Staring Down the Tiger

by Staring Down the Tiger- Stories of Hmong American Women (retail) (epub)

  She smiled at me, squeezed her eyes and shoulders in, and mouthed, “Shh”—code for we’ll talk about it later.

  We gathered for a final dinner together with my brothers and sisters and tried our very best to make it as loving and natural as possible before our guests’ departure.

  At the end of our night, she asked me as I was getting into bed, “Koj puas ntshai?” Were you scared?

  “Yeah,” I admitted. I told her I thought it was gross he wanted to marry me. “He’s so old and has kids,” I chortled.

  She said that, traditionally, it would have been good to have him marry me; then she’d know he would love me, the family, and her. I still contended that such an arrangement was ludicrous and disgusting. She gently smiled, as if withholding a secret to life—perhaps she was smiling at my naivete, or at being able to protect me from what her mother and father wouldn’t when she was a child.

  She never fully explained why she didn’t approve of that marriage proposal. In my most basic understanding, it was because I was young, he was too old, and I was not in love. But I think she knew what it was like to be sold off without a chance to really live and be loved. To know the abandonment of your most trusted and be the cursed casualty of circumstance. As a mother fully in control, she was going to do right by her kids. Her grip tightened around each of us—especially her daughters—because of her conviction and her belief held for our individual freedom. Having lost her first love to the inescapable enemy called death, she wasn’t going to lose us to choice.

  Lyncy Yang was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. A product of her family, city, and community, she aspires to chronicle the stories of family, food, and the complexities as well as the simplicities of living as a Hmong woman and community member. She is a sister, a daughter, and a proud aunt to many nieces and nephews, who all inspire her to be a better human being every day. An educator, writer, cook, gardener, and traveler, she hopes to combine her many identities, passions, and aspirations to make meaningful contributions to her local and global community.

  Because I Love You

  Pa Der Vang

  “You don’t love me.”

  “I do love you.”

  “If only you were a boy.”

  “You need to learn how to cook. No one will marry you if you don’t know how to cook.”

  “If he won’t marry me because I can’t cook, then that’s his loss.”

  “You need to learn how to be still and cross your legs when you sit down, like your cousins.”

  “Why do girls have to cross their legs?”

  “Why can’t your brothers help me pull up the tree roots from my garden?”

  “I’ve been helping you all day. I almost chopped my shin with that ax.”

  “If only you were a boy.”

  “I can only count on my sons to love me when I get old.”

  “The daughters can take care of you, too, just like the boys.”

  “You are too skinny. You need to eat more.”

  “When I was in Laos, they knew I was American because of my plumpness.”

  “You got fat. Don’t eat so much.”

  “You said fat is good.”

  “Don’t eat so much. They will call you hu dab (big appetites will summon the spirits) when you get married.”

  “What if I’m hungry?”

  “You need to learn how to sew paj ntaub so you can sew Hmong clothes for yourself when you get older.”

  “Maybe I can borrow yours or I can just buy it.”

  “Why is your paj ntaub all brown! You didn’t wash your hands!”

  “I don’t know how you keep it so white, Mom.”

  “You need to wear Hmong clothes to Hmong New Year.”

  “It’s too tight and heavy. I can’t breathe, and the necklace

  leaves a bump on my neck.”

  “You have to ball toss at Hmong New Year. I did it when I was your age.”

  “But they are all old men. That is disgusting.”

  “Who is that man who gave you flowers at Hmong New Year?

  You’re going to get knuckled (mag khauj tsiav!).”

  “You wanted me to ball toss so why are you shocked that

  someone gave me flowers?”

  “You have to go dance with Uncle. He wants to dance with you.”

  “But I’m fourteen, and he looks like he’s thirty.”

  “You should marry my nephew.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “If you marry my nephew, they will love you because you are family.”

  “You have to serve him a drink. He is our guest.”

  “Why do girls have to serve?”

  “Why are you talking to him? Do you want to marry him or something?”

  “No. Women can talk to men without wanting to marry them.”

  “Don’t marry a white man. You’re to marry a Hmong man. A white man won’t love you.”

  “I’ll marry someone I love.”

  “Why do you have to be so hard-mouthed (tawv ncauj)?”

  “I’m not tawv ncauj. I’m just stating my opinion.”

  “If you don’t listen, I will twist your ear (mag ntswj pob ntseg).”

  “If you twist my ear, I’ll tell my teacher and child protection will come take me.”

  “If you want to go live with white people, then go ahead.”

  “Why do you ask so many questions? You’re supposed to know already.”

  “But how am I supposed to know if you don’t teach me?”

  “Why did you cancel your landline? Are you moving in with someone? You’re bringing shame onto us.”

  “No one uses a landline anymore.”

  “You need to get married soon. You’re getting old.”

  “But I’m only fourteen!”

  “Why did you get married? You were supposed to finish school first.”

  “You’ve been asking me to marry since I was fourteen.”

  “Why do you have the lights on so late at night? You’re wasting electricity!”

  “I have to get my reading done, and I still have so much homework.”

