Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora, by Chia Youyee Vang, $25, University of Illinois Press, December 2010, ISBN-10: 9780252077593, ISBN-13: 978-0252077593, pp. 192.
Dr. Chia Youyee Vang only has hazy, disjointed memories of fleeing Laos with her family in 1979, waiting in a refugee camp in Thailand and coming to the United States when she was 9 years old.
“I often describe it as a film one had seen a very long time ago,” she writes. “One may be able to recall the themes and a few scenes here and there; however, one cannot accurately recount the entire story.”
Vang was one of more than 130,000 of her people who came to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From the early 1960s on, the United States had relied on the Hmong to fight against the North Vietnamese Army, which intruded into Laos during the Vietnam War.
After the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, the Communist victors began enacting vengeance against those who had aided the Americans, including the Hmong. Thus began the exodus of the Hmong people.
Today, Vang is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, but this is not a memoir of her journey. It is the first scholarly examination of the Hmong refugee experience to come from within the Hmong community.
In the book, she brings the experience of this ethnic group into sharp focus, retracing its origins in southwestern China, its role in the Southeast Asian conflict and the journey out of the war zones.
