Hmong People Research Articles

Medical Mistrust and Discrimination in Health Care: A Qualitative Study of Hmong Women and Men

Low rates of breast and cervical cancer screening among Hmong women have been documented. Mistrust of Western medicine and the health care system, as well as experiences of discrimination in health care, may be barriers to seeking health care for this population. In this study, we explored medical mistrust among Hmong women and men, their experiences with discrimination in health care, and how these factors may influence Hmong women's breast and cervical cancer screening behavior. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with women and men who were members of the Hmong community in Oregon. Transcripts of 83 interviews were analyzed using content analysis. Despite personally trusting Western medicine and the health care system, participants shared reasons that some Hmong people feel mistrust including lack of understanding or familiarity, culture, and tradition. Although mistrust was thought to result in delaying or avoiding breast or cervical cancer screening, more frequently trust was described as positively influencing screening. In addition, few participants reported being treated differently during breast or cervical cancer screening because they were Hmong. When discussing health care more broadly, however, some participants described differential (e.g., disrespectful or rude) treatment. Such experiences led to feelings such as anger and sadness and affected behavior, including willingness to seek care and choice of provider. Medical mistrust and perceived discrimination were not major barriers to breast and cervical cancer screening in this study. Additional studies are needed to assess whether our findings reflect the experiences of other Hmong.

Medicinal plants used in Hmong women's healthcare in northern Thailand

Ethnopharmacological relevanceWe studied traditional knowledge of medicinal plants used for women's healthcare in three Hmong villages in northern Thailand and determined how prevalent such knowledge is. We documented traditional medical practices and determined which of the species used are culturally important among the Hmong. Materials and methodsWe interviewed six key informants and 147 non-specialist informants about their traditional knowledge of medicinal plants used in Hmong women's healthcare. We selected nine species that were known in all three villages as the domain for questionnaire interviews with 181 additional and randomly selected non-specialist informants. We calculated the Cultural Importance index (CI) for each species and use category. We tested normality of the data, age correlations, and gender correlations with Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, Kruskal–Wallis test, and Mann–Whitney tests. ResultsWe documented traditional knowledge of 79 medicinal plants used in women's healthcare. Of these, three species were culturally important to the Hmong. Our questionnaire interviews revealed significant difference in traditional medicinal plant knowledge between genders and age groups. ConclusionsThe Hmong people in northern Thailand possess large amounts of traditional knowledge related to women's healthcare and plants used for this purpose. However, this knowledge, even for the culturally important species, is not possessed by all Hmong and there were signs of knowledge erosion. Preservation of the Hmong intellectual heritage related to medicinal plants used in women's healthcare requires intensive traditional knowledge dissemination to the young Hmong generation.

THE EDUCATIONAL REALITIES OF HMONG COMMUNITIES IN VIETNAM: THE VOICES OF TEACHERS

This article presents the language policy and sociolinguistic realities of Hmong people in Lao Caï province, Vietnam. Minority children, who have their own mother tongue, are educated in Vietnamese, a language that few understand. In response to this situation, the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam in collaboration with UNICEF, implemented in 2006 a bilingual educational reform integrating minority languages at the beginning of preschool and throughout elementary to improve the quality of education for minority ethnic groups. Based on a field experience, the author brings the narratives and the visual representation (photos and drawings) of the teachers working and living in Hmong communities. This article explores the questions: What issues ethnic minority teachers faced in their daily practices? The purpose of this article is to illustrate qualitatively what the statistical data cannot reveal on the educational realities of linguistic minority learners in Vietnam.