  “Turn off the lights now or you will get in big trouble!”

  “Why is it taking you so long to finish college? Are you really going to school?”

  “It takes several years to get a college degree.”

  “I’m glad we let you go to school.”

  “You didn’t LET me go to school.”

  “The world will say we didn’t help you through school.”

  “They will say I did it for you.”

  “If only you were a boy, you would be a leader.”

  “I don’t yearn to be a leader.”

  “Your divorce shamed us.”

  “Divorce is awful, but it is pretty common.”

  “It’s a good thing you divorced him because you wouldn’t have finished school if you stayed.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Mom I’m dating someone, and he’s white.”

  “You’re so old now. As long as he is a good man, that’s okay. You need to get married or no one will bury you.”

  “I am considering cremation.”

  “You will come back all burnt.”

  “Mom, why did you make it so hard for me when I was growing up?”

  “Because I love you.”

  Pa Der Vang is an associate professor in the department of social work at St. Catherine University. She has been a volunteer with Hnub Tshiab since August 2000. She publishes works on the immigration experience of Hmong in America.

  Kuv Niam

  Gao Vang

  My mother was born in the northern hills of Laos. As a child, after a day of playing in the fields, careful not to stray far for fear of encountering tigers or soldiers, my mother ran home to devour a pile of ncuav pob kws that my great-grandmother stacked in the middle of the floor for her. Corn pancakes were my mother’s favorite growing up. My great-grandparents looked after my mother and auntie during the day, while my grandmo
ther farmed and sold vegetables at the market in the village.

  My mother has one older sister. They are half sisters, but love each other in full since they were born from the same womb and drank from the same breast. Their fathers passed away early in life. Their mother remarried six times. She was soft-spoken and no great beauty, but men did not last; the women outlived them all. I’ve never met my grandmother. The only glimpses I’ve seen of her are through photos of a small, frail woman, with folds of wrinkles and milky eyes. She was nearly blind by the end of her life.

  My auntie is the only family my mother has left.

  If you want to know about my life, go and speak with Tais before it is too late, my mother says.

  My auntie lives with her son’s family in St. Paul. She is elderly; in a word, she is dying. She asked my mother to come visit before the fog of old age sets in completely. In these moments of clarity, which grow fewer and farther between, she had things to say while she was still able. They spent the day together; my mother cooked for her older sister and sat with her on faded couches in the living room.

  I asked my mother how she was handling her older sister succumbing to age. There were no tears in her voice, only a quiet resignation.

  Because I was the younger sister, I could never love her as much as she loved me.

  As the youngest of eleven, I understand the love between siblings that echoes throughout generations. My eldest sister and I paid our auntie a visit so we could hear our mother’s stories.

  When my mother was small, her older sister was already a young woman. My auntie married into the Vang clan. My father’s clan. My auntie had married one of his cousins. My father was a man in his late twenties. He already had a wife and a son when he learned that his cousin’s new wife had a younger sister. He journeyed through jungles to steal my mother as his second wife. At thirteen years old, my mother was more girl than woman. She walked alone along a dirt road to the farm when my father found her. She tried to fight him off. She cried, kicked, and screamed. My grandmother was out killing two chickens for supper.

  When my mother speaks of my grandmother, whose home she was taken from too early, she gazes into the distance.

  You don’t know how lucky you are.

  At her wedding, my mother tried to stab my father with a utensil. Donned in traditional Hmong clothes with heavy layers, she pulled off the winding wraps around her body to make it easier to run away and slipped down a hill. She was caught again. My father sent for a small silver helicopter from the General to take them to what would become her new home, days away from her village. She had never seen an aircraft before, and even though she hated my father, had thrashed and spit like a feral cat up till this point, she clutched him the entire way, scared to death at this alien contraption lifting them into the air. The pilot remarked how affectionate she seemed toward her new husband. Once their feet touched the earth, she released my father immediately and propelled herself as far away from him as possible. My father’s house was not far from his cousin’s, where my auntie waited. After they landed, my mother ran past her new residence and straight into her older sister’s arms.

  My auntie recalled standing in the doorway of her home.

  I saw your mother run to me crying. She was just a child. She had not even developed breasts yet when your father took her.

  When my mother stepped into the role of second wife, she entered an intricate labyrinth of power balances. My father’s first wife ran the household. My mother learned to tread carefully and not overstep her. Whenever my mother walked past, the first wife spat at her feet and left a gob of dribble on the floor. The first wife often pushed my father’s patience. She threw hot water on him once, and he grabbed her by the hair, dragging her outside to beat her. For all the fight my mother had put up at the beginning of their marriage, she understood my father was not to be crossed.

  My father gave my mother piles of his laundry to wash. She walked to and from the well every day. The water jostled on her small back and splashed all over her. She went to her older sister and said she had no extra clothes to change into. My auntie sewed together pieces of fabric to make garments for her.

