On This Hmong American Day

From the desk of Yia Vue

Yia Vue as a child and adult wearing Hmong clothing

My family came to the US in 1979, or so it's stated on my green card. I was barely more than an infant. I carried that card with me well into adulthood. Sometimes I’d stare down at a one-year old me and barely recognize that face as my own. Chin tucked shyly for the camera. Big, dark eyes almost covered by the classic straight-across bangs that all Asian kids seem to sport at some point in their lives. So tiny, brown, and vulnerable. 

In America, I grew up in the Central Valley where many other Hmong families had settled, our family falling into a skill that many Hmong people had carried over with them from the old country, but farming here in the dusty Central Valley was nothing like the red dirt mountains of Laos. There, you didn’t need to water your crops. The rains came down steady and heavy all throughout the year and the mountains would carry their mist like blankets over sleepy hillside villages. But that was before the war broke out and farming was no longer possible. Here in the Central Valley of California though, water was scarce and farming was only made possible because of manmade canals.

I don’t remember anything of Laos from childhood, but there is a picture of me in a pink dress and little plastic jelly sandals, barely able to maintain my balance on legs just learning to walk. I remember being surprised to see the soft, light brown wisps of hair on my baby head, an indicator of some long lost relative with blond hair. My older brother stands behind me and around us are a row of traditional wooden Hmong houses on an earth-packed road. The dirt is red beneath our feet, almost the same tint as my skin. That was a lifetime ago. All of my memories now of Laos are recent from my travels abroad as a researcher; still there’s something elemental that connected as I touched ground again in the land where I was born, but also in the land where my family had to flee.

Growing up, the American Secret War was a ghost that lived in my parents’ memory, but also in the corners of our house. It followed us everywhere we went. It lived amongst all of the Hmong families in our community. People spoke of it at family gatherings, recalled it in casual conversations, and relived it equally in stories of escape and of longing. Despite all that had happened, so many of my parents’ generation and their elders missed their homes and remembered their mountains. My grandmother used to say when she died, she wanted to be taken back there, to be buried where she’d given birth to her children, back to the land where she knew her parents would be waiting for her. Although she’d spent more time in America than in Laos, she knew where home was.

Although the war was never a secret and within our community, it was spoken of routinely, it was never clear to me as a child just exactly what had happened. I knew we’d fled Laos. I knew we were refugees. I knew my father was a soldier, but it wouldn’t be until I was older and began doing my own research that things truly became clear. For most Hmong American children, the experience would be similar. The American Secret War in Laos was a living entity in all of our identities, inherited from parent to child, traumas and stories handed off like heirloom clothing. As you came of age, you slipped it on, you wore it, and you learned to own it.

In this way, our Hmong stories weren’t completely different from those of the other Secret War refugees around us. Strangely enough, for much of those initial resettlement years, the communities were largely separate. There were distances—cultural, linguistic, and shaped by the different roles our communities had been forced into during the war. It would take years, and in many ways a new generation, to begin bridging those divides, to see more clearly that the war had marked all of us, just in different ways.

It’d take time and maturity to draw me back to the landscapes of my forefathers—not only to understand what had happened, but to understand what continues to happen. Returning to Southeast Asia, I saw firsthand the ways in which the past persists. The land, at a glance, can appear healed. Green, abundant, even peaceful, but beneath that surface, there are histories that have not yet been fully resolved. There is a particular kind of kho siab—a Hmong word that was not quite grief, not quite loss, but a quiet, enduring ache that sits between what was and what remains—that comes with that realization.

Sometimes, I’d catch my elders staring off into the distance, particularly when we were out in breathtaking scenery. A field of wheat. A smoky mountain vista. The bank of a slow flowing river. My elders would say then, “How kho siab this is,” and they’d break out into kwv txhiaj, Hmong folk singing, and they’d sing softly into the wind, the lilting notes full of ache and longing, full of remembering. 

For Hmong American Day, although there is much to celebrate, there is also much to remember and to hold onto. There is a legacy that lives on in each of us, generation after generation, marked by a history not of our making, yet made nonetheless; but we are still here as we have always been. Throughout Hmong history, resilience and survival have been the marker of our people and we carry that on. The work that Legacies of War does reflects in the communities they serve, all those who had survived the American Secret War, both here and back in Laos. It reflects much of my own work, a push to bring more visibility to a marginalized and often underserved community. We are bridges between past and present, between those who lived through the war and those still living with its consequences, and between communities like mine in the diaspora and the land that continues to hold our history.

We carry these legacies in our language, in our stories, in the quiet kho siab that surfaces in unexpected moments. We carry it in the way our elders still sing into the wind, in the way memory settles into the body and into the land. Hmong American Day is not only a moment of remembrance. It is a moment of connection. A recognition that while our experiences may differ—Hmong, Lao, and others shaped by the same war—we are bound by a shared history that did not end when we left. It continues in different forms, across different places, and across generations; and within that shared history, there is also the possibility of shared healing. Healing that comes not from forgetting, but from acknowledging. From telling the stories that were once too heavy to hold. From doing the work—slow, careful, and ongoing—of repair. My grandmother knew where home was. For many of us, home now exists in more than one place: in the mountains she longed for, in the communities we have built here, and in the spaces in between, where memory and the present meet.