Universal health-care demands in rural Northern Thailand: Gender and ethnicity

Thailand introduced a universal health-care scheme in 2001, initially with a co-payment of 30 baht (B) per physician’s visit which was abolished by the military Government in 2006. The scheme covers 75 per cent of the Thai population. Nevertheless, it lacks flexibility for the beneficiaries as it is a one-size-fits-all scheme. In this study, choicebased conjoint (CBC) analysis is used to identify the health-care demands of different subpopulations in the Mae Rim district, northern Thailand. The different demands of subpopulations, such as men, women and ethnic minorities, are revealed through the CBC analysis. Most households would pay a co-payment higher than B 30 if the services were adapted to the demand, that is, if the quality of service were improved. In general, women appear more willing to pay a higher price than men if the benefits are improved accordingly. This means that men profit much more from the policy change of dropping the co-payment than do women. Furthermore, the present analysis indicates the need for more health education training, designed to meet the needs of the Hmong people in particular.

Gender, generations, and nations: An experiment in Hmong American discourse and sociophonetics

This study of Hmong discourse provides new perspectives on language, gender, and age by researching an underrepresented community. The experiment tested how 33 Hmong people in St. Paul, Minnesota would respond to the same young female Hmong interviewer. The recordings show that older men often style-shifted into an acoustically distinctive “authoritative voice,” whereas women and younger men did not use this speech style. For Hmong Americans, then, “doing gender” also involves “doing generations.” In moment-by-moment discourse choices, older men use the “authoritative voice” to construct social hierarchy and traditions, admonish youth, and practice other aspects of Hmong American nationhood. In feminist terms of gender and nation, young Hmong American women are a locus of cultural tension: conservative “cultural reproducers/border guards” but also progressive agents of change.

A people's history of the Hmong

Over the centuries, the Hmong have called many places home, including China, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and most recently France, Australia, and the United States. Their new neighbours, though welcoming, may know little about how they have come to these places or their views on relationships, religion, or art. Now, in A People's History of the Hmong, representative voices offer their community's story, spanning four thousand years to the present day. This was the life of our Hmong people, remembers Pa Seng Thao, one of the many who describe farming villages in the mountains of Laos. Others help us understand the Hmong experience during the Vietnam War, particularly when the U.S. military pulled out of Laos, abandoning thousands of Hmong allies. Readers learn first-hand of the hardships of refugee camps and the challenges of making a home in a foreign country, with a new language and customs. Drawing on more than two hundred interviews, historian Paul Hillmer assembles a compelling history in the words of the people who lived it.

Through Hmong America: A Bibliographic Journey

Since 1975, the Hmong people have actively woven their presence into the social, economic, and political fabric of the United States. In little more than three decades they have endured the trauma of refugee displacement to forge new lives and livelihoods within both the urban centers and rural towns of the United States. As a consequence, the Hmong presence can also be found in the growing literature and research that has surfaced in libraries, special repositories, and in the mainstream and ethnic press.

An Exploration of Hmong Women's Perspectives on Cancer

The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives of Hmong women on cancer, using focus groups as the research method. Two focus group interviews were conducted and the narrative data were analyzed using thematic content analysis. Themes that emerged from the focus group discussions included "fatalistic and 'black and white' thinking", "valuing rumors rather than scientific information", "strong adherence to traditional medicine", "male leaders controlling health care decisions", "embarrassment discussing women's bodies", and "preferred strategies in addressing cancer". Many Hmong people in the United States believe that both traditional and Western health care practices are effective, but when health professionals do not address differences in language, communication, and beliefs about health, trust between the provider and client may erode. The findings of this study provide new insight into the importance of cultural accommodation to improve early cancer detection in the Hmong community.

Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident A Dialogue between Anthropologist Louisa Schein and Filmmaker/Activist Va-Megn Thoj

