Workbook
For Hmong (American) Families
A Workbook on the Distance Between the Village and Now, and What You're Choosing to Carry Forward
Name what your family carries across the distance.
Hmong American families navigating the distance between the village, the refugee camps, and the life being built here. First-generation Hmong refugees and their American-born or American-raised children who are trying to find shared language for who they are across the enormous gap between their two worlds.
The Name It First Experience
Your family crossed something most people cannot imagine. The village. The war. The camps. The resettlement. The gap between what your family survived and what your children know about it is one of the widest in the American immigrant experience. This workbook does not ask your family to close that gap. It asks you to name — together and on paper — what Hmong identity means in your specific household, what you are carrying on purpose, and what you are choosing to build from here. Grounded in Racial Identity Development theory (Cross, Helms), Acculturation Theory (Berry), Intersectionality (Crenshaw), diasporic identity scholarship (Brah, Hall), and research on Hmong American refugee identity and intergenerational family dynamics, this workbook gives your family a structure to have the conversation. The work is yours to do together. This is where you write it down. You leave with The Hmong (American) Families Agreement.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What has your Hmong American clan given you — the values, the stories, the ways of belonging that came through the family even across the enormous distance from the village to now?
- What is the distance between the world your family came from and the one you are building — and what have you had to figure out on your own in that gap?
- What would The Hmong American Family Record say — from your actual experience, across generations — about what the clan carried here and what you are choosing to carry forward?
Research basis
Cross (1971, 1991) Nigrescence Model adapted for Asian American identity / Helms (1990) racial identity statuses / Berry (1997) acculturation strategies with focus on refugee adaptation / Crenshaw (1989, 1991) intersectionality / Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora / Hall (1990) Cultural Identity and Diaspora / Faderman & Xiong (1998) I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience / Hamilton-Merritt (1993) Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars / cultural frameworks of Hmong clan structure (18 major clans), txiv neeb (shamanism), and Hmong animist/Christian identity transitions / Lee (1997) Hmong American identities and school achievement / Vang (2008) Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora / intergenerational trauma and refugee family dynamics (Rousseau et al., 2004) / Hmong American youth identity (Xiong & Huang, 2011).
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