screen, she was either a prostitute, she was killed, she didn t speak english. wow. by the time i was 18 i was like, oh, man this sucks. i m over it. i think art making has been an opportunity to try to live in my own skin unapologetically. yes. we also just like talking about ourselves a lot and wanted people to pay to come see us. we think we re funny. i m right there with you. i had a similar life. i understand. yes, yes. you recall earlier we learned the hmong had a lot of conflict then you know why their working together is so revolutionary. even years later the divide is still real. the thing is our communities don t often talk to each other. we have so many things in common. we have a shared history. we actually wrote a whole play called hmong-lao friendship play. it makes a difference. my people will click on hmong-lao and your people click on lao-hmong. we wanted paem to come into the room together and be able to
just learned. the same way you learned to kill the birds. exactly. i had a dream of making hmong people stop migrating place to place, place to place. hmong town marketplace is a fulfillment of that dream. built in 2005 it employs over 600 hmong americans including his kids. nice to meet you. as well as his wife and his son-in-law who helped me not feel so bad about not knowing much about the hmong. i m hearing in college, she said i m hmong. i m like, what is that? i ve never heard of hmong people. i texted my brother back home in hawaii. hey, can you look up hmong people for me? at some point he realized he wasn t excited about raising a bunch of soft american kids. how do i make my american raised kids to be as motivated as i am? yeah. the only way is to take them to the jungle. there is no more jungle to take them to. so i bought air fare tickets one way to thailand. the last day i said you guys are
it is just wednesday is my maroon day. these young women are among the top badminton players in the state. they have won nine state championships and are going for their tenth. though practice looked intense and rough a couple star players took a break from beating that birdie to talk to me. how long have you played badminton? six years. what do you like about it? smashing. smashing? tell me what that is. when you kill the birdie where it goes straight down. a scary, violent sounding word. smashing. like the spike in volleyball? yep. like a spike in volleyball. okay. are you both hmong? yes. why are there so many hmong girls on the team? i think it s because they are willing to work together a little bit more. okay. before we came here they were the state champion so it gave that reputation and we wanted to do it. what are your hopes for the future of badminton? tenth year. the repeat and the three-peat. air going for the ten-peat.
bad joke. congratulations everybody on your re-election. part of the hmong wave it sounds like. in november, 2018 a record five, that s right, five is a record, state representative seats were won by the hmong candidates. i m at golden time coffee sitting down with the first ever hmong city council member and two newly elected reps. so i ve heard a lot about this clan system. is there a difference between clan politics and politics outside of the clan? your relationship with each clan is a little bit different and that prepares you well in the main stream politics because everybody is diverse. right? so if you want to do well in politics come learn the hmong clan system. the hmong approach to politics is informed bite clan system. hmong families are divided into 18 separate groups called clans.
once the american military pulled out of vietnam for the united states the war was effectively over, but for the hmong, a people who had turned on their own government, a new fight has begun a fight to survive. the laotian government set to the task of hunting down the hmong. many escaped into the jungle. many went to refugee camps in thailand many with the u.s. in their sites. some ended up in what could be the most unlikely place to imagine, minnesota. if you think i made that sound easy i certainly did. i m going to sit down and eat and eat at the hmong town marketplace in st. paul. this is the owner of the marketplace. and, boy, he s got a story to tell. that s why we ll sit down. i ll be more like a regular human size. so we are going to be eating some hmong food. okay. there is an unbelievable amount of food here.