When the fatal shooting of six hunters by a Hmong man in the woods of Wisconsin received sensationalized national coverage in 2004, Hmong Americans struggled with an intensification of the hostile typing that had haunted their arrival in the U.S. since 1975. Mainstream accounts asserted that the incident, whether from the point of view of the white hunters or that of the Hmong man, could not be interpreted as primarily racial, but more probably centered on misunderstandings of property. Chai Soua Vang was convicted by an all white jury of six counts of first-degree murder. Simultaneously, the Hmong people and their culture were - by many accounts of Hmong in Minnesota andWisconsin - likewise convicted through one sweeping judicial act. Meanwhile, in eerie anticipation of the gruesome incident, Hmong filmmaker Va-Megn Thoj had in 2001 penned a screenplay, Die By Night, that conjured a contrapuntal image regarding the air of racial danger in the northern woods. Written a full three years before the actual shooting incident, the dark script portrays the terror of a group of Hmong campers who are methodically maimed and murdered by what they think is a Hmong demon but turns out to be white hunters who have ruthlessly hunted the party over the course of the night. Working from the many actual hunting confrontations he already knew of, and evoking the racial tension that had long saturated the everyday lives of Hmong in the Midwest, the text is an intriguing amalgam of Hmong immigrant themes and slasher horror. In this dialogue piece, we explore the potential for the occult demon feared in Die by Night to illuminate the active and ongoing occulting of race in Hmong-white relations. Keeping artistic vision and social analysis tightly articulated, we intercut the logics of Die By Night, histories of racial dynamics in the Midwest, the proceedings of the trial, the politics of media representation, and notions of turf and property, in order to ask: What accounts for the masking of race in so much discourse on Hmong over the decades, those same decades in which racialized interactions have been so salient to Hmong resettlement in the U.S.? In the process, we explore the erasure of Asian race in the black-white logics of American race politics.

Our Lives Were Healthier Before: Focus Groups With African American, American Indian, Hispanic/Latino, and Hmong People With Diabetes

Focus groups were conducted to explore health-related beliefs and experiences of African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian, and Hmong people with diabetes and engage community members in improving diabetes care and education for these populations. Eighty participants attended 12 focus groups, 3 per population. Major themes were loss of health attributed to modern American lifestyles, lack of confidence in the medical system, and the importance of spirituality. Participants recommended improvements in the areas of health care, diabetes education, social support, and community action. Their recommendations emphasize the importance of respectful, knowledgeable health care providers; culturally responsive diabetes education for people with diabetes and their families; and broad-based community action. These recommendations align with current public health priorities and medical knowledge. It is proposed that healthy traditions from diverse populations can be leveraged to improve the health of all people with diabetes.

Book Review: The Promised Land: Socioeconomic Reality of the Hmong People in Urban America (1976–2000)

Book Review: The Promised Land: Socioeconomic Reality of the Hmong People in Urban America (1976–2000)

Genetic Structure of Hmong-Mien Speaking Populations in East Asia as Revealed by mtDNA Lineages

Hmong-Mien (H-M) is a major language family in East Asia, and its speakers distribute primarily in southern China and Southeast Asia. To date, genetic studies on H-M speaking populations are virtually absent in the literature. In this report, we present the results of an analysis of genetic variations in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hypervariable segment 1 (HVS1) region and diagnostic variants in the coding regions in 537 individuals sampled from 17 H-M populations across East Asia. The analysis showed that the haplogroups that are predominant in southern East Asia, including B, R9, N9a, and M7, account for 63% (ranging from 45% to 90%) of mtDNAs in H-M populations. Furthermore, analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA), phylogenetic tree analysis, and principal component (PC) analysis demonstrate closer relatedness between H-M and other southern East Asians, suggesting a general southern origin of maternal lineages in the H-M populations. The estimated ages of the mtDNA lineages that are specific to H-M coincide with those based on archeological cultures that have been associated with H-M. Analysis of genetic distance and phylogenetic tree indicated some extent of difference between the Hmong and the Mien populations. Together with the higher frequency of north-dominating lineages observed in the Hmong people, our results indicate that the Hmong populations had experienced more contact with the northern East Asians, a finding consistent with historical evidence. Moreover, our data defined some new (sub-)haplogroups (A6, B4e, B4f, C5, F1a1, F1a1a, and R9c), which will direct further efforts to improve the phylogeny of East Asian mtDNAs.

