December 31, 2025Fifty Years and a Heavy Heart
On HMoob in America
This year marks fifty years since HMoob people were uprooted from Southeast Asia and began arriving in the United States as a result of the Secret War and the Vietnam War. For most of 2025, celebratory events — along with photos and videos of remembrance — flooded my social media.
Fifty years is supposed to feel like a celebration. A milestone. A moment of light.
Yet as 2025 comes to a close, my heart feels heavy.
This reflection is not an attempt to take anyone down.
Not a dismissal of the elders, the leaders, the organizers, the storytellers, our families who have endured and achieved so much in moving the needle forward.
It is not an argument against pride, joy, or the many real and hard-won successes of HMoob people in the United States.
It is an attempt at something quieter and more difficult:
honesty.
Because I believe we deserve that kind of care.
Many years ago, I attended the HMong National Development Conference (HNDC) as an undergraduate student. After a keynote speech, a HMong elder — Aunty — stood up in the audience and said, in our native tongue, something I will always carry with me:
“Don’t ask what you can do to become vam meej, successful. All of you being here in the United States of America — that is already the success. You have already made it.”
At the time, I didn’t fully understand her meaning.
Growing up in a household where the expectations in my parents’ and grandparents’ eyes felt heavier than thirst or hunger, I wanted nothing more than to fulfill their hopes of educational and financial success.
Recently, I asked my pog, my paternal grandmother, about her life before the war.
She told me about her marriage to my grandpa.
About sleeping in qhov tsua — caves.
About the cold. The dirt. The dark.
About throwing her sev, her apron, over her face at night for warmth and privacy and protection.
There are no metaphors for that kind of life.
Only survival.
Holding my grandma’s story, I’m finally beginning to understand what Aunty meant.
That simply being here — breathing, living, raising families on this land — is already a miracle.
And still.
Miracles are not the same thing as healing
Fifty years is not the same timeline for everyone.
Some families arrived five decades ago.
Some came in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s.
Some arrived last year.
Some are still arriving.
Some are still learning the language of survival here.
Some are still grieving the relatives they were forced to leave.
Some are still spiritually standing in the lands where they were born.
How do we honor all of us — not just the loudest voices, the most resourced stories, the ones that fit most neatly into American ideas of a “successful immigrant”?
How do we create a future where the newly arrived feel just as seen as the fourth-generation child who barely speaks HMoob?
How do we sustain bridges that keep us in relationship with those in our former homelands — bridges built on care rather than class wars, capital extraction, or sexual exploitation?
What does belonging look like when our timelines are uneven, overlapping, and unfinished?
Fifty years in the United States holds both fullness and fracture.
We have doctors and artists, farmers and scholars, politicians and athletes, organizers and aunties running entire economies out of their kitchens.
We have ceremonies, languages, stories, funerals and weddings that last for days, laughter that refuses to die.
And we also carry painful truths we often avoid naming:
Patriarchal violence continues to silence and erase HMong women and girls.
Homophobia and transphobia continue to deny and attempt to control our LGBTQ+ siblings.
Abusive international marriages continue to condone the practice of child brides.
Silence around child abuse and neglect continue to leave our children vulnerable to exploitation and victimhood.
Fatphobia continues to perpetuate baseless stereotypes of laziness with ties to capitalism.
Colorism continues to narrow our standards of beauty and wealth, bound to misogyny, racism, and classism.
Anti-Blackness continues to seed ignorance, harmful myths, and further entrench our community in white supremacy.
These are not Western ideas imposed upon us.
They are human wounds living inside our community — alongside our beauty — and we, as HMoob Americans, have the profound power to interrogate them.
To be HMoob and to love our people is to speak the truth.
Not with shame. With responsibility.
It is not anti-HMoob to let women and children eat first.
It is not anti-HMoob to defend Black humanity and see them grow old.
It is not anti-HMoob to ‘bite the hand that feeds you’ and fight alongside those who are experiencing ethnic genocide on their own ancestral homelands.
The relationship between shame and success in our culture has created a practice where we no longer trust our emotions to guide what we must and can do.
What if we un-practice that kind of shame?
What relationships could we build and repair if “having face” was no longer the goal?
What might it look like if being a “good refugee immigrant” were no longer the dream, and co-creating a world where our children, neighbors, and relatives can truly thrive became the work?
How then would we measure our success as a community?
Which values would rise above?
Which would fall back?
When I think about fifty years of HMoob in America, my heart breaks even as everything around me suggests it is supposed to feel whole.
Not because I am ungrateful.
Not because I do not see the miracles.
But because survival alone is not the same as liberation.
Because healing requires truth.
Because joy that cannot hold grief is thin.
Because celebration that refuses complexity is fragile.
Fifty years in, I don’t want only success stories.
I want stories that hold the courage and the harm, the resilience and the work still undone.
Brave stories. Honest stories.
In honesty, as I prepared to share these words, I found myself hesitating. Questioning whether I had the right to speak. Wondering if I was out of touch, if I had done “enough,” if my distance from organized community spaces had somehow disqualified my grief, my care, my longing. If I arrived too late?
I realize that this doubt is also part of our story. That we are so practiced at surviving, at moving forward, at building and achieving, at being ‘the first’, that we have rarely been given the space — or the permission — to feel what this journey has actually cost us. And without that feeling, our growth remains incomplete.
This reflection is my attempt to pause inside that space.
To feel.
Aunty’s words found their way into me long before I understood them.
Over a decade later and with some time to feel, I now recognize the significance of her medicine. The wisdom in her words was not to abandon success, but to question it and redefine it.
Only then can we build a thriving HMoob community. Not through the divisive war tactics. Not through patriarchal cowardice. And not through colonial violence. But through courageous accountability, radical inclusion, and deliberate love.