  My mother’s in-laws treated her with kindness and loved her like a daughter. When the first wife wasn’t looking, her father-in-law snuck her leftovers from his own bowl, saying aloud to no one in particular that he could not finish it. When the husbands went away for the day, beyond the hill to carry out their work for the General, the young wives in the neighborhood gathered outside to play under the sun, skipping rope. One day my mother saw my father walking down the side of the mountain in his uniform. From the threshold of their home, she watched the light of the fading sun move behind him. She had always cleaned and mended his clothes with the utmost care; she would eventually learn to care for him, too.

  When my mother became pregnant with my eldest brother, she craved bitter greens, which her in-laws gathered for her. In the coming months, she watched her once-flat midsection balloon in size. I imagine her peering down at her swollen stomach. She strokes the mound of her belly, the skin taut like a drum.

  My mother gave birth in a room alone. My father came in only once to brace her as she pushed. There were no doctors or drugs to ease her pain. She did not know if she would survive. She did not fear for her own life. Instead, she was afraid if she died, no one would love her child. She murmured words to my eldest brother and summoned everything inside of her and pushed.

  After I gave birth, I was so happy to be alive, I didn’t have time to be sad.

  My mother spent whole days walking around with Leng wrapped to her chest or resting upon her back. I picture a slight teenager, bent at an angle, pacing in the dusty grass, cooing over her baby. Her will for survival transformed into a fierce love for her children.

  As I sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor, between the pair of sisters who have grown old together—the elder with thinning hair and missing teeth, and the younger with long black hair in a bun and weathered hands—my auntie says, There is no one like your mother. I think I’m pretty good, she chuckles and starts to cough, but your mother, she pauses, your mother loves everyone. She is good down to her soul.

  While our family grew, so did whispers of a communist takeover. War was at hand. My father uprooted our family to Ban Vinai. He sent my mother and eldest siblings first, along with his son from the first wife to accompany her. Each day, crowds would gather at the airstrip in Long Tieng in hopes of fleeing across the border. I see a rush of wind blowing my mother’s hair into her eyes, pieces of her clothing swirling all around her. These planes did not have steps for passengers to gracefully ascend; with all the strength he possessed, my father grabbed my mother, pregnant with my eldest sister, and lifted her into the air, throwing her aboard the aircraft. The first wife was left behind.

  Lining the walls of my parents’ home in south Minneapolis are framed photos stacked side by side or on top of one another. There is a black-and-white photograph of my mother taken right before she came to America. I can’t tell what she is feeling in this picture. My mother is a lot like the Mona Lisa in that way. Her expression, if not fully guarded, conceals something. The stern beauty. She has the look of all immigrants in old-timey portraits, standing stiff and straight. There is no smile to ease the intensity or directness of her stare. Garbed in a traditional black shirt and pants with thick neon green and pink cloth wound tight around her waist, her shape is hard to make out. She has always been a small woman. Maybe in her early twenties at the time, she had given birth to four children already. Trails of heavy silver trinkets fan out across her chest and neck.

  As a young girl, I would look upon the photo and marvel at the beauty she possessed, hoping I, too, would come into my own one day. Her hair is hidden, tucked into a dark purple turban with a pinstripe X on the front. Her face is bare and unadorned. With clear skin and high cheekbones, she was beautiful to the bone. She has a mole above her left eye, beneath the arch of her brow, which is said to be
a sign of good luck. Her wide lips, the top one slightly fuller than the bottom, and pronounced cupid’s bow are traits my sisters and I inherited. I see my older sisters in her; growing up, I saw very little of me. People say that I resemble my mother very much. Perhaps it is in our smile, the way our eyes crinkle and our faces light up. If I am like my mother in appearance, in her resilience and capacity to love, I consider it my sign of luck.

  Gao Vang earned her master of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. She is a nonfiction writer born and raised in south Minneapolis with wanderlust in her heart. She is working on a Hmong American family memoir about the indelible bond between siblings and navigating liminal spaces of love and grief. This essay is dedicated to her mother, and all Hmong mothers, who bear the strength and dignity of multitudes.

  Running Away

  Mai Neng Moua

  “What should I do with my car?” the woman asked in Hmong.

  Blong and I were at a gas station on Highway 55 in Golden Valley, where the woman had called us from a pay phone and asked us to pick her up. She was standing outside a rusted Toyota minivan. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. In the yellow light of the gas station, she looked thin and pale. She was probably tired from the three-hour drive from southwest Minnesota. In her mid-twenties, she was a few years younger than me but looked haggard. The blank eyes of two little kids—a boy and a girl—stared at us from the minivan.

  “Should I leave it at the hotel?” asked the woman.

  Earlier when I had asked Blong about the car, he’d said, “We don’t need to worry about it,” as if the woman had taken care of it.

  Blong and I didn’t know this woman. We were doing a favor for Ka, a good friend of his aunt. Ka couldn’t help her because she lived in Texas. Ka told us the woman’s husband was abusing her and she was planning to run away with her two kids while he was at work. Ka wanted us to help her find a hotel for the night and a cab to the airport the next day. She told us the woman had bought one-way tickets to California.