No Evidence of HTLV-I or HTLV-II Infection Among the Hmong People of Northern Thailand or Injecting Drug Users in Bangkok

No Evidence of HTLV-I or HTLV-II Infection Among the Hmong People of Northern Thailand or Injecting Drug Users in Bangkok

Dynamique identitaire en situation migratoire : à propos de jeunes issus de l’immigration hmong

The identity dynamic in a migratory situation about the young born into the hmong immigrants The young Hmong people, who are said to be from the «second generation», are marked by the patterns of two cultures and build their cultural identity from these two. After a devaluation of their parental culture during their teenage years, they enter the world of adults through a union with a member coming from the same ethnic group and this cannot be done any other way. They are all driven by the same desire to claim at the same time their ethnic identity and their French cultural background. The ethnic community is then the mould of the cross-cultural identity of these young people who put forward their differences while wishing to integrate into the French environment.

The Blue Flower (review)

and often no translator was available ), Hmong restrictions on many medical procedures, and misunderstandings over dosages and combinations of medication. EventuaUy Lia was placed in a foster home for several months. The general differences of approach between these two communities (spinal taps and drug cocktails warred with ritual washings and pig sacrifices) culminated in Lia's final massive series of seizures, which left her brain dead in 1986. Fadiman meticulously chronicles this tragic story, interviewing the Lees, social workers, Hmong leaders in the community, and virtuaUy every doctor who ever treated Lia. Her obvious affection for the Lees and her sympathy for their plight is balanced by the care she takes to be fair in detailing both cultures ' treatments for illness. She also interweaves the Lees' tale with the history of the Hmong people, focusing on the Hmongs' life in Laos and their work for the American CIA during the Vietnam War, which led to destruction of their villages and necessitated flight to Thailand and eventually to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Foua and Nao Kao Lee and their chUdren were part of this wave of refugees, and Fadiman's positioning of the Lee family in the context of the general Hmong experience helps to explain their resistance to American doctors and customs. One of the most interesting facets of this book is Fadiman's interaction with this very foreign culture and her gradual assimilation into Lia's family with the help of translators and advice from prominent members of the Merced Hmong community. She participates in Hmong rituals, such as being dressed by Foua in traditional costume and taking part in one of the sacrifices the Lees hold in their Uving room in honor of their sick daughter. SkUlfully paraUeled with this introduction into a new ethnic culture is Fadiman's growing assurance with medical terminology and methodology as she interviews doctors and tunnels into Lia's immense , five-volume chart. Although at times Lia's story is in danger of being subsumed by the mass of historical detail, Fadiman ends up conveying an impressive amount of information in a book that ultimately finds a balance between the personal and the political. Her account of Hmong tradition is engrossing, and her tale of a young girl caught between the beliefs of her famüy and her doctors is heartbreaking. (TH) The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 1997, 226 pp., $12 (paper) The adjectives that dominate puffs and reviews of Fitzgerald's latest novel—"light," "endearing," "clever," "beguiling," "deft"—are enough to put wary readers on guard. Is there any substance here? And there's the subject, too: the life of the German Romantic poet, Novalis. A novel about one of the giants of Romantic poetry in "eUiptical and witty prose"? Hard to imagine, and such a book might be even harder, one suspects, to stomach. 182 · The Missouri Review But there's the intriguing acknowledgment, in the Author's Note: "The description of an operation without anesthetic is mostly taken from Fanny d'Arblay's letter to her sister, Esther Burney . . . about her mastectomy." Anyone who has read d'Arblay's (Fanny Burney's) harrowing description knows that there's nothing elliptical or particularly amusing about if. And there's the first chapter of Fitzgerald's book, which opens with the poet's famUy's annual laundry day. In three short, introductory pages, Fitzgerald manages to capture aU the charm and chaos and monetary worries of a large, slightly kooky but wellrespected German famUy in financial decline. Read another chapter or two of Fitzgerald's remarkable book, and you'U be hooked. Working from sources that inclu-ded official documents, as weU as the poet's private correspondence and diaries, Fitzgerald has created a historical novel that doesn't bog down in excessive period detail. With economy and precision she portrays both the daily life and the Zeitgeist of late eighteenth-century Germany. The Blue Flower (the title is taken from the name of an unfinished work by Novalis) concerns NovaUs' years as an ardent philosophy student and novice poet, who wrote under his real name of Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenburg. Brilliant, driven...

