I hadn't paid much attention to it. Not until I read a summary on Facebook about Panhia Vue's incident in Wisconsin. But I have been so disturbed by this news that at first I've shaken every time I thought about the incident. And I thought about it a lot each day. So shaken and so disturbed that I decided to go to the funeral in Eau Claire, WI, on August 1, 2013.
Before that, I had read a piece of news about her being killed by her husband Ying Xiong. But I took that to be normal news nowadays, since there have been constant news about domestic killings in our community.
But Panhia Vue's case took a sharp twist from the rest: neither of the two Hmong clans involved in her life did her funeral; while her corpse was rotting in the morgue, a mainstream women organization took over the funeral for the Hmong.
The news further stated that the Hmong women are not happy about how Panhia Vue's corpse was handled and all fingers had been pointed to the 18 Clan Council in Wisconsin for the failure to provide a traditional funeral for Panhia Vue's corpse. The women's position was: if Panhia Vue was a Hmong man, she would have received a proper traditional funeral; but since she's a Hmong woman, the male clan leaders have let her body rot without funeral attention.
The women wanted equality. They now question whether the 18 Clan Council should be allowed to operate its policies over the Hmong or if it should even continue to exist at all.
All of these made me realize the Hmong still need a lot of guidance in life--old and young, traditional and those that aren't.
In fact, both of the clans involved in Panhia Vue's case are traditional Hmong clans. Neither has converted to Christianity. We make the distinction in that respect, despite the fact that members of those clans have lived in America for over 30 years.
In these last few weeks, and today, too, I've been constantly bothered by this case. How could they let a body rot in the face of the rest of the world? Why was their conflict so strong as to make them completely insensitive to Panhia Vue's rotting corpse, no matter what kind of reputation she may have had while alive? Questions and just more questions without answers. Well, I have my answers but those are in my diary, not in this journal.