by Staring Down the Tiger- Stories of Hmong American Women (retail) (epub)
through the threats of fists and bullets
from the angry mouths of no longer
husbands and lovers,
she, my father protected
and
she, my grandmother loved
in spite of.
My aunt
whom
my mother loathed.
She used to visit when we were kids
with her boyfriend-of-the-month
who she would tell us was probably
just temporary,
because that was the way love was—
just temporary.
She always visited with mouth-watering
Peking duck—
such a delicacy
for us little Hmong kids
who didn’t get out much.
My mother would caution us each time—
duck tastes good,
but don’t eat it too often.
Los los kua muag,
she would say.
It brings so many tears.
My mother
who only knew to be right,
to be good,
who built her self-worth
around the flaws and cracks
of others.
Every time my aunt visited
with her roasted duck
and temporary boyfriend,
I wanted to go home with her.
Pa Xiong is a middle school English teacher living in southern California who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Asian American studies. She spends most of her time raising her two kids, but here and there, when she can find a moment, she likes to write as well.
Never Again
MayKao Y. Hang
My job was to create a community initiative to prevent violence in the Hmong community at the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, a nonprofit in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was 1996. I was a young woman with little credibility or social power, and the hiring process had been on standby for a long time. I figured I must not have had the type of qualifications Wilder wanted but was surprised when an offer came. After a year of organizing, Hmoob Thaj Yeeb (Hmong Peace) was born, and I had more than a thousand people engaged in violence prevention and intervention activities. As the voices of those impacted by violence rose through me, I became outspoken as an organizer and started receiving hate letters from those who disagreed with the approach I was taking. Ironically, they signed their names. I guess they weren’t afraid of a twenty-four-year-old Hmong woman with more heart than sense. It wasn’t unusual for me to show up at a community meeting and not be acknowledged, greeted, or given much respect. Yet, I persisted.
I was also a newlywed. My husband, Lao Lu Hang, was raised in rural Michigan in a town of three hundred people. By Hmong norms, we were late to the starting line of life. After defying tradition and beating the odds out of poverty, I had graduated from Brown University and then the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. I could only resist having children until I was twenty-six, and then I caved into the pressure. Having grown up babysitting, the thought of raising children exhausted me. I didn’t feel ready to become a parent, having watched my own parents in survival mode—working nonstop to meet our basic needs, and yet never having enough. I never stepped into a movie theater until I was sixteen. Going to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken was a special treat. Cake and cookies were a luxury we could not afford. I knew children meant responsibility, and I was just starting out in my career.
But the pressure of motherhood came from all corners. And, to my surprise, we conceived right away. At our first ultrasound, we stared at the gray screen to figure out which tiny spots might be the baby. Not a word was said throughout the procedure. Instead, the woman in the crisp white lab coat with efficient movements led us to a small room with a circular table and told us to sit down. A few minutes later, a nurse came in. “I am so sorry. There was no heartbeat, and the fetus isn’t viable.” I saw that her mouth kept moving, but I really couldn’t hear her. I looked at Lu, and his stoic face reflected mine. The nurse told us the “fetus” would discharge soon. Did we want to scrape it out or let it come out naturally?
The self-recriminations began. Was it because I hadn’t really wanted a baby and hadn’t taken care of myself well enough? I couldn’t go into work. My mom came over, made a fuss over straightening up my apartment, and told me every now and then with sympathetic nods that I shouldn’t have moved around so much with my usual vigor. I must have scared the spirits, and the baby had detached from me. Three months later, I was still sad and anxious. I hadn’t menstruated and wondered if I would be barren. Reading books about miscarriages and stillborn babies had caused fear rather than healing. So I visited the doctor. He made me take a urine test. I was surprised to learn I was four weeks along with another pregnancy. Unlike the first time I was pregnant, I was thrilled. I was so happy; I don’t remember feeling tired or sick during the pregnancy. I was excited despite the morning sickness, leg cramps, and lack of air conditioning. The nine months went by fast.
Close to my due date, I picked up a copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press to read at work. I was skimming when I saw a short story reporting the deaths of six Hmong children, all under the age of twelve. Details were sketchy, but the last name of the little children was “Hang,” my husband’s clan. The youngest who had passed was preschool age, still a baby. I instinctively cradled my round stomach. My baby was supposed to be a boy. I looked up at the cluttered two-person office, gazed out the window, and carefully reread the story. The next day, I picked up the paper again, and there were more details. Oh, my goodness: there were pictures of the children, and a picture of their mother, who had allegedly murdered them. The gruesome details unfolded with controversies around the accuracy of the reporting. Then the request for help came to Wilder. I was a member of the Wilder Community Violence Response Team, and I was asked to find Hmong social workers and mental health workers to debrief and to bring solace to the staff and people at the McDonough Homes Housing Project where the murders had happened.