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (review)

only one or two titles a year, is weU known. Less known is the significant number of gifted, mature poets whose work, thanks partly to that avalanche, has continued for years to slide past the blearing eyes ofinundated book publishers. My congratulations to Utah State University Press and to Herbert Leibowitz, judge for its 1996 May Swenson Poetry Award, for rescuing this superb collection and its author from prolonged oversight. Freisinger's milieu is irony—in the best and deepest sense. It is with-k in the tension between the real and ideal that Freisinger locates our Uves. An empty-nest couple, having just made love with a desire become spontaneous and intense from "the pure voltage" of its "long absence," settles back, "spliced together, lightly touching,/listening; to the wind's violence, to sleet/on paned glass, to blood picking its way/through thickened arteries, cautionlit/crews combing streets for limb-downed/ lines, repairing what they can." Freisinger's subjects are wonderfully diverse, from love to death, from intimacy to isolation, from metaphysics to shop class, from vacuum cleaner salesman to Walt Whitman. His poems are funny, sad, light, dark, hopeful, grim, and quite often aU of these at once. One must also admire the music of his lines. Listen to this meditation on the nose, from "Thoughts on a Child's Nose Swallowed by a Dog": Tn a world growing duU with sameness/imagine its infinite permutations/of skin, cartilage, and bone: the juts snubs and swales, fine grades/of Roman, Greek, Retroussé, the sure/cursive of septal-vestibular flared papulae dehcate as the breast/ nipples' filigree, the three turbinate/shelves sifting dusty debris,warming/breath for its pink plunge lungward." Don't overlook this book. (WT) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 339 pp., $24 This book started as a magazine assignment for Fadiman, the new editor of The American Scholar, but evolved into an almost decade-long exploration of a Hmong family's troubled interactions with the Western medical community when their infant daughter, Lia, became ill. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao Lee, immigrated to Merced, California, from Laos in 1980 with eleven children. They joined a large community of Hmong living in Merced and had their first American medical experience when Lia was born in 1982. Three months later the Lees found themselves back at the Merced County Hospital when Lia started having a seizure that would not stop. She was diagnosed by American doctors as having severe epilepsy and by her family as having a condition caUed quag dab peg, which translates as "the spirit catches you and you faU down." This discrepancy in diagnoses began a long struggle between the Lees and American doctors that encompassed language difficulties (the Lees spoke no English The Missouri Review »181 and often no translator was available ), Hmong restrictions on many medical procedures, and misunderstandings over dosages and combinations of medication. EventuaUy Lia was placed in a foster home for several months. The general differences of approach between these two communities (spinal taps and drug cocktails warred with ritual washings and pig sacrifices) culminated in Lia's final massive series of seizures, which left her brain dead in 1986. Fadiman meticulously chronicles this tragic story, interviewing the Lees, social workers, Hmong leaders in the community, and virtuaUy every doctor who ever treated Lia. Her obvious affection for the Lees and her sympathy for their plight is balanced by the care she takes to be fair in detailing both cultures ' treatments for illness. She also interweaves the Lees' tale with the history of the Hmong people, focusing on the Hmongs' life in Laos and their work for the American CIA during the Vietnam War, which led to destruction of their villages and necessitated flight to Thailand and eventually to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Foua and Nao Kao Lee and their chUdren were part of this wave of refugees, and Fadiman's positioning of the Lee family in the context of the general Hmong experience helps to explain their resistance to American...

