Cambodian, some of them never even heard of it. One girl even asked if I was mexican.

[amietron]

Bessie's roommates are Hmong.

[AngryABCGirl]

Bessie's roommates are Hmong.

Yeah they are, and they make too much noise and don't take out the trash enough.

Anyway onto something more relevant, in terms of culture I find that I have a lot less in common with them than other East Asians. I might as well be living with Armenians or Mexicans. Although they did find it more comfortable living with me than with an non-Asian. I think that's an AA thing. I wonder what implications that has.

[SunWuKong]

Yeah they are, and they make too much noise and don't take out the trash enough.

Anyway onto something more relevant, in terms of culture I find that I have a lot less in common with them than other East Asians. I might as well be living with Armenians or Mexicans. Although they did find it more comfortable living with me than with an non-Asian. I think that's an AA thing. I wonder what implications that has.

you should ask them to teach you some Hmong phrases and Hmong cultural things.

[amietron]

you should ask them to teach you some Hmong phrases and Hmong cultural things.
from what i understand, Hmong doesn't sound very pleasing to the ears. especially when spoken in high 12-year-old girly pitches, mixed in with n*sync lyrics.

[Proud_Jook_Sing]

There are plenty of subgroups among Chinese easily divided by geography and dialect. They are marginalized by being folded into the whole of Chinese culture. Some of these groups are way larger than many non-Chinese sub groups.

[AngryABCGirl]

you should ask them to teach you some Hmong phrases and Hmong cultural things.

To tell you the truth, I'm not very interested.

[tapestrybabe]

i'm not sure if we have any hmong, laotion, cambodian, mein (i know there's more but i can't name them all) members on yw, but if there are, now's the time to speak up! what other groups are there?
funny,
i always felt that Koreans... were kinda seen as the bottom of the totem poll... not getting the same recognition as other groups... when it comes to our history and so forth... but i guess there are other groups out there... that dont seem to get recognized as well... to be honest... i've never heard of mein before... i mean, haha... i've heard of lo mein, chow mein... but never mein as an ethnic group...

anyways, i had to look it up...
and if i'm not mistaken,
they seem to appear in the pakistan group...

[kasia]

There are plenty of subgroups among Chinese easily divided by geography and dialect. They are marginalized by being folded into the whole of Chinese culture. Some of these groups are way larger than many non-Chinese sub groups.

interesting. but not in the united states, right?

[TidaMaria]

from what i understand, Hmong doesn't sound very pleasing to the ears. especially when spoken in high 12-year-old girly pitches, mixed in with n*sync lyrics.


Have you ever tried speaking to a Hmong individual before?? If you listen more closely, they're language is similar to Mandarin.

[AngryABCGirl]

Have you ever tried speaking to a Hmong individual before?? If you listen more closely, they're language is similar to Mandarin.

It is, but not really.

[TidaMaria]

It is, but not really.

My best friend is Hmong and some things that she taught me sounds closely related to some words in Mandarin. Of course, not their whole language but some.

[ric 3]

i'm not sure if we have any hmong, laotion, cambodian, mein (i know there's more but i can't name them all) members on yw, but if there are, now's the time to speak up! what other groups are there?

do you often find that your interests are overlooked by society because of the larger Asian groups that exist? what, specifically, would those interests be? what comes to mind first would be education. i would think that the model minority myth probably impacts this group the most, because of the refugee background of most of their families.

are you tired of being considered a subgroup of Vietnamese or Chinese people? do you often get mistaken as such? how would you like to be identified? for those of you in college, do you have organizations or clubs that represent your identity? at u.c. davis, i remember that we had a hmong club as well as a mein club (which consisted of 6 people). does sharing with members of your ethnicity make a difference?

also - random question - on surveys, what box do you check under the question about ethnicity?


Well they do make up smaller % of asians in america.Im also sure they want their own identity as well. Living in CA there are plenty of clubs on various college campuses.

[Blue dice]

One of my roommates in college was Vietnamese but because we were all asian americans it didn't make a damn bit of difference. Culturally I find some SE asian people to integrate almost flawlessly into NE asian groups. Thai, Laotian, Cambodians tend to look different though. Usually they have darker skin, more wirey stature, and sharp facial features. OF course this isn't true for the entire SE asian population because i've seen Vietnamese people that look exactly Chinese and vice versa.

[ailongam]

Well, I'm Hmong.

Hi!