Week 3 Hexi Huang A03

It was very interesting reading about the Hmongs' experience in America because I like to compare and contrast it with my own. I am of Chinese origin and I went to a high school with primarily whites and Latinos. I was one of less than five Asian Americans in my class yet I never felt isolation that was described by the some of the interviewees, although I did become friends with most of them later and noticed a correlation between age of arrival in American and the isolation that I perceived that they experienced. There were the Asian Americans born in America, they grew up with the same people for most of their life and very well integrated into the community and there are kids who immigrated to America later, from middle to high school, and I noticed those kids had a harder time with the social aspect. Somehow I suspect that may be a trend with anyone that move into a school towards the later years though and may not be due to any systemic racism, that is of course not to say that the interviewee’s experiences are invalid or that there is no systemic discrimination.

I don’t know if I fully agree that Hmong history should be taught in k-12 education though. The writer says that this type of education can help miseducation and separation in the Hmong community but to understand the subtleties of those points would take an incredible amount of time, and I don’t think this education is fair to other ethnic groups as it necessarily implies favoritism among ethnic groups as the units on those groups will have to have longer or shorter sections.  But if we decide to include every ethnic group that has ever existed in the US they would get maybe a couple minutes at the most and would defeat the point of even attempting to learn about them. And my personal view on K-12 education is to give the most basic tools to life and/or higher education and there is barely enough time for that as it is.

I wonder what the original justification for “Hmong means free” came from.

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp
Mouavangou, K. N. (n.d.). Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation Of Hmong Americans 1.