Between Two Worlds
Southeast Asians in Rhode Island seek a better life while struggling with gang activity, poverty, and a legacy of violence
By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 3-9, 2004
This piece was awarded Rhode Island for Community and Justice's 2004 Metcalf Award for Diversity in the Media, and 3rd place in the feature category at the Rhode Island Press Association's 2004 Editorial Awards.EARLY THIS OCTOBER, as the leaves turn a Rhode Island shade of red, people from as far as Minnesota and North Carolina will gather in Warwick to celebrate the Hmong New Year. If the celebration is anything like last year’s, some 3000 people will spend two days eating purple sticky rice and papaya salad. The baseball diamonds and volleyball courts of the Mickey Stevens Sports Complex will be transformed into venues for traditional Hmong dance and perhaps some heated matches of tujlub, a game that involves spinning large wooden tops.
In Laos, the Hmong New Year usually falls at the end of December, a time of year marked by pleasant weather and the closing for two weeks of schools and government agencies. But when the Hmong people started resettling in Rhode Island, with its cold winters and the inflexible work schedules typical of America, they didn’t know what to do, says William Nouyi Yang, president of the Hmong United Association of Rhode Island. Eventually, Hmong communities all over the US started choosing times to celebrate the new year that were as close as possible to December while still offering hospitable outdoor weather.
For the generation of Hmongs and other people born in Southeast Asia, but raised in the US, the bending of this ancient tradition to suit a different climate suggests the challenges they face in their new home. Like previous immigrants groups, they seek a better life, but struggle with gang activity, disproportionately high amounts of poverty, the legacy of violence in their home countries, and other social ills. And while Latinos have been gaining momentum in recent years on the Rhode Island political scene, local Southeast Asians are still working to muster a similar degree of recognition. This heterogeneous group — dubbed "the 1.5 generation" by 27-year-old Maliss Men, spokeswoman for the Cranston-based nonprofit Project AIDS Khmer — also walks a very difficult line between the lives they have built here and the lives their families left behind.
Though she lived in Cambodia until she was six, for example, Men is struggling to retain her Cambodian language skills, which gets harder as the years go by. "Once you’ve lost your language," she says, "you really lose your culture, because you can no longer communicate with the older generation." This position between the generations, however, also puts the 1.5-ers in a unique position to voice — in English — the needs of their distinct communities and to use their familiarity with the system to advocate for change.
The 10,000 or so Southeast Asians in Rhode Island are primarily Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Hmong (an ethnic group primarily from the highlands of Laos). The Cambodian community is the largest by far, with more than 5000 residents statewide. And though the four groups are commonly referred to in the aggregate as "Southeast Asian," Molly Soum, herself the state’s liaison to the Southeast Asian community, says, with not a little bitterness, that lumping the groups together is overly simplistic. "It’s better for other people to call us ‘Southeast Asian,’ " she says. "They used to call us ‘Asian.’ They think we’re all Chinese."
What unites the disparate communities, says Soum, is the legacy of the older generation: the terror they experienced in their home countries, their struggles as refugees, and the difficulties they faced after fleeing for their lives and arriving in the US.
THE HISTORY OF the Southeast Asian peninsula is a bloody one, steeped in colonialism, civil war, and the aggressive and often shadowy operations of the US government and military during its conflict with North Vietnam.
From the late 1800s to the early 1950s, the countries now known as Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam were all part of the French colony Indochina. The 1954 Geneva Conference declared independence for the people of the Southeast Asian peninsula, dividing Vietnam between a communist north and a capitalist south. After the withdrawal of the French, communist groups in Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam began rising to prominence. In response, the US provided economic and military support to local, often unpopular anti-Communist groups (the largest and most well-known of these military conflicts is, of course, the Vietnam War, a key element in the social turmoil that gripped America from the 1960s through part of the ’70s).
In 1975, the communists prevailed over the US-backed governments throughout Southeast Asia. What followed were some of the bloodiest and most deadly government campaigns in history, with the newly installed communist regimes seeking out and systematically killing any person who was thought to have supported anti-communist forces. The governments were especially suspicious of educated persons — teachers, merchants, former government officials — and those who were not killed were sent to brutal "re-education camps." In the "killing fields" of Cambodia, almost two million of Cambodia’s seven million people died at the hand of their own government.
Hundreds of thousands of people managed to escape to Thailand, many crossing the treacherous Mekong River in boats or making their way through miles of brutally hot jungle on foot. From the Thai refugee camps, refugees were relocated to "third countries," such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. Ultimately, an estimated 1.3 million Southeast Asian refugees are said to have entered in the US between 1975 and 1998.
