Contemporary Women’s Roles through Hmong, Vietnamese, and American Eyes

Abstract

For many Americans, Southeast Asia and its inhabitants particularly the Vietnamese and transnational ethnic groups such as the Hmong become visible only through the lens of the Vietnam War. At the same time, contemporary Vietnamese tend to see that war as only one of the many imperialist conflicts in which they have been engaged for the past millennium.1 And the Hmong, with traditional roots in agriculture and no national ties to speak of, hold an even longer view, seeing this war and subsequent migrations as part of an ancient four-thousand-year-old history of conflict and flight through the highlands of modern China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and now to the United States. Not surprisingly, gender roles in Southeast Asia and the United States have been profoundly shaped in both cultures by these traditions of invasion, resistance, and, often, flight. A complex, diasporic confluence of political history, militarism, immigration, and feminism emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War. To tease out these delicate global intersections, which continue to shape contemporary women's lives, in this paper I explore representations of Viet and Hmong women in Vietnamese publications and public spaces and compare them to representations of women in the writings of Vietnamese American and Hmong American women. To this end, I pair images of Viet women culled from two Vietnamese publications, Images of the Vietnamese Woman in the New Millennium (2002) and Female Labour Migration: Rural-Urban (2001), and from the Vietnamese Women's Museum housed in Hanoi with Lan Cao's negotiations of Vietnamese American womanhood in her novel, Monkey Bridge (1997). As well, I examine representations of Hmong women at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi, specifically a book of photographic essays by Hmong girls titled Through H'Mong Eyes (2003), and compare them to selections by Hmong American women writers and storytellers from the anthologies Bamboo among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing