For Hmong and Lao Americans, the perceived proximity to both whiteness and East Asian domination in the conflated term of “Asian American” is always lost. How can we reconcile this fissure?
By Vienna Chang
MAR 28, 2024
We’re celebrating a friend’s 19th birthday dinner in Boston’s Chinatown. It’s the beginning of my first semester of college, and I’m forced to come out of my socially anxious shell to mingle with friends both oldish and new, when one of her friends sits next to me and asks, “What kind of Asian are you?”
It’s not a rare question people ask me nor does it bother me in particular. Sometimes people feel like they need to label you, while others are genuinely curious. At this point in my life, it’s a question I’ve learned to become comfortable with, but when another Asian person asks “what kind of Asian” I am, it becomes a sick and twisted game where I make them guess and watch as they fail over and over again.
“Guess.” I smirk at him, challenging him to a game that he probably thought would be easy given my last name and light complexion. And with full confidence, he takes his guesses.
He begins to name every East Asian country until he’s forced to name every Southeast Asian country, and for 10 minutes we continue the game of “what kind of Asian I am.” His confidence from the beginning is waning, and all he can do is look at me and keep wondering what I am.
It’s an interesting experience to play this game with another Asian person. For the majority of my life, it was always white people asking me what I was, and it wasn’t until I moved to the East Coast that other Asians began to ask me these same questions, confused and in disbelief that I wasn’t East Asian—the de facto guess for a culture that still sees Asianness as monolithic.
The correct answer is that I am a Hmong and Lao American, born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where you can find some of the highest populations of Hmong and Lao communities in the United States. Like other Southeast Asians during the 1970s and ’80s, a huge influx of Hmong and Lao refugees came to the U.S. after the Secret War, which as the name implies, was a secret war that the CIA conducted in Laos to recruit young Hmong men and children to fight against communists in Laos after the Vietnam War. However, once the U.S. pulled out of Southeast Asia, Lao and Hmong communities became subject and victim to communist soldiers, losing thousands of lives.
In 1975, the U.S. allowed entry for Hmong and Lao refugees. It took treacherous journeys through the jungles of Laos and across the Mekong River, where Hmong families entered refugee camps in Thailand, to even be considered for entry into the U.S. as refugees. These struggles run deep within my blood, and I’ve always been proud of my mixed ethnicity and the struggles that my family went through to be able to bring me the life I have now. Yet, now more than ever, as the Hmong continue to integrate into the U.S., I feel the burdens of my people as the Hmong community continues to grasp at any remnant of their culture they can, fearing it may dissipate forever.
Hmong don’t have a country, and the Hmong diaspora has fostered fear across our elders and older generations that one day, we may be gone forever. I’ve always struggled with how I can honor and carry my culture, and my mixed ethnicity and my inability to speak Hmong only alienate me from my Hmong community. This sentiment has only continued to grow as I enter East and Southeast Asian spaces, as I not only become hyper-aware of my perceived “lack of Hmongness,” but also my perceived proximity to East Asianness.
I’ve always been mistaken as Chinese, not just by racist white people but also by East Asians and even other Hmong people in my life. I was never sure if it was my last name (Chang—typically associated with Chinese last names but also a last name that’s part of the 18 Hmong Clans, or Cha), my light complexion that isn’t typical of Hmong or Lao people, or my supposed proximity to whiteness because of my American upbringing that pushed these assumptions. I never had an issue with my Lao identity, mostly due to being raised by my Lao grandma, but when it came to my Hmongness and my perceived proximity to either whiteness—or even to East Asian cultures—I always felt lost. I refused to be associated with whiteness because of others’ inability to acknowledge my ethnicity, but when I was perceived as East Asian by other Asian people, I never felt so unsure of my identity.
There are significant disparities between the East and Southeast Asian experiences that we tend to disregard in the West, ultimately overlooking the struggles and discriminations that Southeast Asian communities have experienced in the U.S. We can follow this phenomenon back to the term “Asian American” itself and its roots in social activism, first coined by UC Berkeley graduate students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee to mobilize a pan-Asian movement. Predominantly associated with East Asians, the term only later expanded to refer to more Southeast Asians and South Asians as more people from those regions began to migrate to the United States. As a result, many of the nuances of Southeast Asian identity and experiences have disappeared in our popular imagination, in favor of a more monolithic conception of Asianness, and have become seemingly adjacent—or even subordinate—to East Asian identity.