That day, September 4, 1998, I went into labor but was still calling around to find Hmong social workers who would be willing to help. More details were coming out about the murders, and it was triggering even more grief and horror. I was at home on the sofa, responding to questions from a Pioneer Press reporter, when I had to tell him to wait as a contraction came and went. From my two years of organizing, I knew there weren’t going to be enough Hmong social workers. From the blood I saw in the toilet that morning, I knew the baby would arrive very soon. I hadn’t yet told my husband that I had been having contractions all day. I panicked. My mind became overly active as I imagined the methodic actions of the mother, Khoua Her. Allegedly, the children had been called in from the playground one by one and strangled.
By the time Lu got home from work, the organizing and outreach became a blur of physical and mental pain. This baby was definitely coming. I don’t remember how the police were called to McDonough Homes, or who saw what happened first. I felt sorry for the first responders. And now, I don’t care about those details anymore. What impacted me was that Khoua Her was the same age as I was. Our two twenty-six-year-old lives intersected to define us both in this moment for eternity. Ironically, I felt our fates could have been interchanged. An odd twist of fate and circumstance had enabled me to become a college-educated Hmong woman while Khoua Her had not been able to—not even close, as we learned much later about her.
My labor went for twenty hours. Almost the entire time, I faded in and out. In my lucid moments, I thought of the children who had been killed by their mother, and then eventually, I felt only the pain and exhaustion of labor. The children were from my husband’s clan. I felt they were family, as we are taught from childhood that the clan we marry into would be our permanent home. My dad told me when I married Lu that I had borrowed my mother’s womb to be birthed, but that my real mother would be my mother-in-law for life. I objected to what I considered was bra
inwashing from my dad, but still, I felt loyal to the Hang clan. I had talked to some of Lu’s relatives who were worried about the stigma and sins of Khoua Her. The Hangs also objected, and most said that though the family had resettled under the Hang clan name, they were really from the Kong clan. In the end, I thought, does it really matter? Six lives were gone, taken by their own mother. What desperation had driven her? The Hmong clan system hadn’t worked to protect the children.
The pain eventually became unbearable. My mom and sister were in the delivery room with me. They were noisy. At 4 AM, after twenty hours of labor, my animist and ritualistic mother, who had not been in a church for fifteen years, told my husband and sister to bow their heads in Christian prayer. My mother has a tendency to be melodramatic when stressed. She says now it was worse for her to watch me go through labor than to go through it herself five times. During labor, grief and love were both in my heart. I couldn’t cry or scream. My life and Khoua Her’s could have been exchanged but for a twist of fate. I had just ended up in a better place.
What could have driven Khoua Her to murder her own children? Growing up with two parents who took turns being depressed, angry, and, yes, hopeless, I had kept myself resilient and strong. If I had slammed the door of optimism and given up on myself, my younger siblings would have been without an emotional anchor. My positive attitude kept them going. I could tell that when I was dark and angry it made the three of them that way, too. As the second of five children, I felt it was my job to take care of the younger ones. Once, in middle school, I had come close to seeing death for myself as a solution. I turned myself around by realizing that other people’s low expectations and opinions of me should not shape my future. Somehow, I pulled myself out of depression. My older sister had married after her freshman year at Mankato State University. Untethered, my life was empty and lonely in my early twenties without her. The helplessness and despair of my adolescence had been hard. Even so, I had endured. Also, I couldn’t imagine either of my parents feeling as desperate as Khoua Her did.
The doctor used forceps to pull our son out. I was exhausted and couldn’t push anymore. The baby’s heartbeat was failing, and the doctor placed an IV to keep my contractions going. I had squeezed Lu’s hand so hard and for so many hours that there were red welts around his ring finger. Once the baby was out, the doctor placed him onto my chest. Lu cut the baby’s umbilical cord. I looked down and saw his perfect dark red lips, tiny wrinkled face, and helmet of black hair. His hair had grown past his ears. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. My eyes welled up with tears, and after twenty hours of no screaming, hollering, or making noises, I started crying with relief, joy, and sadness. Khoua had delivered six babies like this, given life like this six times, and taken life six times. I whispered my son’s name for the first time, Fuchi, and kissed his head. For someone who hadn’t wanted motherhood, motherhood suited me perfectly. I would go on to have another three exceptionally perfect babies.
While I recuperated at Regions Hospital with Fuchi, I learned more about Khoua Her. She would stand trial and be jailed for life. She had failed at committing suicide. Back at work, I helped the community heal from the aftermath at McDonough Homes. I learned more about Khoua’s life. She was married off at the age of twelve in a Thai refugee camp. She had given birth to a baby every year with no reprieve. In Thailand, if you were a young person who wanted to resettle in the United States and your parents refused to resettle, you were stuck in the refugee camps until you turned eighteen. The only way to overcome this hurdle was to marry and file to resettle as your own household. This policy created many teen marriages. When tragedy and trauma was all around, Hmong daughters who were orphans were bartered off like chattel to other clans in the refugee camps. I don’t know if either scenario was true in Khoua’s case, but since I had worked in Ban Napho refugee camp, I knew firsthand the rules of resettlement. The Hmong community is not kind to orphans, widows, and divorcées. Khoua was socially isolated. She was a battered woman. Her husband had abandoned her and the children. There had been seventeen police calls for service to her public housing unit. The public housing agency and the community policing program had responded, but there were no documented attempts to support the family’s needs. Their battered and shattered lives, sadly, had been an “open secret” to the system with little formal action. Help had been within reach, yet also so far away.
