I interviewed Xia Moua. She is my uncle’s wife. This interview took place at my house in Saint Paul, Minnesota when my aunt and uncle visited my family in October during fall break. The most surprising thing I learned about my aunt was that as a Hmong woman who grew up in a small village in Laos during the 1950s-1960s, she could speak Hmong, Laotian, Thai and French. Xia grew up in a traditional and collectivist Hmong village in Laos. The Hmong are patriarchal and clan society. She also grew up in a household where her grandpa had two wives: her grandma and her step-grandma. Back in the days, it was acceptable if a Hmong man marry more than one wife. This practice is mentioned in the book as polygyny, which is a cultural tradition that men …show more content…
He would cry and won’t let others hold him. In the book, stranger anxiety occurs when an infant is around 6 months of age; a child is fear in response to unfamiliar faces (Arnett, 2016). Xia’s son Pao was strapped to her back as she did her chores, so his gross motor development was slower. Her son skipped crawling and just started walking since his movements were restricted. As Arnett (2016) wrote that gross motor development is the ability for baby to do whole body movement such as crawling. In the book, filial piety was mentioned as the belief that children should obey and respect their parents throughout life (Arnett, 2016). One of the things Xia most proud of is having filial children. She said ever since her family arrived in America and her sons found jobs to support the family. Xia mentioned that her sons would accompany her to visit relatives. Her sons still respect and listen to her. This is important in Hmong culture as the children are expected to obeyed and respected …show more content…
Xia described that she has vision declines, as she is older now. She must wear her glasses for reading or for sewing traditional Hmong dresses. Living in Thailand, people tend to get married earlier and have kids. Xia became a grandmother when she was around 40 years old when her sons got married. According to Baldelomar (2015), becoming a grandparent in developing countries usually occurred when people are in their 40s. After her sons got married and had children, Xia enjoyed providing childcare for them. It is a choice and she likes to babysit them. According to the book, Erikson defined generativity is the motivation to contribute to the well-being of the future generations (Arnett, 2016). My aunt is a mother to children and also a grandmother to her grandchildren. She enjoys taking them to school, and picking them up from school when their parents are at work. Arnett (2016) wrote that self-acceptance is when middle adults become more accepting of having a mix of positive and negative qualities, but overall felt more positive about themselves. As Xia is in her mid-sixty now, she accepted that she was once fortune enough to attend school unlike most women at that time, but due to the war, she could not continue her education as planned. However she has a great family now. She is
Shostak’s ethnography, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, is a collection of memories and life events recounted by a !Kung woman named Nisa in the early 1970s, and translated to English by Shostak, and published along with Shostak’s own observations and research on !Kung
In their pursuit of assimilating and calling the US home, they had forged a new identity of Hmong Americans. (Yang, 203) Being Hmong American meant striving to move up the economic ladder and determining one’s own future. They understood that for them to realize their American dream and their “possibilities”, it could only be done so through “school”. (Yang, 139) Yang realized her dream by attaining a Master’s of Fine Arts from Columbia University and publishing books about the Hmong story.
I thought it would be an interesting idea to enlighten and inform people about the Lao Iu Mein and our process of immigrating to the U.S. as well as the challenges we have to overcome. I interviewed my parents, Lao Iu Mein refugees who immigrated to the United States from Thailand. Through this interview, I had a chance to hear for the first time the story of my parents' struggles and experiences as they journeyed to a place where they became "aliens" and how that place is now the place they call "home."
Within this critical analysis, I hope to show that the lack of communication and compromise between the Hmong family and the American doctors, was the defining blow to Lia’s ill health. I hope to do this by addressing the following three main points of interest in relation to this miscommunication; the views held by the American healthcare professions on the causes of Lia’s illness, contrasted with the opinions of Lia’s parents. I will then discuss the health-seeking strategies of Lia’s parents and how they were influenced by different resou...
Lee uses the example of a Navaho mother to show the personal autonomy of a child. In this example the baby walks around the house without the mother keeping an eye on it. Although knowing that the baby could get hurt by the knife or the fire, she does not put away the sharp object, nor does she keeps the baby away from the fire. Lee considers that “for Navaho mothers, personal autonomy means that her child has the freedom to make his own mistakes, to suffer pain or grief or joy and learn from the experience” (Lee, 1959, p. 13). The mother takes the chance to leave her baby to explore on his or her own, knowing that it could harm the c...
