PebHmong Discussion Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: theking on August 12, 2021, 06:26:28 PM
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Meet the Woman Who Created an App to Save Her Endangered Language
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After the Vietnam War, Annie Vang’s parents escaped persecution in Laos and traversed the Mekong River in the dead of night to seek safety in Thailand. “My family had no choice but to flee or die,” she says.
Vang and her family are Hmong, an ethnic and cultural group who lost their land—and way of life—after siding with the U.S. in the fight against Communism. Like so many other Hmong people, Vang’s family resettled in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S. in the late ’70s. Growing up in Iowa, Vang remembers being bullied for having an accent and “looking different” than everyone else. “I was told to go back to my country every day,” she says. “I just wanted to be like everyone else and assimilate and forget about my Hmong roots.”
Yet as an adult, the 44-year-old is doing everything in her power to preserve her cultural history. For more than a decade, the app developer has been digitally documenting the Hmong language with HmongPhrases, an app she created to teach the Hmong language to English speakers. “It is critical we capture this, so that our language, legacy, and stories can live on,” she says.
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The Hmong people—widely considered to be one of the country’s most marginalized Asian American groups—have been in the U.S. for almost 50 years. But until gymnast Sunisa Lee competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, they rarely made headlines. After Lee won gold in the all-around competition, there was an uptick in interest surrounding the ethnic group, with Google reporting a spike in searches for the word “Hmong,” and the phrase,“Where are Hmong people from?”
The answer to that question is complicated. Hmong American chef Chef Yia Vang (who, like Vang, lived in a Thai refugee camp) recently told Teen Vogue that the word “Hmong” literally means, “we don’t have a land of our own.”
The Hmong people are primarily from Southeast Asia and remote areas in China. During the Vietnam War, Hmong child soldiers were recruited to fight in a CIA-sponsored operation known as the “secret war.” When the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam—essentially abandoning the ethnic group—more than 120,000 Hmongs became refugees in their own homelands, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Many fled to Thailand, and later to the U.S., where there are now at least 18 Hmong clans sprinkled across the country—the largest in Lee’s hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
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Love to see her app. She's a great cook too.