High School Connections

SSWG2 Evaluate how the physical and human characteristics of places and regions are connected to human identities and cultures. a. Examine how ethnic compositions of various groups has led to diversified cultural landscapes, including, but not limited to, architecture, traditions, food, art, and music

SSWG4 Assess the characteristics, spatial distribution, and migration of human populations on the earth’s surface d. Compare the response of different groups and governments to migration, including national migration policies and differing responses by local communities (e.g., quotas, amnesty, resettlement programs, and official language laws).

How is the migration of the Hmong similar to the migration of other groups of people throughout American history and today? Have your students read some of the stories told in the PBS Minnesota Remembers Vietnam story wall. Then students can compare and contrast the experience of the Hmong to other groups that have migrated to the United States.

SSUSH22 Analyze U.S. international and domestic policies including their influences on technological advancements and social changes during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. a. Analyze the international policies and actions taken as a response to the Cold War including the opening of and establishment of diplomatic relations with China, the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the War Powers Act, the Camp David Accords, and Carter’s response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis.

Who is a veteran, and what does this status mean? Have your students watch PBS’s America’s Secret War Digital Shorts The CIA, the Hmong, and the Secret War and Hmong Veterans Not Considered Veterans. After students research United States veterans, conduct a Socratic Seminar where students discuss the Hmong’s situation and the lessons that can be learned from American’s involvement in Vietnam.

ELAGSE9-10RI1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. ELAGSE9-10RI2: Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text. ELAGSE9-10RI3: Analyze how the author unfolds an analysis or series of ideas or events, including the order in which the points are made, how they are introduced and developed, and the connections that are drawn between them.

The following are books by Hmong authors who describe their experiences in Southeast Asia and the United States.

Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir is the first memoir written by a Hmong- American to be published with national distribution. Driven to tell her family's story—and the story of the Hmong people—Yang wrote it as a "love letter" to her grandmother whose spirit held her family together through their imprisonment in Laos, their harrowing escape across the Mekong River and into a refugee camp in Thailand, their immigration to Minnesota when Yang was only six years old, and their transition to a hard life in America.

Kao Kalia Yang’s second memoir The Song Poet, retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine.

When Mai Neng Moua decides to get married, her mother, a widow, wants the groom to follow Hmong custom and pay a bride price, which both honors the work the bride's family has done in raising a daughter and offers a promise of love and security from the groom's family. Mai Neng, who knows the pain this tradition has caused, says no. Her husband-to-be supports her choice. What happens next is devastating, and it raises questions about the very meaning of being Hmong in America. As she navigates the Hmong world of animism, Christianity, and traditional gender roles, Mai Neng Moua’s begins to learn what she has not been taught in her memoir The Bridal Price.

Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile.