Vang: I was born the year my homeland exploded

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I was born in 1975, the year Laos exploded.

That is how the Hmong elders describe it — lub teb chaw tawg, the country exploded. Not a metaphor, but a memory. The year the communists took power. The year the Hmong became hunted in their own homeland. The year the first waves of Hmong refugees arrived in Minnesota.

The collective Hmong trauma was so vast, words weren’t enough. So my people used images. Explosion. Fire. Smoke. That’s how you describe the end of a world.

Fifty years have passed. I write this column because if I don’t, someone else will — and they may not be Hmong. They may not know that the phrase “the country exploded” isn’t poetic license. It’s an inherited truth.

This year, the 50th anniversary, is not just a marking of time. It’s a reckoning. For too long, our story has been told by others — first by the French, our early colonizers, and later by the Americans, our ally and exploiter. Whether it’s historians, journalists, anthropologists or poets, those outside our community have attempted to narrate our experiences. But no matter how well intentioned, they cannot fully capture the depth and truth of our story. Why? Because only we can speak with the authority of lived memory, cultural nuance and ancestral knowing.

While many rightfully celebrate 50 years of Hmong resilience and achievement in Minnesota and the U.S., I also focus on refugee trauma because healing requires remembering. Remembering is how we break the silence, how we stop passing pain from one generation to the next.

I was born on Long Tieng (sometimes spelled Long Cheng), a CIA military base carved into the Laotian mountains where the Hmong fought a secret war. It was the busiest airfield in the world at the time —more planes took off and landed there than at JFK in New York. But by the time I came into the world, the war was lost. The Americans were leaving. Long Tieng — once a fortress — was becoming a tomb.

Whenever Hmong elders learn my age, they pause. Their faces change. “You were born that year?” they ask, as though my existence is stitched to their sorrow. Because it is. I arrived as they were leaving. My birth marked their exodus. A Hmong shaman told me I was smuggled into life through closing doors.

My mother sometimes recounts how we fled Long Tieng. When I was less than a month old, my father, who was safe in the Laotian capital city of Vientiane, sent word she must flee the base. There was no time to pack. She couldn’t take anything. Only her breath and me.

The evacuation of Long Tieng was meant to be a secret. American planes were coming, my father said, but only for Gen. Vang Pao and his chosen few. My family was among the lucky ones. But secrets don’t last long when lives are at stake. Thousands of Hmong rushed to the airstrip, desperate to escape.

Only one plane opened its hatch. The others landed, looked at the crowd, and lifted back into the sky without letting a single soul aboard. Chaos erupted with thousands sprinting toward one plane. My mother dashed, holding me in her arms. She was still healing from childbirth. In the stampede, she fell. The crowd surged over her, hundreds trampling her body. She told me later she felt her lungs collapsing, her grip on me loosening. She believed we would both die there.

And then — a hand. A distant uncle, she said. He lifted her and threw her into the belly of the plane. The hatch wasn’t even fully open. The pilot, overwhelmed by the scene, slammed the door shut and took off.

That was how I left Laos: too wounded to squeak. A baby carried out of a burning country by a mother whose story I wear like a second skin.

We became refugees in Ban Vinai in Thailand, one of the largest Hmong refugee camps, for five years. At any given time, there were 45,000 residents of Ban Vinai.

One of my first vivid memories was of a girl who was raped. Her father tied her to a pole in the village square to punish her shame. By morning, she was dead. They said she took her own life. But how does a girl tied at the wrists stab herself? My 3-year-old self wished I would grow up to be ugly because I had witnessed a beautiful girl’s death.

I remember digging through garbage, singing. I was 4. I knew only one word in English: “I.”

“I don’t have money,” I sang in Hmonglish, “so I will just eat the watermelon rind.”

Before we arrived in America in 1980, my parents took “culture classes” to prepare — watching films about deer, shopping malls, and McDonald’s, and learning “Old MacDonald had a Farm” and how to flush toilets. But no class taught them how to navigate the unseen lessons of racism that awaited us.

In third grade at a St. Paul public school, my best friends were Gwen and Dawn. Gwen wore flannel shirts; Dawn, sundresses. We thought we were the same. One day at recess, I chased a squirrel across the playground. They followed, laughing. A teacher shouted that I’d never catch it. Another joked I’d be eating dog for dinner. They laughed.

We froze. Gwen turned to me. “Do you eat dogs?”

I whispered, “No.”

I didn’t yet understand the cruelty in the teachers’ words. But I knew I had just been made different from Gwen and Dawn.

Despite enduring racism, poverty and countless challenges, the Hmong community has transformed from invisible to indelible. Today, nearly 100,000 Hmong call Minnesota home. We are citizens, voters, educators, lawmakers, entrepreneurs and artists. Within our community, being the “first” to achieve something — especially in a profession — is a profound milestone. We celebrate our first Olympic gold medalist, Suni Lee, and our first Hollywood actress, Brenda Song.

A family member recently reminded me that I am the first Hmong American columnist for a major daily newspaper. While there have been Hmong reporters before, no one had held the writer’s voice in quite this way. This recognition stirred mixed feelings — hope tempered by the reality that, despite our progress, we still have far to go.

True equity will come when there are no longer “firsts” to mark our achievements, when breaking barriers becomes ordinary. For now, we are boldly claiming space and crafting our own authentic Hmong narrative.