I also interviewed former CIA operatives, intelligence officers who worked with the Hmong during that time and they helped me understand how they trained the local pilots. Now I have the opportunity to create a place where Hmong students, in particular, can see that their history matters too. Everything I’ve learned about Hmong history I had to learn from outside of school. I didn’t see myself in the curriculum when I was a student. This academic program is very important because Asian American students can see themselves in the curriculum. I then built on student advocacy work to create a Hmong Diaspora Studies program. In 2006 the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s history department was looking for someone to teach Southeast Asian history, so I was recruited here. Those who resettled in the United States and those who resettled across the globe. I have researched Southeast Asians, in particular, what happened to refugees from the Vietnam War. So, I started studying refugee resettlement policies. I was interested in studying the history of my people. By the time I went back to school to get my PhD, I knew exactly what I wanted to research and write about. That was the history we had access to as American students. When I was younger it was considered more important to learn about European and American history. I like that American studies is interdisciplinary–it’s history, political science, and a variety of other disciplines as well. I decided to get my PhD in American studies, which I completed in 2006. All my brothers and sister went to college. They would do anything for us to get an education. My parents gave my siblings and me a stable foundation and huge support for education. My family was very poor financially, but I grew up in an environment of love and support, which money can’t buy. I didn’t come from a privileged background. I traveled to 13 European countries, including a train ride from Paris to Prague all by myself. I was very interested in European political history. My junior year in college I studied in France. Since I was interested in political science and foreign policy, I thought I would eventually work for an international organization like the United Nations. At one point in time, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but after high school I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I studied political science and international relations. When I was much younger, I was interested in history, but I did not study history as a student. Back in the 1980s, we were among the very first Hmong families to sell at the farmer’s market in the Twin Cities. If you go to farmer’s markets now in Madison and other cities, you will see a lot of Hmong farmers. During my teenage years, my siblings and I harvested vegetables in the summer and worked with my parents to sell the produce at the farmer’s market. My parents had been farmers in Laos and rented farmland about an hour from St. I grew up in the Twin Cities, except for one year when my family lived in Winona for my dad to take a farm training program. My father’s youngest brother was already there, so we followed him. We moved to Minnesota in 1980, landing in the Twin Cities on April 13. My family was part of the refugee resettlement program after the Vietnam War. Since I didn’t actually know anybody that had a PhD, I didn’t know that it was unrealistic to get a PhD by 25, but I did get it at 35.
When I was in middle school, I wrote in my journal that I would get my PhD by the time I was 25.
Social studies, civics, and language arts were my favorite classes. Then in eighth grade science class, we had to dissect a frog and I decided I didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.