What a Hmong American Olympian means
Individual failures and achievements belong to the whole community.
At the age of 18, many of our Hmong parents and grandparents found themselves entrenched in the middle of a war that would eventually drop more than 260,000 bombs on their farmlands, a planeload every eight minutes for nine straight years to make Laos the most bombed country in the history of the world. Many had fought against communists and North Vietnamese supply lines. During this Secret War, fleeing Hmong families huddled closely in the dense forest of Laos, agent orange silently rotting their bare feet to the point that they’d eventually have to be left behind. Mothers, careful not to miscalculate, gently pressed opium into their babies’ bottoms so their cries would not give the Viet Cong an advantage. Everyone prayed for a raft to be waiting to bring them across the sniper-filled Mekong River because the promise of freedom and the protection of American soldiers lay just beyond on those dark, glistening Thai banks.
Forty-six years later, a young 18-year-old Hmong girl takes hold of uneven bars in Tokyo as a whole Hmong American community from one sea to shining sea excitedly huddles close with their children and their elders around the TV screen at the break of dawn. They pridefully wait for their yet-unknown gymnast, Sunisa “Suni” Lee, to walk onto a global stage and represent them in a way that has never been done before. The room is thick with anxiety and old familiar feelings come rushing back — the apprehension of leaving the mother country, the pain of watching the lands they meticulously cultivated be destroyed, the frustration of learning a wild new culture, the blind risk they all took in hopes that America was indeed the land of opportunity.
Moments after her score to win gold in the all-round competition was announced, social media posts spread the news like wildfire from household to household. The one greatest distinction from all the other U.S. winners — Suni Lee is the first Hmong American to have
reached the stars. Suni would go on to win two more medals at the belated 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, silver for artistic team all-around and bronze for uneven bars, and arrive back to her home in Minnesota as an American Olympic champion. The mayor declared July 30 as “Sunisa Lee Day.” Celebrities and athletes showered her with social media congratulations. The Minnesota Department of Transportation even lit up the I-35W Bridge in red, white and blue to honor her. But to her community, the most important legacy Suni has started is the conversation of, “Who and what is Hmong?”
The Hmong people have an estimated population of about 5 million worldwide with a current U.S. population of just over 300,000 — 100,000 of whom resettled as refugees in the United States after the Vietnam War. Before the start of the war, we were mostly scattered throughout Southeast Asia in countries that “host” us, often as secondor third-level citizens. Because of this, we built tight-knit communities to protect one another from outside threats and to share harvests and care for our children. And now, even half a century later, living in a country that is wide and free, we still cannot bear long distances between each other’s front doors. This is the reality that can be seen driving through East St. Paul, Minn., which houses the second-largest population of U.S. Hmong and where Suni lives and trained for her Olympic dreams. Families have bought up whole streets where aunts and uncles and cousins and children have grown up together like one small village. As we have increased in numbers over the years, received higher education and taken better-paying jobs, rarely does anyone leave. When we do, the first question we throw out there is, “Are there any Hmong people living nearby?” In Houston, there are only a handful of us.
Every video I watch of hers, I see a young Suni graciously giving credit to the great gymnasts who’ve inspired her, to her adopted father who built her a balance beam because they couldn’t afford one, to her community that sends supports from every corner of the world they’ve scattered to. Competitive sport at this level is costly: practice dues, time off work and school, gas money, uniforms, entrance fees and the many trips out of state to qualify for the next one. For most Hmong families, sports are unaffordable, period. But because of our community’s natural instinct to come together to help, the Minnesota Hmong have been showing up to Suni’s father’s annual fundraiser in East St. Paul to help pay for required competition outfits and to get her to the upcoming meet. Families voluntarily bring trays of rice and grilled meats and veggies for working staff and then wrap more to be sold alongside Team Sunisa T-shirts for the watch parties. When I called my brother in the middle of the excitement, he didn’t have time to chat because he was on his way to Suni’s house to drop off a large stack of photographs of her he’d created for her to sign and give out to her fans, just because he wanted to show his support. As Suni was still training and strictly following quarantine requirements before leaving for Japan and could not be at her sendoff event, we all still felt as if we’d printed the boarding pass and handed it to her as she boarded.
Growing up the first generation born in the U.S. of Hmong refugee parents, I experience some of the same the pressures Suni brought with her to Tokyo. It is instilled in us as children that we never just represent ourselves or our parents when stepping outside the home but that our siblings, our grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the entire Hmong community gets credit in everything we do. Our individual failures and achievements belong to the whole. As a daughter in a male-dominated culture that is increasingly changing because of Western influences, it is still difficult to escape domestic duties and gender expectations and to be allowed the freedoms of our brothers, even in 2021. In addition to studies and after-school activities, we are also expected to watch our younger siblings, care for our elderly, cook, clean and help our parents make ends meet with a weekend job. This demanding role can often feel suffocating for a daughter and the shame from wanting to break away from tradition is great enough to make you stay and bear it.
My parents successfully raised me to feel 100 percent Hmong. I speak Hmong. I cook Hmong. I care for my family as a good Hmong wife should. And I am incredibly proud to be Hmong. But the cultural responsibility these expectations carry most likely played a part in the reason why I married outside my Hmong race, even as it meant possible ostracism from the clan. I had a very forward-thinking mother who protected me and taught me to question everything respectfully. For as strong as our community can make us feel, the desire to see what I look and feel like as an individual was stronger, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it while immersed myself into another Hmong family. But no matter how “Americanized” I’ve become, my Hmong roots are deeply embedded in me. Even now, married to a Vietnamese American for almost 20 years and no longer participating daily in the community, I am still secondguessing what experiences I should share in this article, should my family read this and feel I’ve shown us in a lesser light.
Suni’s beautiful Asian face has appeared on every popular news platform and been splashed across social media to the extent that my auto-text goes to fill in her name whenever I type the letter “s.” She is the newest
Asian American role model with videos popping up of young girls doing back flips with her Olympic performance playing in the background. And, Suni's father is telling her on national TV how proud he is of her. This is a vastly different world compared to that of our mothers, and mine. And it's still changing. The next generation of Hmong girls are getting bolder, smarter in navigating the American system to figure out how to combine and maintain the best of both cultures. They will not be held back from reaching their full potential any longer.
And though it may not seem like a big deal to most looking in, we proudly celebrate each Hmong woman as she becomes a Minnesota state senator, pro golfer, Harvard graduate, NASA engineer, NPR journalist, deputy school superintendent, doctor, movie director, CEO, published author, and now, an American Olympian — each one becoming the raft that brings the rest of us closer to the promise of choices shining brightly on the other side.