If a family of refugees from Southeast Asia already had relatives here when they arrived in the late 1970s, the newly landed family usually "camped out with" the more well-established relatives for their first few months, explains William Shuey of the International Institute of Rhode Island, one of the agencies responsible for resettling refugees. Because refugees almost always arrived with very few possessions and even less money, extreme poverty was common. Shuey tells of 50 people who slept in the basement of Trinity Methodist Church while they waited to find housing. Maliss Men recalls arriving at the home of her "sponsor" family in South Providence to find that there were not enough mattresses to go around.
In the time since, the economic picture has improved, though not across the board. The median annual household income for Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese families just about matches that of the typical state resident — around $42,000 — but between 12 and 22 percent of families in these communities remain below the federal poverty level, compared to nine percent of statewide residents. Moreover, the Cambodian community’s median household annual income remains stuck at around $27,000, and nearly a third of Cambodians still live below the federal poverty level.
Southeast Asians are still a relatively new addition to the state, with almost all the members of the different communities having arrived within the past 20 years. Their presence in sheer numbers is still dwarfed by that of other minority communities (there are about 10 times as many Latinos statewide than South Asians, for example), but Rhode Island’s Southeast Asians have slowly put down roots. For the most part, they have done so quietly — except for the occasional Providence Journal column titled "In the Southeast Asian Community," there is no apparent Rhode Island-based Southeast Asian media outlet, and the community receives relatively little media attention. And a Southeast Asian has never been elected to public office here.
In 2002, Allan Fung, a Cranston city councilman, became the first Chinese-American elected to public office in the state. He sees some clear lessons for the Southeast Asian community — indeed, for any immigrant community — in the trajectory of Rhode Island’s more established Chinese-American community.
First, says Fung, people must unite as a group, and factions that might be divided over ethnic or political lines must come together. Second, they must identify their collective issues and concerns. Third, they must voice those concerns. And the older generation, says Fung, often look to their children to be that voice: "Children of immigrants understand government a lot better [than their parents] because they went through school here." Fung points out that being involved in politics means more than getting elected to office. And indeed, despite a lack of Southeast Asian names on the Rhode Island ballot, the 1.5 generation is helping the community to find its political footing in other ways.
ThongKhoun Pathana, 27, was 11 when he arrived in the US from a refugee camp in Thailand. He and his brothers spoke no English, and his parents were so unsure of what awaited them that before they left Thailand, they filled their suitcases with bamboo, rice, and papaya — just in case all they could find here was "orange juice, white bread, and potatoes," says Pathana.
He went to Woonsocket High School, deciding in his junior year to become an architect. Pathana’s parents beamed. His stepfather dedicated himself to 12-hour shifts as a machine operator at the Comtran Corporation’s wire factory in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. His mother opened an Asian market in Woonsocket. "The choices they made," Pathana writes in an e-mail, "no parent would do, with long days at the grocery store . . . For six years my mother . . . never took a vacation . . . This [was] only worth [it] to earn enough money for my college tuition." With his degree from the Syracuse University’s School of Architecture, Pathana moved back to New England and began building.
In addition to working toward his architect’s license as an intern with the New Hampshire-based firm Lavallee/Brensinger Architects, Pathana is a board member of the Watlao Buddhovath in Smithfield, one of the largest Lao Buddhist temples in New England. He is also president of the Laotian Community Center of Rhode Island, based at the temple, and the director of its Sunday school. The combination of having been raised in Woonsocket and operating at the helm of the Laotian community in Rhode Island makes Pathana a natural resource. He recalls a phone call from the Woonsocket police in the middle of the night. A Laotian husband and wife were having a domestic dispute, the officer explained; would Pathana come to their apartment and help mediate? Telling the story, Pathana just shrugs. "I’m a community leader," he explains simply.
AS THE HEAD of one of the state’s largest social service organizations for Southeast Asians, Joseph Le has seen the economic hardship faced by arriving refugees. He’s the executive director of the Socio-Economic Development Center for Southeast Asians, which offers programs and such services as assistance to crime victims and ESL/citizenship classes. The organization’s offices are in a squat brick building on Elmwood Avenue in Providence, full of certificates, citations, and awards from prominent figures like Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline and former governor Lincoln Almond.
Because educated people were targeted by the communist governments, Le says, it was often farmers and laborers who managed to escape to a new life here. Even those who were formally educated in their home country usually arrived speaking little or no English (according to the Census, between 50 and 60 percent of Southeast Asians in Rhode Island "speak English less than ‘very well’ "), and as a result were forced into jobs that paid little and required long hours. ThongKhoun Pathana’s stepfather, for example, a machine operator in a Massachusetts factory, had been a mathematics professor at the National University of Laos.
