Download or read book Laos Beyond the Revolution written by Joseph J. Zasloff and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-06-18 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work contains papers presented at a conference called "Current Developments in Laos" in Washington DC in 1988. The topics covered range from Lao nationalism and American policy, 1954-1959, to Laotian refugees in Thailand.
Download or read book Indochina s Refugees written by Joanna C. Scott and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This poignant collection of oral histories tells the stories of nine Laotians, four Cambodians and nine Vietnamese: what their lives were like before 1975, what happened after the Communist takeover that made them decide to flee their native countries, and how they escaped. The storytellers (housewife, Amerasian child, schoolteacher, government clerk, military officer, security agent, Buddhist monk, artist) create a broad and moving picture of the new realities of contemporary Indochina.
Download or read book How to Pronounce Knife written by Souvankham Thammavongsa and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and winner of the 2020 Giller Prize, this revelatory story collection honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world." A failed boxer painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. A mother teaching her daughter the art of worm harvesting. In her stunning debut story collection, O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to belong. In spare, intimate prose charged with emotional power and a sly wit, she paints an indelible portrait of watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures, languages, and values. As one of Thammavongsa's characters says, "All we wanted was to live." And in these stories, they do—brightly, ferociously, unforgettably. Unsentimental yet tender, taut and visceral, How to Pronounce Knife announces Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most striking voices of her generation. “As the daughter of refugees, I’m able to finally see myself in stories.” —Angela So, Electric Literature
Download or read book Diversity in Diaspora written by Mark Edward Pfeifer and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology wrestles with Hmong Americans’ inclusion into and contributions to Asian American studies, as well as to American history and culture and refugee, immigrant, and diasporic trajectories. It negotiates both Hmong American political and cultural citizenship, meticulously rewriting the established view of the Hmong as “new” Asian neighbors—an approach articulated, Hollywood style, in Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino. The collection boldly moves Hmong American studies away from its usual groove of refugee recapitulation that entrenches Hmong Americans points-of-origin and acculturation studies rather than propelling the field into other exciting academic avenues. Following a summary of more than three decades’ of Hmong American experience and a demographic overview, chapters investigate the causes of and solutions to socioeconomic immobility in the Hmong American community and political and civic activism, including Hmong American electoral participation and its affects on policymaking. The influence of Hmong culture on young men is examined, followed by profiles of female Hmong leaders who discuss the challenges they face and interviews with aging Hmong Americans. A section on arts and literature looks at the continuing relevance of oral tradition to Hmong Americans’ successful navigation in the diaspora, similarities between rap and kwv txhiaj (unrehearsed, sung poetry), and Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir, The Latehomecomer. The final chapter addresses the lay of the land in Hmong American studies, constituting a comprehensive literature review. Diversity in Diaspora showcases the desire to shape new contours of Hmong American studies as Hmong American scholars themselves address new issues. It represents an essential step in carving out space for Hmong Americans as primary actors in their own right and in placing Hmong American studies within the purview of Asian American studies.
Download or read book Refugees from Laos written by U.S. Committee for Refugees and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper, based partly upon staff visits to sites of Laotian river crossings, examines the history of the refugee situation in Laos, the conditions of life in that country and the current situation of Laotian asylum seekers who have sought refuge in Thailand, and suggests policy objectives. Following the fall of Laos and the events that took place in Viet Nam and Kampuchea, thousands of Laotians fled their homes to seek refuge, primarily in Thailand. However, as political problems in Southeast Asia remained unresolved and the number of arrivals in Thailand increased, the welcome of the asylum seekers in their host country grew thin. The refugees found themselves either forced back across the Mekong or placed in humane deterrence camps. January 1985 saw a policy of widespread pushbacks of Laotians by the Thai authorities. Thai officials also began screening new arrivals from Laos to determine if they were indeed refugees. By 1986, Laotians in Thailand numbered among the largest group of asylum seekers in that country. The Thai authorities decided in this same year to open its humane deterrence camps and permit third countries to process refugees in time for resettlement.
Download or read book The Making of Hmong America written by Kou Yang and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study documents Hmong’s involvement in the Secret War in Laos, their refugee exodus from Laos to the refugee camps in Thailand, and the challenges to find third countries to take Hmong refugees. At the time, Hmong and other highlander refugees from Laos were considered unsuitable to be resettled into the United States. He provides detailed research on the adaptation of Hmong Americans to their new lives in the United States, facing discrimination and prejudice, and the advancement of Hmong Americans over the past 40 years. He presents the Hmong American community as an uprooted refugee community that grew from a small population in 1975 to more than 300,000 by the year 2015; spreading to all 50 states while becoming a diverse and complex American ethnic community. To get better insight into their diversity, complexity, and adaptation to different localities, Kou Yang uses the Hmong communities in Montana, Fresno and Denver as case studies. The progress of Hmong Americans over the past 4 decades is highlighted with a list of many achievements in education, high-tech, academia, political participation, the military and other fields. Readers of this book will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges, complex and diverse experience of the Hmong American community. They will also obtain insight into the overall experience of the Hmong, an ethnic people of Diaspora, found in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Europe. They are like bristle-cone pines on the rock that have been exposed to all types of weather, climate and conditions, but they won't die.
