By Maxwell Yang
During the winter of 2022, I had the opportunity to work with the East Side Freedom Library as a means of giving back to my community. The East Side Freedom Library (ESFL) is a place filled with history. It’s a gathering of intricate details and a wealth of knowledge that is tied to many of the ethnic communities living here in the Twin Cities. From refugees across the globe to the history of Native America. These are the gentle, often fragile, bits of history that are often missing in the narratives taught in education. These are the stories that are pushed to the backs of bookshelves, or chopped off the starts of sentences. It is here, at ESFL, where one can find the Hmong archives: books, documents, articles of collected culture. It’s here at ESFL where I’ve spent time with the work of local Hmong-American artist and former Minnesota state representative, Cy Thao.
In the year of 1975, when Cy Thao was 3 years old, his family fled from the sweltering heat of the Laotian jungles and Communist gunfire into the refugee camps of Thailand. 5 years later, his family would come to the United States – to Minnesota. One of many Hmong boys with no country. One of many Hmong boys with nowhere to return.
The story of the countryless refugee is easier to tell when they arrive in a nation that is not their own. The Hmong sacrificed their history, left behind keepsakes and homes, and unbeknownst to them, became part of an American narrative. We were reduced to a label, a perception, a mystery that was conglomerated within labels of foreigner, impoverished, and different. We were lost, in spite of being home. Inevitably, we had to be home.
Cy Thao’s The Hmong Migration, a project which he began and finished over two decades ago, is a primary document of Hmong history, a colorful and concise record of ancient oral history and a firsthand account on the first generations to come to America.
Thao’s artwork models that of traditional Hmong paj ntaub (also known as story cloth), a style of storytelling featuring complex needle and threadwork. Paj ntaub records the lives or events which surround the Hmong community, experiences which define and affect all of us. The work of Cy Thao takes this process and sentiment into account. He paints his characters as their profiles, framing his works through the journey of our people. Thao begins his 50 portraits with the origin of Hmong people, a legend of a melon which was spliced into 18 pieces, forming the 18 clans. His paintings take us through the Qing Dynasty’s oppression to fleeing into Laos. The story of our people continues, then, into the fog of war, and out of it into refugee camps and eventually, America.
His fiftieth piece in the series is a message to the coming generations of Hmong-Americans. It is a message of, as he says in an interview with the Minnesota Institute of Art, “to educate the younger generation, to have some closure with the generation that went through war…”
While the characters are painted two dimensionally, the backgrounds of Thao’s paintings are painted in three dimensions, with depth and distant mountains, with rows of overlapped houses and stretches of tall buildings. There is a story being told in his choice to make the world around the characters three dimensional. Paj ntaub is sewn in two dimensions. Whether it be trails of rice or stitched dirt paths, there is always a trek to our story. The Hmong move from moment to moment, experience to experience. But most importantly, there is always some kind of start and finish to paj ntaub. The world in paj ntaub is small, tight knit, and in its own lonely way, romantic. Whether intentional or not, Thao’s works break this form. This world that the Hmong knew to be bound in mountains is taken away from those borders. By pulling western art styles right up against Hmong tradition, Thao makes it clear that this Hmong story, these moments in our lives that have always been locked away in what was once lost, cannot end. That the Hmong story, in the face of its end, the closure of our history, is not the end at all.
This is a message that is carried on with every Hmong artist, every laborer–and family, and child. Our history is small. Our world was once very small as well. But our history and our world cannot end with a war. It cannot end when there are no more mountains to border us. History is lived as we fulfill it, and in the case of my people, to create history is a lonely path. But it is one which must be forged.
Paj ntaub, although it is deeply personal and is woven through the eyes of a single individual, is not a medium that is told as a single person, for a single person. It is the one form of documentation the Hmong community has had for hundreds of years. It is our history, a record of life as it is lived, and as it will be remembered.
As I sat in the East Side Freedom Library looking through Cy Thao’s many paintings, I felt a sense of freedom stir inside me. It wasn’t the sense of freedom I’d been taught in schools, where opportunities flowed beyond me, or the sense of freedom taught to me by teachers when I was very young, to hold my hand to my heart with my eyes on the American flag. It was a freedom that has been denied to my people for a very long time. And that was the freedom of being remembered. Of having a home in history. It was an honor to work with the East Side Freedom Library.
Maxwell Yang is a young Hmong American born on the East Side of Saint Paul. He enjoys art, literature, watching TV with his siblings, and being a full-time uncle to six nieces and nephews. At the moment, he is looking forward to making a college decision and becoming a Central High School graduate.