Your soul is like your shadow, she said. Sometimes it just wanders off like a butterfly and that is when you are sad and that's when you get sick, and if it comes back to you, that is when you are hap...
Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.
The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means to speak of all kinds of things. It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the worl...
I'll meet some people who'll treat me mean and I'll just pray that I'll never be like them. And then I'll meet some very nice people and I will take a little bit of them and make myself a better perso...
I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice -...
I remember having a little bit of a feeling of awe at how differently we looked at the world. It was very foreign to me that they had the ability to stand firm in the face of an expert opinion.
I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring...
When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.
The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request...
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover midstream, su...
My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.
It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegi...
During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory Americanization classes. In addition to English lessons, there w...
Benjamin Franklin wrote that he would like to be embalmed in a cask of Madeira
A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If...
Her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with
You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I w...
When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficie...
In 1965, Johnson commented sanctimoniously that the problem of Laos is the refusal of the Communist forces to honor the Geneva Accords, What he failed to mention was that his own country wasn't honori...