A Hmong immigrant finds her way back home through her language and her poetry.

Pa Vue

A Hmong woman carrying the Hmong language in all its material and symbolic forms into the future. Art: Stacey Lo

After we arrived in America
in that two-bedroom apartment
I wonder how we squeezed nine people
and a flock of chickens and still feared tsov
the monarch of the jungle stalking
us from his chaparral throne

as a child treading water in the English sea
I listened to my father and uncles reminisce
about their green days tim Thailand and Laos
when borders were easier to erase and prepositions
elevated as well as pointed to smokey villages
nestled in mountaintops

last year, my sister and I foraged for tshuaj qaib:
mugwort, Herbst’s bloodleaf, Eupatorium fortunei,
and Okinawa spinach in the
aisles of Fresno grocery stores
to pair with freshly slaughtered chicken
for her postpartum diet
because no manufactured pill will do

this lingering inheritance refuses to be spent

you see, my father learned to hu plig on stolen
lands, his soothing voice intoning ancestral songs
to call our souls home from the searing sun
and the pounding rain, from the rigid clutch of
the Sacramento River and the pride of the platanus

yesterday Facebook mourned a Son who died nram Colombia
someone asked: will his soul be able to find its way home?
or will it be forever lost in that moment
memorialized among the mindful Miconia?

all I know is here in this boyish Northern California college town
Hmong students whisper of poj dab who haunt
the fourth-floor dormitory bathroom looking
for their looted recollections

I wonder if it’s because no one sang them to the ancestors
for there were no voices left to sing them to the ancestors
I wonder if the man who died in Colombia will hear the calling gong,
be able to follow the trail of incense curling toward home
as the Hmong community comes to zov hmo, to wait out the long night

that I wonder at all evidences a will

for you see, we have inherited more than a way
we have inherited a home

our land is in our language
our language in our bones

these words are part tiger, part tradition
part topography, part sensation
shaping elephant footprints and snail shells
mountains and houses that adorn
our sleeves and our mouths

on the tip of our tongues
these songs say

kuv tseem yog Hmoob

I am still Hmong

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Glossary

tsov: tiger
tim: in (preposition for something that is far away)
tshuaj qaib: medicinal plants that are often cooked with chicken
hu plig: to call souls
nram: in (preposition for something to the south)
poj dab: (female) spirit
zov hmo: guard the night
kuv tseem yog Hmoob: I am still Hmong

Chinese mustard greens (left) and garlic (right) that my parents grow in their backyard. Photos: Pa Vue

On Being a Steward of Language

Nyob zoo. Ntawm no kuv yog Paj Hnub xeem Vwj. Be well. My name is Pa Nou, clan name Vue.

All my life my parents have talked about land. There was the land they had given to my uncle when we left Thailand to come to the United States, which I later learned had never really been theirs to give because it belonged to the Thai government. There was the land my parents borrowed from a farmer those first few years in Willows, California. They shared it with other refugee families and grew corn, sugarcane, cucumber, and pumpkin. There was the land behind our apartment complex in Chico that my mom claimed because no one was doing anything with it. She scattered cilantro and lettuce seeds for a makeshift garden. There was the land in the planter where my dad grew a kaffir lime tree to grace our doorway. We ate from that tree for years.

Hmong people are indigenous to what is known today as China. There are still Hmong people there, but through multiple displacements, a large group of us have found ourselves on unfamiliar, often bordered, lands claimed by empires and nations. When my family came to the United States as part of this country’s post–Vietnam War resettlement efforts, we gave up a hard life of working with the land, but land lingers. It haunts my parents’ desires, and it haunts our language. My poetry draws upon this haunting, which includes my relationship with the language, Hmong cosmology, and the constant fight to hold on to Hmongness and Hmong presence in the face of assimilation and erasure.

The best way for Hmong people to honor the lands we’ve been on, to continue to be stewards of these lands long after displacement from them, is to continue to use our language.

I’m not a trained poet. Poetry came to me during trying times when no other forms of creativity seemed right. To me, poetry is about using all our senses to remember, understand, create, and (re)connect with beings of our past, present, and future. It’s about seeing the invisible through our ears and hearing the silenced through the sensations we feel in our spines. In this poem, I bring together imagery of nostalgia, oral tradition, and spirituality, and touch on the connection between Hmong people, our culture, and land. Hmong people have always had a respectful relationship with the land, relying on it for the cultivation of food but also respecting it for its mysteries — for the unanswered and unexplainable things that occur in nature.

While I don’t speak for all Hmong people, and I acknowledge the impact of capitalism and globalization on Hmong people all over the world (and, thus, the need for Hmong people to respond accordingly to survive), I believe that our ancestors’ longing for land has been less about owning the land and more about being in relationship with the land. As a speaker of Hmong and a Hmong language reclamation researcher, I see myself as a steward of the language, a language intimately connected to land. I believe that the best way for Hmong people to honor the lands we’ve been on, to continue to be stewards of these lands long after displacement from them, is to continue to use our language.

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Read more from Pa Vue at bypavue.com

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Pa Vue is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies Hmong language revitalization and literacy and writes poetry to help her (re)connect with Hmong language and culture.