Saturday, July 15, 2006
By Pat Schneider The Capital Times  

When the plane descended at O'Hare International Airport that day in 1980 onto a landscape piled high with snow, the teenaged Mai Zong Vue figured she knew why the blond, blue-eyed worker in the Hmong refugee camp -- the only American she had ever seen -- was so white.

"The whole country was white," Vue recalled in a recent interview about how it seemed to her adolescent mind.

Vue, at 39 today a seasoned Hmong activist, refugee services worker and small business owner, laughs about the cultural differences that were once so confounding that she and family members hid when a telephone rang.

"We didn't know how to turn on the water faucet," said Char Peng Her, Vue's husband, 34, who arrived at age 5 with his family in the United States in 1976 in the first group of 500 Hmong refugees allowed to enter the country.

Thirty years after the first Hmong refugees began arriving in the United States, in May 1976, the couple reflected on their experiences and those of the more recent Hmong to come to Wisconsin.

The Hmong fled their traditional highland Laos clan culture after U.S. forces left Vietnam in 1975 at the end of the war. The Hmong, who had assisted the CIA during the war, feared retaliation from the communist Pathet Lao.

Thousands made their way to refugee camps in Thailand. Many families stayed in the camps for decades, but those with close ties to the U.S. leaders of the secret war in which they had assisted soon were granted entry to the United States.

Unlike later refugees, those first Hmong arrivals were not greeted with special social service programs or ethnic Hmong to show them the way.

Her's family also arrived in the United States in winter, in Indiana, he recalled in a recent interview. The next morning he and his six brothers and sisters ran out to play in the newly fallen snow in T-shirts and shorts.

Neighbors called the police, apparently thinking the parents were neglectful.

"Can you imagine, your first day in America, the cops come to your house and you can't speak any English?" Her asked. The family's sponsor was called and the children's exuberant response to their first snow was explained to the police, but the episode illustrates the cultural chasm the family had to cross.

Yet both Her and his wife Vue credit their strong English skills to being immersed in an English-speaking world on arriving in the United States.

"It was sink or swim," Her recalled.

* Today the couple operates "Taste of Asia" restaurant on East Washington Avenue. Vue works in the state Department of Workforce Development; Her is a former physicist.

The couple worked on the Madison Children's Museum's "Hmong at Heart" exhibit, which illustrated traditional Hmong life.

Her has been active in an effort to secure state funding for a Hmong Cultural Center in Milwaukee.

Vue recounts looking at old snapshots of her family proudly sporting outfits sent by relief organizations to the refugee camps. They were pajamas, Vue said with a laugh.

Her fashion-conscious older brother, whose determination to grasp opportunities beyond the camp was the driving force behind the family's emigration to the United States, unwittingly dressed in women's clothing. He was considered best-dressed in his crowd of buddies in the camp, Vue said.

Food was scarce in the camp, and activities for the children even more so after they had completed the few years of schooling offered. Vue said she and other children routinely followed in the steps of "Joe," the fair-skinned U.S. relief worker who seemed shocking for his large size.

"He is an American," she recalled her parents explaining to their wide-eyed children.

Vue took that to mean that all Americans were big and white like Joe. Truth was, it was a very homogenous white society in which Vue and her family found themselves when they arrived in the United States.

Their host family in central Illinois brought the family a block of cheddar cheese in the supply of food, she recalled. The aromatic cheese was repugnant to the family, so they hid it in a dresser drawer -- prompting the inclusion of another block of cheese in the next food basket.

Once the cache of cheese was discovered, sponsors asked why they hadn't just said they didn't like it. "It would not have been polite," Vue recalled.

Her family soon was relocated to Wisconsin with the help of an older sister who had arrived earlier in the United States and thought that a community with few Hmong would be best for them to adapt to American culture.

That meant Kaukauna, near Green Bay, where they were one of only two Hmong families.

As the only Hmong students at the high school, Vue and her sister struggled with such cultural expectations as stripping to shower after gym class, which was taboo to the modest girls.

But they were encouraged to speak about their culture in social science classes, and a friendly upper class student introduced them to many of the typical activities of American teens: athletic games, bowling, and in Wisconsin, a bar.

Since their image of an American bar was the strobe-lit dance floor where actor John Travolta danced in "Saturday Night Fever," Vue and her sister, dressed to the nines, were shocked by the smoky beer-sign and pool-table bars of Kaukauna.

Vue's husband, Her, said that he and his siblings were sheltered in the conservative Christian community of their church and school in Oskaloosa, Ind., where their status as war refugees was respected. Outside that circle, Southeast Asians were so unfamiliar to mid 1970s Midwesterners that "they didn't know what to make of us," Her said. "They wanted to make fun of us, but they didn't know how."

* While Hmong girls were then expected to marry at age 15 or 16, Vue said that she and her sister were determined to finish high school. "That was pushing the limit," Vue recalled. And enough to set tongues wagging in the wider Wisconsin Hmong community, especially because of her father's position as a clan leader.