Ecological study on the dynamics of soil organic matter and its related properties in shifting cultivation systems of Northern Thailand

There is a large number of hill people in northern Thailand, who practices shifting cultivation. In order to analyze the soil ecological problems involved in the transition from traditional shifting cultivation to more intensive upland farming, the authors carried out comparative studies on the dynamics of organic matter and its related properties in soils both in the traditional shifting cultivation systems adopted by Karen people and more intensive upland farming practiced by Thai and Hmong people in the area. The contents of organic matter and available N in the surface 10 cm layers of soil from the fields continuously cultivated were lower than those in soils under prolonged fallow (more than 10 y) or natural forest. Based on the rate of soil respiration, the amount of organic matter decomposed within 1 y was estimated to reach nearly 10% of that stored in the upper 50 cm layers of the soil profile in the upland crop fields. These results indicate that the organic matter-related resources markedly decreased under continuous cropping. The contents of C, N, and P in the microbial biomass of the surface 10 cm layers of soil ranged from 0.37 to 2.09 mg C g−l soil, from 22.7 to 188 µg N g−l soil, and from 6.1 to 65.7 µg P g−l soil, respectively. Since the contents of microbial C, N, and P in the surface soils were generally higher under prolonged fallow and natural forests than in the fields continuously cultivated, the microbial activity and/or the amounts of C, N, and P available for biological activity seemed to have declined under continuous upland farming. The incubation experiment to assess the N mineralization pattern showed two remarkable characteristics: 1) there was an initial time lag until active mineralization of N occurred in the soils from young fallow forest and 2) the soil burning effect was observed after burning in the fields under prolonged fallow. The active process of nitrification after N mineralization was always associated with a sharp fall in soil pH, suggesting that soil acidification was promoted and basic cations were lost from the soils. In conclusion, rapid deterioration of the soil organic matter-related properties in cropping fields can be considered to be one of the ecological reasons why upland fields must be returned to fallow again a few years after forest reclamation in traditional shifting cultivation systems. Therefore, in alternative farming systems with more intensive land use, it is essential to apply organic materials into soils to decrease the rate of soil degradation, or to improve the soil fertility, in avoiding soil acidification along with nitrification.

Fish consumption advisories and outreach programs for Southeast Asian immigrants.

Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees, in particular the Hmong people of Laos, have settled in large numbers in metropolitan areas of Minnesota. These communities, accustomed to hunting and fishing for food in Laos, now fish in some of the most contaminated waters of Minnesota. Fishing and fish-preparation customs of their homeland emphasize using all fish caught and discarding very little waste. These practices result in a potentially high exposure to PCBs and mercury. Educational outreach efforts to inform this population of the potential health hazards from consuming the fish are hindered by language and cultural barriers. While most Hmong anglers welcome information about contaminants and fishing, the typical press releases and mailings that convey fish advisory information to the public do not reach this community. The Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources collaborated to determine the health messages and communication methods that would best meet the needs of these communities. Using the results of interviews and a behavioral survey, the Minnesota Department of Health has tailored fish consumption advisories to meet the unique needs of Southeast Asian anglers. Over the past four years, educational programs involving specialized advisories, translations, signs, a Hmong language video, and workshops have been used to inform Hmong anglers and other Southeast Asians about fish contaminants.

Mother of Writing: The origin and development of a Hmong Messianic script By William A. Smalley, Chía Koua Vang, and Gnia Yee Yang, and: Hmong Njua: Syntaktische Analyse einer gesprochenen Sprache mithilfe datenverarbeitungstechnischer Mittel und sprachvergleichende Beschreibung des südostasiatischen Sprachraumes By Bettina Harriehausen (review)

