Nhia Moua - Week 6

In Walter T Boulden's "Gay Hmong: A Multifaceted Clash of Cultures," Boulden presents what he discovered through conversational interviews with ten gay Hmong.

Boulden presented a lot of dialogue from the interviewees.  I am not sure what he wanted to discover through these interviews, because the title of his article "a multifaceted clash of cultures" could have been applied to any gay ethnic group.  For example, Gina Masequesmay's "Emergence of a Queer Vietnamese America" article could have argued their experience to be a "multifaceted clash of culture." Not only that, the gay community itself can be argued to be some sort of clash of culture since gays, to some extent, defy socially constructed gender roles. Among the research information that Boulden presented, there were various interesting pieces that could have been the foundation for more research. 

For example, in one of the interviews, the interviewee mentioned the Hmong word for "husband" and "wife" being directly related to word "man" and "woman." The interviewee explained that the Hmong word for "husband" and "wife" are used in the Hmong word for "man" and "woman"; it would translate to "male husband" and "female wife" respectively.  This is one of the more interesting parts of the article for me. It made me wonder about the complexity/simplicity of the Hmong language and whether that related to the complexity/simplicity of the kind of lives they lived in Southeast Asia. As a Hmong person, I do realize that the Hmong vocabulary is much smaller than the American English vocabulary. The question I'm leaving with is: how have the Hmong language changed over time? Growing up, I know that some words my parents used were adopted from the Thai and Lao language. How have Hmong integrated (or not) other languages into their own? To what extent have they done that in America?

On a separate note, below is a link to an article that I found while doing some internet research for my own research paper. I have not had the time to go through it, but I am hoping it will draw some interesting conclusions or add to this topic of conversation. Please check it out. 

" The Importance of Family for a Gay Hmong American Man: Complicating Discourses of “Coming Out” " by Bic Ngo, PhD, U. of Minnesota

http://hmongstudies.org/NgoHSJ13.pdf