April 21st, 2022

My fourth performance for Hmong Legacy’s Reading event. It had been a very long time since my last spoken word performance so I was pretty nervous about this one. The background of this piece is talking about the fragile masculinity I’ve witnessed in the Hmong community. I had the opportunity to attend APAHE earlier that year and I listened to a workshop presented by Vince Moua. They talked about the struggles of being a Hmong professional at higher education institutions and having to be one or one of the few AAPI individuals fighting for our Hmong youths.

I sent this email to Vince after the conference because of how impactful his workshop was to me. “Thank you again for such a strong and powerful workshop you presented here at APAHE. I feel so privileged and honored to have attended and gotten to meet you and hear about your story. I resonated so much with many of the things you mentioned, especially the part about going to higher education and getting that exposure and then going back home and people who you used to go to school with, your own community, outcasts you. I hear you, and I see you and the pain that comes with that experience because I have gone through that too.”

On the right side here, you’ll see a few of Vince’s slides that I was able to capture.

The other media that I incorporated into this piece was from Joyner Lucas’ song called Things I’ve Seen. It is such a powerful song and raw in how he points to the struggles that Black women face and encounter. I wanted to incorporate that and switch to something that is more geared toward Hmong women. Also, I apologize for my usage of Hmong, I got too emotional during my piece and I was not able to correctly pronounce some of the Hmong words I had written down.

We even had a reporter from our university’s independent news source in attendance to capture the thoughts and feelings of the performers. You can read it here! Am I Hmong enough? Students search for identity in diaspora. Thank you Melvin Bui for coming out and reporting on this! Also, special thanks to Selena and the Cross-Cultural Leadership Center for keeping Hmong Legacy alive!