REVIEWS165 Halle, Morris, and Michael Kenstowicz. 1989. On cyclic and noncyclic stress. Cambridge , MA: MIT, ms. Halle, Morris, and Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 1978. Metrical structures in phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT, ms. Hayes, Bruce. 1981. A metrical theory of stress rules. New York: Garland. [Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation, 1980.] ------. 1982. Extrametricality and English stress. Linguistic Inquiry 13.227-76. Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. 'Elsewhere' in phonology. A Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky, 93-106. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Levin, Juliette. 1988. Generating ternary feet. Texas Linguistic Forum 29.97-113. [University of Texas, ms, 1985.] Liberman, Mark, and Alan Prince. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8.249-336. McCarthy, John J., and Alan Prince. 1986. Prosodie morphology. Brandeis University and University of Massachusetts, ms. ------, ------. 1988. Quantitative transfer in reduplicative and templatic morphology. Linguistics in the morning calm 2, ed. by Seuk-Dik Kim, 3-35 Seoul: The Linguistic Society of Korea. ------, ------. 1990. Foot and word in prosodie morphology: The Arabic broken plural. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8.209-84. Miner, Kenneth L. 1979. Dorsey's law in Winnebago-Chiwere and Winnebago accent. International Journal of American Linguistics 45.25-33. Prince, Alan. 1983. Relating to the grid. Linguistic Inquiry 14.19-100. Rappaport, Malka. 1984. Issues in the phonology of Tiberian Hebrew. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Department of Linguistics[Received 21 June 1991; 501 Calhoun Hallrevision received 24 September 1991.] The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1196 Mother of Writing: The origin and development of a Hmong Messianic script. By William A. Smalley, Chía Koua Vang, and Gnia Yee Yang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xii, 221. $15.95. Hmong Njua: Syntaktische Analyse einer gesprochenen Sprache mithilfe datenverarbeitungstechnischer Mittel und sprachvergleichende Beschreibung des südostasiatischen Sprachraumes. By Bettina Harriehausen. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 245.) Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Pp. xxv, 307. DM 128.00. William Bright, University of Colorado* Among languages spoken by recent arrivals in the United States, one of the most interesting is Hmong—introduced by immigrants from Laos who fled their homeland, starting in 1975, because of the Indochina war. Varieties of this language (a member of the Hmong-Mien family) are spoken by perhaps as many * Thanks for my introduction to Hmong go to Ka Yang and to Annie Jaisser; and, for other help, to William Smalley and to Lise Menn. 166LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) as six million people, centered in southern China and in adjacent areas of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The best known varieties in Laos and Thailand are Hmong Daw and Hmong Njua; these are, at least in part, mutually intelligible . Overseas populations now exist in France, French Guiana, and Australia ; and there are some 85,000 speakers in the US, especially in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.1 The Hmong people have historically lived as minority populations in mountainous areas, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture and lacking any established writing system. It is remarkable that, since 1950, two successful writing systems have been created for Hmong, each with its community of literates. One of these, the so-called Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), was devised in 1951— 53 by a missionary group which included William Smalley, and is now widely used. The other, the unique 'Pahawh Hmong', is said to have been revealed in 1959 to a native religious leader, Shong Lue Yang—called by his disciples the 'Mother (i.e. source) of Writing'—and has continued to be taught since his assassination in 1971. Both writing systems have unusual characteristics, and the Pahawh Hmong presents phenomena perhaps unique in the history of written language; these are the topic of the book by Smalley et al. here under review (hereafter MW). The book by Harriehausen is a descriptive syntax of Hmong Njua as currently spoken in California (and will be abbreviated HN); I will discuss it more briefly.2 1. MW has the distinction of being written by Smalley (the missionary who was one of the inventors of the RPA) in collaboration with two Hmong men who are active in transmitting Shong Lue Yang's messianic message as well as his writing system. As Smalley tells us, since...

Cultural Conflict and Adaptation: The Case of Hmong Children in American Society.

Culture conflict and the American dream ethnohistory of the Hmong people the Hmong at La Playa becoming American through schooling seven learning disabled Indochinese - institutional approach to children facing culture conflict culture and minority achievement - implications for research and instructional practice.