There were no mental health services in St. Paul that could have been offered to her in a culturally and linguistically relevant way in 1996. We had perhaps one fully licensed Hmong mental health professional to serve the entire Hmong community in Minnesota. There were no women’s shelters with advocates who could speak the Hmong language to help protect her and her children. What would become Asian Women United, the first battered women’s shelter for Asian women in Minnesota, had just started after a group of young women had successfully advocated for resources from the state. When Jon Gutzmann, the executive director of the St. Paul Public Housing Agency, called a meeting to discuss how he could help, only two Hmong community members showed up. I was one of them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t contain my anger and resentment. In a rare fit of temper, I told him how I felt about the situation and what his organization could have done earlier. Instead of being angry or offended, Jon eventually hired me to help fix the system as the Resident Services director. We planted a tree for each child who had died, including plaques with their names, outside of the McDonough Homes Community Center. Every time I go there, I still visit.
One of my first projects as the Resident Services director was to devise a protocol with the St. Paul Police to send social workers to public housing units after three calls for service and to offer family supports. Neither the Hmong cultural systems nor the public systems had worked for Khoua and her children. I have spent my life and career working to prevent such tragedies from happening ever again. This case was so traumatic, it followed me to my next job as the director of Adult Services in Ramsey County. The State of Minnesota did an extensive mortality review, and I was interviewed to see where state systems might have failed in both adult’s and children’s services. This case followed me back to Wilder as the director of Children and Family Services, where I worked to create a clinical training institute to get more clinicians of color fully licensed and credentialed as mental health professionals. The case followed me to my role as president and CEO of the Wilder Foundation. In September 2018, I talked to the Pioneer Press about this case once more. I gave an overview of the expansion of mental health services to the Hmong community and new refugee and immigrant communities, and how this has changed in twenty years. It’s still not happening quickly enough.
My son, Fuchi, turned twenty on September 5, 2018. His birthday also marks this tragedy. Twenty years later, it is broadly seen as the worst homicide case the city of St. Paul has ever experienced. Unfortunately, Khoua and her children are not unique. They represent the many families and people who are traded and dealt with like they are a cheap commodity because they are powerless and poor, left to suffer unprotected and ridiculed. They have few real choices to receive the support they need. Help comes too late, or it comes but with too many obligations and demands, creating more problems for those who are already suffering. Too often, instead of a hand up, we wait too long to give help and ask too much in return for those who are most in need. Birth and circumstance shouldn’t determine destiny, but they often do.
Every year on Fuchi’s birthday, I promise to use my privilege as a weapon for good. When I was younger and my world was restricted by what I could see and read, I felt invisible with few advantages. And yet, as I have seen families without stability or real opportunity, I understand the resilience and support I had, even in a family ravaged by war and trauma. I’ve chosen to believe that though I may be only one person, my passion and convictions, if applied diligently, can help save more families. Privilege is useless if we don’t use it to benefit others. Over years of serving those most disadvan
taged in society, I see that acts of love, support, and care have cost me nothing except having courage when moving forward is tough. When I am the only person of color, woman, class-crosser, or former refugee in a room, I willingly carry the voices of those who aren’t visible in systems of power.
And now I know what my intense joy and sadness meant when I looked at Fuchi’s face the first time. Women have divine right to give life. In Fuchi’s innocent face, I saw a precious love unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I tell myself now that Khoua must have believed that suffering worse than death would come to her children if she was able to take her own life. She meant to kill herself. She just hadn’t been successful. I won’t ever know the truth, and now I don’t want to know. I’d rather live with the fiction that it was both trauma and love that drove her to do what she did. But I do know this truth as the mother of four: when love is deliberately killed, all hope has expired. Some people tell me that hope can’t keep people alive, but I believe it can, and it does. Some people tell me that hope can’t be measured, but I believe it can because I have seen too many lives changed. Some people tell me that I can’t see the bad in others because I am an eternal optimist; I tell them to leave me alone so I can do more good for humanity.
Dr. MayKao Y. Hang is vice president and inaugural dean of the College of Health at the University of St. Thomas and former president and CEO of the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation. She has dedicated her life to leading courageously, to improving lives today and for generations to come, and to social justice. Among her achievements, Dr. Hang is proud to be a current board member of the Minnesota Historical Society, a founding member and the inaugural board chair of the Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL), and a cofounder of Hnub Tshiab: Hmong Women Achieving Together.
Orders
Duabhav BJ Lee
I’d say my family has a long history, a lineage, of service in the military, which fits oddly in the realm of the Hmong hierarchy of formalities, where one must address so-and-so based on relation to so-and-so. And thus, for a festive occasion this past summer, my cousin and her very general-like or type A husband were hosting a blessing dinner for my beloved uncle and aunt. All the tasks had been assigned, and my rather tall order was to enhance my meager pepper recipe to feed more than five hundred people. I laughed that day I was voluntold, saying, “I know my job, Brother! Don’t worry. I got you.”