Her sister married soon after high school, but Vue went to work as a legal secretary, and then to Lakeland College in Sheboygan, further thwarting cultural expectations.

"I chose that path because it was for the good of the community, because in this country, education is the key to everything," Vue says today.

Vue said her mother supported her determination to be educated and deflected some of the criticism of her lifestyle. "She was like an eggshell protecting me," she said.

Returning home from Sheboygan on weekends, she maintained the appearance of the dutiful Hmong daughter helping her mother, Vue said. She would get in the family car as Hmong neighbors watched, and drive her mother to the family garden plot. Once away from watchful eyes, as mother and daughter had agreed, Vue would sit in the car and do her homework while mother worked in the garden.

"It was the only way I survived," Vue said.

* I t was while at Lakeland that Vue discovered the outlet that would help bind her to her culture as she developed her talents.

Practicing in the school's grand chapel, she began to wail of the frustration and stress of her life with a foot in two cultures. The wail became a chant that Vue eventually developed into folk songs about Hmong life in America.

Vue has self-produced several CDs, and performs publicly.

"Now I use folk songs to deliver a message," Vue said, like protesting the practice of the payment of a "bride prize," the virtual sale of a girl by her father.

Singing the songs, instead of mounting an argument, enables her to get her story out, while connecting her to the culture, she said. "It makes me complete as a Hmong."

Vue said her songs resonate with other Hmong, especially women elders who appreciate the development of an ancient art by a younger generation.

An activist since her high school days, Vue later became involved with Hmong National Development, which assists in resettlement and community building in Hmong enclaves in the United States.

That work put her at odds with her father, a follower of Gen. Vang Pao, the leader of Hmong troops in the Vietnam War, over whether the Hmong should try to return to Laos or build new lives in the United States.

Vue's husband, Her, says that with the passage of time, leadership has shifted, and some of the positions have changed, but factions representing the old guard and an emerging professional class persist.

Her met his future wife in 1993 when he attended a conference of Hmong National Development, in which Vue was a rising young leader. They married in 1998 and have three small children.

Her said his restaurant, which features Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese and Thai foods, is one way to spread the culture of his people. "Food is a huge part of any culture," said Her, who hopes the example of his business venture will inspire other Hmong to open businesses and succeed.

He said he was surprised and pleased, after the restaurant opened two years ago, to see older Hmong couples -- grandparents -- come out for dinner on their own to a place where they knew they would find familiar food and Hmong-speaking servers. "In the past, they didn't have that option. They had to bring the children to translate," he said.

Last fall, the couple hosted an egg roll sale to raise funds for Kajsiab House, a Madison program for elderly Hmong. They plan the fundraiser again this year and are already accepting items for a concurrent Internet-based silent auction.

Vue teaches a Hmong studies course at UW-Madison, and will inaugurate a similar class this fall at Edgewood College.

In her job with the state, Vue has helped oversee a job readiness program for refugees newly resettled in Wisconsin with the closing of the last Hmong camp in Thailand in 2005.

Their experience, relocating from camps infiltrated by cell phone and computer and which most adults routinely left to work, is a far cry from the experience of Vue's family -- cowering at a ringing phone and hiding the cheese they couldn't bring themselves to eat.

"The language barrier is not as scary now," Vue said. "Refugees now have an anchor family to explain how things work."

But economically, the recent refugees face a greater challenge, Vue said. "I'm proud to say that we were the product of public assistance food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. There were not limits. It let us deal with resettlement issues, pick up skills, and then become taxpaying citizens."

The new Hmong refugees are eligible for only five years of W-2 aid and payment does not increase with the size of the family.

"They're already stressed out," she said. "How do you start a new life when you have so little funds to address your needs?"

* Once they've found their footing, the Hmong have worked hard to become part of the American dream, Vue and Her contend. Half the Hmong in the United States are property owners, Vue said.

And Hmong culture, with its emphasis on sharing and respect of elders, is a force to balance the majority U.S. culture back toward traditional values. "We help reshuffle the values," she said.

The Hmong say they live to see the fruits of their labors, Vue said, and she feels she is doing that now, as children she once helped teach grow to take leadership roles in the community.

"We're not walking any more. We're riding in a car," she said.

Her says his generation paved the way for the next. His children, he said, can run for president if they want to.

Even the Hmong elders now are looking to a future in the United States, Vue said.

She recalled that when she finally did marry, many of the same people who had whispered about her unconventional, single lifestyle told her they wanted their daughters to be like her.

"I told them, 'Then you have to be an eggshell for your daughter.'"

\ RESPITE HOUSE FUNDRAISER

What it is: Taste of Asia is accepting donations of arts, crafts, household items, gift certificates and more for a silent auction and egg roll sale Nov. 13-19 to benefit the Kajsiab House day care program for elderly Hmong.

How to help: Drop off donations at 2817 E. Washington Ave. or call 628-3903 or 240-0762.