More than one-third of Southeast Asians in Rhode Island work in manufacturing jobs. Though these posts are a stable source of employment for many people, the Cambodian Society’s Molly Soum, who herself worked briefly at a Providence jewelry factory, says Southeast Asians are often easy targets for layoffs: "We don’t speak the language," she says. "We don’t have the skills, we don’t have the degree . . . they look at you like you don’t have anything else to do than work for $5 an hour and let them walk all over you."
Employment is also difficult for those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the late ’80s and early ’90s, psychiatrists estimated that up to three-quarters of Southeast Asian refugees suffered from PTSD, depression, or both. As Le says, "Our people witnessed death, hunger, suffering . . . It sets them back sometimes to remember the war, what happened on the Southeast Asian peninsula."
The Hmong United Association’s Vangpao Yang used to work at a Southeast Asian support center at St. Joseph’s Hospital, running groups and linking people with therapists and psychiatrists. He saw the effect of the trauma on people’s ability to live and work. "People have a hard time finding jobs," he says, "because they can’t adjust . . . people who don’t have support — brothers, sisters, family killed — they can’t get to work." Yang himself has a moment of panic each time a firecracker goes off near his Washington Park home; he can’t help but worry, for a second, that it is a bomb. Each time a helicopter flies overhead, the sound brings him back to the sticky hot jungle, afraid for his life, listening to the pounding of the military helicopters carrying the dead back to their villages. Yang says the memories were especially hard for his father. " ‘No matter what, you have to get a job,’" his father always said, but Yang knew, too, that "the nightmare is still there."
The good news, says Le, is that more and more Southeast Asian youth are completing high school, continuing on to college, and securing good jobs. "It’s very gratifying to see," he says, how the "sacrifice of the first generation" is paying off. Indeed, 69 percent of all Asian Rhode Islanders 25 or older have a high school diploma, up from 60 percent in 1990. More and more families, agrees Molly Soum of the Cambodian Society, are able to "buy their own homes, move out from the South Side . . . they move up, sending their kids to private school, getting a stable job, sending their kids to college."
Maliss Men’s family represents one such story. Describing her father’s struggle to make a living after arriving in the US, she says, "It really broke his wing. He was very successful in Cambodia. [Then he] came here and was stripped of everything . . . [It was] disappointing finding out the American dream isn’t what they thought it was." Men’s mother, meanwhile, has worked in a Texas Instruments assembly line in Attleboro, Massachusetts, for more than 30 years. Men herself worked there for two long summers during college, and says, "It brought me to tears seeing her."
After she graduated from Bridgham Middle School on Providence’s West End, though, her family was able to move to the suburbs, to Lincoln. Her parents made this choice, Men explains, because, "Education was always a priority. [The] whole purpose of coming to America [was to] make a better life." After graduating from high school, Men went on to the University of Rhode Island, participating in the University’s Talent Development program, which explicitly seeks to "recruit, support, and retain students of color and disadvantaged students," thereby creating a forum for the students to explore these issues. Now she teaches at a Montessori school in North Kingstown while working part-time toward her master’s degree in ESL and cross-cultural studies at Brown.
GIVEN THE VIOLENT PAST that haunts many in the older generation of Southeast Asians, a different kind of violence has seeped down to the youth: gangs and guns.
There are an estimated 15 gangs in Providence, with a total of about 300 members. They range in size from 10 to 50 members, usually a loosely associated group of kids that band together around a certain neighborhood or street. Many of them are explicitly Asian gangs, such as the Oriental Rascals and the Bad Junior Boys. Of the 23 homicides in Providence in 2002, four were gang-related.
Teny Gross is the executive director of the South Providence-based Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence. He and the institute’s street workers intervene in fights and try to stop gang violence before it happens. Speaking about Southeast Asian parents, Gross once told the Phoenix, "They thought they were coming to the promised land, and now their kids are being killed on the streets" (see "The peacemakers," News, September 5, 2003).
Dyna Kun, 31, was almost one of those kids. He’s a small man, but he has an imposing presence. He talks matter-of-factly about the time he spent in prison, and the weapons he used to carry for protection — nunchucks as a boy, and later guns as a young man. As a student at Nathan Bishop Middle School when he first arrived in Providence, he saw other Cambodians getting pushed around at school by people of other races. The gangs, says Kun, started as a means of self-defense. It becomes self-perpetuating, though, and soon young kids join gangs just because they exist. "My generation, we know what we’ve been through — other races against us," explains Kun. "The next generation came out, they don’t know what gangs are about — they start by writing on the wall, argue about girls. Now I see my people killing each other."