Download or read book The Latehomecomer written by Kao Kalia Yang and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.
Download or read book Modern Jungles written by Pao Lor and published by Wisconsin Historical Society. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning. Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope. Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.
Download or read book Dien Cai Dau written by Yusef Komunyakaa and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1988-09-01 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is “a major contribution to the body of literature grappling with Vietnam” (Poetry). Yusef Komunyakaa is renowned for his ability to blend memory and history with strikingly evocative poetic imagery. Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and received a Bronze Star for his service as a journalist. In Dien Cai Dau, he applies this unique sensibility to his experience of the Vietnam War. The resulting poems have been called some of the finest Vietnam testimony ever documented in verse or prose. “So finely tuned are Komunyakaa’s images, so faultless his vision, that the reader sees precisely what the poet recalls . . . A powerful must-read for those who have forgotten those days.” ―Booklist
Download or read book Running on Empty written by Michael J. Molloy and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-04-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of Saigon in April 1975 resulted in the largest and most ambitious refugee resettlement effort in Canada’s history. Running on Empty presents the challenges and successes of this bold refugee resettlement program. It traces the actions of a few dozen men and women who travelled to seventy remote refugee camps, worked long days in humid conditions, subsisted on dried noodles and green tea, and sometimes slept on their worktables while rats scurried around them – all in order to resettle thousands of people displaced by war and oppression. After initially accepting 7,000 refugees from camps in Guam, Hong Kong, and military bases in the US in 1975, Canada passed the 1976 Immigration Act to establish new refugee procedures and introduce private refugee sponsorship. In July of 1979, the federal government under Prime Minister Joe Clark announced that Canada would accept an unprecedented 50,000 refugees – later increased to 60,000 – more than half of whom would be sponsored by ordinary Canadians. Running on Empty presents gripping first-hand accounts of the government officials tasked with selecting refugees from eight different countries, receiving and matching them with sponsors, and helping churches, civic organizations, and groups of neighbours to receive and integrate the newcomers in cities, towns, and rural communities across Canada. Timely and inspiring, Running on Empty offers essential lessons for governments, organizations, and individuals trying to come to grips with refugee crises in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Forty Dollars and a Dream written by Niphaphone "Laura' Robertson and published by Rose Gold Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2021-05-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author shares how she discovered her reason to come to America. She shares stories of her childhood and of her family members, some killed during the Communist Rule in the '70s. The author's father, a prisoner did a daring escape and took his family to a refugee camp in order to survive the war that was devastating the country of Lao. The author courageously shares her experience, reading the newspaper clippings and stories written about her, her family, and her friends. In this book filled with the history of their journey into a new life, she shares the kindness of strangers and how without them, their lives may have ended. A definite must-read! Powerful,, riveting, and truly engaging.
Download or read book History on the Run written by Ma Vang and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During its secret war in Laos (1961–1975), the United States recruited proxy soldiers among the Hmong people. Following the war, many of these Hmong soldiers migrated to the United States with refugee status. In History on the Run Ma Vang examines the experiences of Hmong refugees in the United States to theorize refugee histories and secrecy, in particular those of the Hmong. Vang conceptualizes these histories as fugitive histories, as they move and are carried by people who move. Charting the incomplete archives of the war made secret through redacted US state documents, ethnography, film, and literature, Vang shows how Hmong refugees tell their stories in ways that exist separately from narratives of U.S. empire and that cannot be traditionally archived. In so doing, Vang outlines a methodology for writing histories that foreground refugee epistemologies despite systematic attempts to silence those histories.
Download or read book Poems from Captured Documents written by Thanh T. Nguyen and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems from the diaries of Northern soldiers, killed and captured in the Vietnam War, collected by U.S. intelligence. In Tenth Night of the Moon the unknown author writes, "Tenth night of the moon / whose light is bright then dim. / Everything waits for the moon / to spread its light to cover North and South."
Download or read book Refugees and Asylum seekers from Laos written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Emerging Voices written by Huping Ling and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a growing number of popular and scholarly works focus on Asian Americans, most are devoted to the experiences of larger groups such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian Americans. This book presents discussion of underrepresented groups, including Burmese, Indonesian, Mong, Hmong, Nepalese, Romani, Tibetan, and Thai Americans.
Download or read book Hmong Means Free written by Sucheng Chan and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three generations of Hmong refugees expose the trauma and the joy of their lives.
Download or read book Terms of Refuge written by Court Robinson and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For half a century (ever since the Japanese invasion of 1942), much of Southeast Asia has been racked by war. In the last 20 years alone, some three million people fled their homes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This book is their story. It is also the story of the international community's response. Spearheading this was the United Nations agency responsible, UNHCR. It pioneered innovations like the Orderly Departure Programme, anti-piracy and rescue-at-sea efforts, and later on, ambitious reintegration projects for returnees. Today the camps in Southeast Asia are closed. Half a million people have returned home. Over two million have started new lives in the United States, Canada, Australia and France. This compelling book is the history of this modern exodus. It also takes stock and poses important questions. How did the flight of refugees and international response evolve? How do we measure the achievements and the failures of that international effort? What has been the legacy in Asia itself? And what lessons can be drawn for use in other refugee situations around the world?