The label “Asian American” was one that I only felt the weight of when I came to Boston for university. While I expected that I would be the only Hmong Lao American, what I didn’t expect was how alone I would feel among other Asians. Any time I attended a meeting thrown by an Asian organization on campus or tried to meet new friends, the assumption that I was Chinese was not only relentless, but the rhetoric constantly referred to “Asians” as an unspoken synonym for East Asians. I felt misunderstood within the monolith that being Asian had become, which only emphasized this erasure of the identity I was feeling.
Attending a private university in Boston also showed me, firsthand, the socioeconomic and educational disparities between East and Southeast Asians. The reality for Southeast Asian Americans is that they lack support and resources compared to more established East Asian communities that have been able to stabilize and root themselves in the U.S. from earlier immigration waves. 34.3% of Laotians and 39.6% of Hmong adults in the U.S do not have a high school diploma, and 66.5% of Lao and 63.2% of Hmong adults haven’t attended college at all. Southeast Asians are more likely to live in poverty and have lower incomes than their East Asian counterparts, but much of the data surrounding Asian Americans clump our experiences together and without desegregated data, fail to show the disparities that Southeast Asian communities face.
I’ve been in situations in the past two years of college where it felt like what I wanted from my college education was never enough for me or my East Asian peers. Many of my friends perpetuated stereotypical ideas of what it looks like for an East Asian American to pursue an education—and when I didn’t fit into that mold, I was constantly told that I wasn’t taking my education seriously enough. In a “friendly” poll, I was elected as most likely to drop out of college, and I’ve been questioned with doubt as to what I will ever pursue with my degree post-grad, making me question whether I was even meant for college, and that maybe I was supposed to end up as another Hmong student who couldn’t make it past high school.
So for my first year of university, it was hard to feel seen in my Hmong and Lao identity, making me feel as though I could only claim myself as Asian American. The homogenized labels of “AAPI” and “Asian American” are so broad that they create their own definitions and manifestations as to what it could be. I saw it as a label that came with certain expectations as to what one should have interests in, wear, and act like, mostly being synonymous with East Asian cultures. Though there is still power in these labels, they can feel exclusionary to Southeast Asians, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and anyone else who is mushed into the label of AAPI or Asian American.
For me, taking on this label felt like an erasure of my own Hmongness. My whole life, I was expected to take on Asian norms more associated with East Asians, and I lost myself within those narratives. I felt the last bits of my Hmongness slipping from my hands as I no longer could feel it reflected in me. I couldn’t speak Hmong, I wasn’t fully Hmong, and no one claimed me as Hmong. Hmong life is a constant contradiction between grieving what’s lost and reviving the old into something new, and I allowed the fears of my ignorance to consume me, losing myself and only digging the burdens of my culture heavier in my heart.
I’m still learning what it means to be Hmong for myself, and it’s an agonizing, yet healing journey. I look at my parents and see how their wars still rage on in me, grieving what my life could have or could not have been if not for their sacrifices. I listen to the language I can’t understand and cry at its beauty and pain. I stand at the ceremonies clueless as to what the shamans are performing, yet appreciate the practice so unique within us Hmong. I grasp at the tail ends of the Hmong, hoping to rebuild and reshape the narratives that have kept us apart.
I’ve been reconnecting and exploring my Hmong identity through literature and language. As of recently, I’ve been indulging in Kao Kalia Yang, a Hmong American writer and author who focuses on highlighting refugee stories and the Hmong diaspora in the U.S. with The Song Poet and The Latehomecomer, both of which provided a newfound understanding of the experiences that have defined my people. There’s also a healing and humbling experience when it comes to learning your language as an adult. It’s a balance of feeling shame and guilt for getting pronunciations wrong whilst feeling pride and love for the simultaneous newness and nostalgia of it all. I want to continue to heal the wounds of my identity and learn to embrace the cultures unique to me, even if I don’t fully understand them. There’s beauty in ignorance and learning, as each new step I take to rediscover my identity challenges my understanding and allows me to experience my culture with a newfound appreciation and authenticity. Rather than cowering under short-sighted labels and misunderstandings, I make room for myself within the narratives.
Vienna Chang is a media and screen studies and communication studies major at Northeastern University.
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