In the middle adulthood life stage the developmental task are “managing a career, nurturing intimate relationships, expanding caring relationships, and managing the household”. (Cite From Book) June is experiencing the psychological crises of generativity versus stagnation. June is comfortable taking her mother’s place at the table in the United States and not even looking for her sisters. However, when her aunties told her that they had received a letter from her sisters she fought the stagnation part of the psychological crises. According to Newman and Newman generativity is “to bring into existence”. (CITEp.513). This could be though “introducing new things, ideas, beings, or bonds to relationship-all of which not had existed before”. (CITE) June then switch to generativity in where she wanted to do what was best for her mother’s future generations. June wanted to meet her siblings to discuss the type of person their mother was and tell the sacrifice their mother made for them. June felt obligated to meet her sisters to contribute and bring forth the bond with her
The Hmong people, an Asian ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam and Laos, greatly value their culture and traditions. The film “The Split Horn: Life of a Hmong Shaman in America” documents the seventeen year journey of the Hmong Shaman, Paja Thao and his family from the mountains of Laos to the heartland of America. This film shows the struggle of Paja Thao to maintain their 5000 year-old shamanic traditions as his children embrace the American culture. Moreover, the film shows that one of the major problems refugees like Paja Thao and his family face upon their arrival to the United States is conflict with the American medical system. Despite the dominant biomedical model of health, the film “The Split Horn” shows that
The Hmong culture is firmly rooted in their spiritual belief of animism, ancestral worship and reincarnation. These beliefs connect them to their sense of health and well-being. They view illness as having either a natural or a spiritual cause. A spiritual cause results in a “loss of souls” or is an action or misdeed that may have offended an ancestor’s spirit (California Department of Health Services, 2004, Purnell, 2013, p. 317). The soul escapes the body and may not be able to find its way back home. The Hmong also believe that a combination of natural and supernatural cause’s results in illness, and spells or curses, violation of taboos, accidents, fright, and infectious disease are other causes for illness (Centers for Disease Control
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
Amy Tan’s ,“Mother Tongue” and Maxine Kingston’s essay, “No Name Woman” represent a balance in cultures when obtaining an identity in American culture. As first generation Chinese-Americans both Tan and Kingston faced many obstacles. Obstacles in language and appearance while balancing two cultures. Overcoming these obstacles that were faced and preserving heritage both women gained an identity as a successful American.
Share the story of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.
The scene is always the same: the three of us sitting in a room together, talking. I see her from the corner of my eye, glancing for only a second or two, but always long enough to notice the look on her face, the expression I’ve become so painfully familiar with over the years. I am forced to turn away; the conversation resumes. She is a few feet from us. She hears everything, and understands nothing except what she can gather from the expressions on our faces, the tone of our voices. She pretends not to be bothered, smiling at us and interjecting random questions or comments in Chinese—a language I was raised to speak, a language I’ve slowly forgotten over the years, a language that is now mine only by blood. It is an earnest but usually futile attempt to break through the invisible barrier that separates her from us, and in spite of all her efforts to hide it, that sad, contem...
The Hmong Culture of South Asia is a very interesting ethnic group. Between 300,000 to 600,000 Hmong live in Southeast Asian countries, such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. About 8 million more live in the southern provinces of China. Since the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia have settled in Australia, France, Canada, and the United States. The largest Hmong refugee community lives in the United States with a population of about 110,000. The U.S. Department of state has tried to spread Hmong refugees out across the country to reduce the impact on any one region. Because Hmong families tend to be large in numbers, the community grows rapidly.
After the fall of the Saigon in 1975, Heidi’s mother- Mrs. Mai Thi Kim decided to send her to America as fearing for her uncertain future in Vietnam. Twenty two years later years, Heidi eventually found her Vietnamese mother. However, as she was raised in the States, Heidi is now "101%" American and has little knowledge of her Vietnamese heritage. Undoubtedly, this reality reveals potentials for cultural collision.
Tan was born to a pair of Chinese immigrants. Her mother understood English extremely well, but the English she spoke was “broken.”(36) Many people not familiar with her way of speaking found it very difficult to understand her. As a result of this, Tan would have to pretend to be her mother, and she called people up to yell at them while her mother stood behind her and prompted her. This caused Tan to be ashamed of her mother throughout her youth, but as she grew, she realized that the language she shares with her mother is a “language of intimacy” (36) that she even uses when speaking with her husband.