I never expect HMong people like me to star in your average American movie or book, because our culture and history has too often gone unrecognized. There are HMong artists and writers creating works to inform others about our lives and history in the U.S. Mai Der Vang is one such creator.
Vang is a poet who has gained accolades including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Fellowship, and she was a visiting writer at SAIC. After her family fled to the U.S. at the end of the Secret War in Laos, Vang was raised in Fresno, California, and went on to become a poet.
Her writing consists of dreamy, surreal imagery that contrasts with dark themes of war and displacement. While HMong people during the Vietnam War had been coerced to help American soldiers, the atrocities the community faced have been largely redacted from American history. Mai Der Vang uses her poetry as documentation, art, and journalism of a history that has yet to be recognized outside the HMong community.
“Yellow Rain” is a great introduction to Vang’s distinctive style because of her signature formatting choices and the visual-first design of her writing. “Declassified” is a poem that features her unique style. There are spaces between sections of words, and sometimes a new line starts in the middle of a sentence. Vang uses this way of communication as a reference to blackout poetry, which involves a poet taking an existing piece and redacting certain information from it to make a poem. The action of blackout poetry itself is seen as a way of erasing information to make new information, similar to how the U.S. has redacted certain parts of HMong history in the Vietnam War.
While many poets might intend for their works to be read in a flowing rhythm, I believe Vang’s separated lines create an effect similar to Hmong Shamanic chants, which utilize similarly “chopped-up” prose. These chants are used to connect with the spirits, much like how Vang pays respects to the HMong people who were killed in the Vietnam War.
Mai Der Vang’s work also heavily features themes of nature. Vang likens the fleeing of animals to the fleeing of refugees. American Agent Orange chemicals made the forests of Laos toxic and uninhabitable for animals, and many HMong people were persecuted by their governments for helping the American military in the Secret War. They were told by the US that communist forces in the north of Vietnam would take over their lands in the mountains of Southeast Asia.
HMong people were already an ethnic minority without much power. They believed that allying with American forces was necessary to protect their families. Despite this, many HMong people had to flee their newly toxic homelands in fear of persecution without the protection the U.S. had promised them.
In “Declassified,” Vang writes of Agent Orange “divulging its anatomy / to the ecosystem” as if it were an invasive plant instead of a human-made chemical. Insects are depicted by Vang as victims of Agent Orange as they are also part of the nature the chemical destroyed, but Vang humanizes them: “The insects have always known / Their lineage of pollen, and the children / of insects know too.” Like the trauma of the insects in Vang’s poem, HMong experiences in the Vietnam War may be classified, but HMong refugees and the children of refugees know of the horrors enacted upon them.
The Saola is another metaphor used by Vang as she relates the animal’s scarcity to the scarcity of HMong people in American history. Vang’s book “Primordial” contains the poem “I Arrive to Saola by Way of Water.” This delicate poem records Mai Der Vang’s experience with the generational trauma that results from war and seeking refuge. The Saola is an endangered animal that is often dubbed the “Asian Unicorn” because of its rarity.
Vang recounts the HMong-American experience of going through war, leaving home, and coming to America, all the while still feeling trapped in war. Like the Saola, Hmong people’s suffering is rarely witnessed from the outside. The killing of an ethnic minority, the lack of help given after the pain, and the lack of acknowledgment of their sacrifices all become mythology as HMong people and their traumatic history still go unrecognized.
HMong people’s contributions to America have yet to be acknowledged with dignity and truth. As a HMong person myself, I really appreciate Mai Der Vang’s work, as she is able to verbalize the very complex and traumatic experiences of HMong people in a way that does not dramatize the pain. Despite being very symbolic and dreamlike in tone, Vang’s writing is also very direct with the reader in historical information.
Vang does not look back at her family’s homeland of Laos with rose-colored glasses, but rather critiques the violence that caused HMong people’s displacement in the first place. Mai Der Vang’s writing is skillful and deeply insightful, and I recommend her work to anyone who appreciates nature, wants to learn more about HMong culture and history, and respects anti-war sentiments.
