Hmong Story Cloths

By far, one of the coolest things to come out of my internship this summer with Mennonite Central Committee is this: Hmong story cloths (pronounced “mong” – the “h” is silent). First, a little bit of background. This summer, I have had the great honour of serving with MCC by spearheading a pilot project to collect oral histories of former refugees who came to Canada through the MCC private sponsorship of refugees program (find out more here). Because MCC Ontario has sponsored 15 000 refugees since the program began in 1979, I clearly had to narrow it down. I decided to focus on the first group, the people from Southeast Asia, more commonly (and inaccurately – not to mention less-than-sensitively) known as the “Boat People.” When images of the humanitarian crisis in Southeast Asia in the late ’70s started flooding televisions in the west, people began jumping up and down insisting something be done. That something took the form of sponsorship. In Canada, MCC became the first signatory with the Canadian government, creating the private sponsorship of refugees program. Important side note: to this day Canada is the only country in the world that has private sponsorship of refugees – O Canada!

Vietnamese Canadian Federation members

Anyway, because this wave of immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were the first to come, they were the ideal group for several reasons. First of all, practicality. In trying to find participants for oral history projects, you have to be able to actually find them. I had a stack of Notice of Arrival forms, housed in the MCC archives, that listed the person(s) sponsored, the church/business/group that sponsored them, and the person who was point of contact. I then contacted the sponsors in order to track down the contact in order to find the people sponsored. Phew. Thankfully, helping this along, were many commemorative celebrations in the last year or so. See, many of these people came to Canada 30 years ago, and had celebrations with their sponsors to commemorate that.

Well, interviewing these people over the past summer has been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects I’ve undertaken. Even more than that, though, having the opportunity to speak with these people has been a truly great honour. The stories are incredible (you, too, can appreciate their stories, just as soon as I get the project web site up and running! I’ll post about it here when I do).

I’ll speak more about the project when I finally complete the project’s site and post about it here, but today I want to focus on what, as I already said, was one of the coolest discoveries for me, the Hmong story cloths, of course.

The Hmong are an ethnic group from Southeast Asia who have no homeland.

Hmong New Year celebration

To get a quick idea of what their history has been like, think of the Kurds in Iraq, or the Jews in Russia. Not a happy history. After the Vietnam War and the Secret War in Laos, the communist regime and the Viet Cong targeted the Hmong for retribution. The Hmong had worked with the American forces and so were ruthlessly hunted down as a people. (Side note: while the situation is not as dire as it was in the mid-70s, life is far from safe for Hmong people in Laos and Vietnam today). It is estimated that upwards of two-thirds of the Hmong population in Laos was killed.

Ban Vinai Refugee Camp

Not surprisingly, many Hmong fled to neighbouring Thailand, where they landed in refugee camps such as Nong Khai and Ban Vinai. To read an excellent Hmong family memoir, I highly recommend Kao Kalia Yang‘s The Latehomecomer. For those who don’t already know, refugee camps are not happy places. They are filthy, overcrowded, unsanitary, undersupplied prisons. Many Hmong spent several years in these camps. In order to whittle away the time, but even more importantly, in order to make sure future generations would not forget what had happened, Hmong women turned their tradition of needlework to recreating their own stories. Hmong women would embroider intricate pictures on wholecloth quilts, illustrating their escape from Laos into Thailand. Some quilts are small, and some are quite large. This had a practical element, too. Once completed, the Hmong would sell these quilts to foreigners working in the camps, and to friends or family who were already overseas, in order to create an income for themselves and their families. The quilts display images of village life, warfare, escape across the Mekong River, and life in the refugee camps.

Hmong story cloth

When I told my husband about these quilts, he replied, “Well, there’s your dissertation right there!” We’ll see – the idea certainly has merit! But for now I’m just so thankful they were brought to my attention by one of the women I interviewed.

Modesty’s Effect

Kris McDermott left this post here:

“I’m not very familiar with the modesty movement, but I’m curious- what sort of implications do you think the modesty movement has on modern women, either religious or secular?”

Hmm. Very interesting. I decided it was worthy of an entire post. First of all, let me reiterate that this blog is not about telling anyone how they should dress. It’s a place for the exchange of ideas. So here are some of mine, and please, leave a comment to say what you think.

A “modesty movement” can be a very dangerous thing. Take Iran. That is a case where the powers that be decided what modesty would be, and imposed that image onto the women of the country (Iran, by the way, is by no means the only place where this is true). They did not/do not care who the women really are, what’s inside of them, what a woman’s own image of herself is. Instead they pull women before the revolutionary committee because she has long eyelashes, and so they suspect her of using mascara. A principal trims a girl’s fingernails until she bleeds because her nails were “immodestly” long. A group of university students eating apples gets reprimanded by the school morality squad because they were biting “too seductively”. (These are all true accounts from Dr. Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran) The authorities have imposed their own vision of modesty on others, and I don’t support that in any form, from any belief system.

Lest we Christians in the West get too high on our morality horses, let’s remember the Christian missionaries who died of heat exhaustion when they came to hotter climates, rather than take off some clothes! And of course there are the wonderful things we did to the Indigenous populations in the name of modesty:

 

 

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Photos: Saskatchewan Archives Board R-A9223-1, Thomas Moore as he appeared when admitted to the Regina Indian Industrial School, and R_A8223-2, Thomas Moore, after tuition at the Regina Indian Industrial School [ca. 1897

 

On the other hand we have pre-teen girls dressed “sexy” because that’s what it means to be a woman (right?) and caught between two worlds, they would rather emulate grown women than little girls. There’s an interesting discussion of this here In my opinion, while there is nothing wrong with sexy clothes, in and of themselves, (hey, it’s nice to feel sexy sometimes), there’s a time and place, and an age. I feel the Girls Spider Web Sexy Tights, made by PrettySinful, are inappropriate. Who makes clothes for an 11-12 yr old girl with the word “sexy” in them? 

So this is what I believe:

• A woman should always be able to wear whatever she chooses, whether it’s a burqa, or a bikini.
• A man is always responsible for his own actions. A woman never ”asks” to get raped. (Women got raped in Afghanistan under the Taliban, you know, even though you couldn’t get more covered)
• Modesty is in the eye of the beholder (see my post on this).
• Within these frameworks, there is such a thing as what is appropriate. You wouldn’t wear a gown to the grocery store, or go to church in a negligée.
• There is also age appropriate.
• In the end, this is something each woman needs to work out for herself, or each parent/child team needs to discern.