Kun was shot in 2002, targeted because of his gang involvement. His god-brother was murdered the following year. "I wondered why I didn’t die," he said. "I start to think about what I did to defend my Asian people . . . I want to work it out. Maybe it’s the reason I stay alive." And so, Kun considered an offer made by Gross. Get paid low wages — some weeks, Kun makes just enough to cover his gas money — and sacrifice much of your social life. It’s a consuming job, with no clear lines between work and play, colleagues and friends. "Sometimes I have a kid in trouble in school," Kun says. "Two or three kids want to jump him in Kennedy Plaza. [So] every day I pick them up from school. I don’t want them to take the bus. They could get in trouble on the bus."
Why is gang violence such an issue among Southeast Asian youth? There is a disconnect, says Gross, between the older and the younger generations of Southeast Asians. The combination of poverty and miscommunication between parents and children is "a wonderful breeding ground for gangs," he says.
Virak In is one of the Providence Police Department’s two Asian officers. He says many parents are angry by how difficult it is to communicate with their kids, raised as they were in a foreign culture. Parents, he says, are "doing everything in their power to try to get the kids to get along, and the kids say, ‘I’m all set, dad, I’m all set, mom.’ "
Long hours at factory jobs eat away at family time. Parents who do not speak English are less able to be involved with their children’s schooling, to help them with their homework, and communicate with their teachers. The issues that many Southeast Asian parents were equipped to deal with in their home country are totally different from the ones that face their children in Providence. Project AIDS Khmer’s Maliss Men explains, "Gangs, teen pregnancy — you wouldn’t find that in Cambodia."
Men says the issues go deeper still. Parents struggle to provide for their kids financially, but they’re often "not [emotionally] there. They’re haunted by the war." If your parents are not there for you, "You look to friends to be your other family." These friends, she says, are too often gang members.
It’s 1.5-ers like Dyna Kun who are well suited to make the streets safer for Southeast Asian youth. As a former gang member, Kun has the street cred to communicate with gang members. As someone born in Cambodia, he can speak Cambodian with parents of gang members and understand families’ hardships. But as someone who grew up on the South Side, he understands the role of police and politics in Providence. He says Cicilline cares about Asians, and he likes Police Chief Dean Esserman’s emphasis on community policing. In the hour or so that we stood talking on Superior Street a while back, a police officer walked by on foot — "I never saw that before," Kun says. Another officer, seeing a group of people gathered on the sidewalk and fearing a fight, pulled up in his car. Kun walked over and the two greeted each other by name. Everything, he told the officer, was under control.
MALISS MEN says she had an identity crisis when her family first moved to Lincoln. "I didn’t fit in," she explains, "I wasn’t one of them." It wasn’t until she was a student in URI’s Talent Development program that she learned how to "be proud of your own culture and be part of the larger culture."
The 1.5 generation is uniquely positioned to do just that. The question is whether members of the younger generation can strike the same balance, or whether they are instead poised to watch their culture recede into the distance.
Xue Khang of the Hmong United Association of Rhode Island says the biggest issue facing Hmong youth is how they are losing a grip on where they come from. "You live in the US, everything fades into American culture." More than three-quarters of Hmong kids don’t speak Hmong, he says. But the issues run deeper than even language or traditional music. The whole approach to life here is different. "The Hmong tradition says, ‘listen to your elders,’ " he says. In the US, the message is, "Be yourself. Do what you want." Economics, too, play a role. "Traditionally, Hmong like to stick together, so when hard times come, you help each other. Now, everyone’s chasing jobs, families are divided." Teaching the next generation of Hmong is one of the Hmong United Association’s main goals, and once a year it offers classes to teach the "younger elders" the traditions and the ceremonies of their people.
ThongKhoun Pathana laughs as he describes the line between the old and the young, American and Laotian. "I am the line," he says. "I’m in the generation gap. You have to fill both generations, the elderly and the younger generation. You have to understand them." And so, Pathana spends Sundays directing his temple’s Laotian Sunday school, teaching the younger generation traditional dance, Lao language, and the tenets of Theravada Buddhism. He also takes them on field trips to the Six Flags amusement park — something that the elders in his community do not understand, but one that he knows helps to win the hearts of his students.
Pathana’s office is dominated by a long Plexiglas case. Inside it is a model of a building, his vision for the future: part museum, part school, part community center, in the style of a Buddhist temple. It’s his dream to use his hard-earned architecture license to build a Southeast Asian arts and cultural center on the site of the Watlao. He envisions it as a place where kids will be able to connect to their heritage.
"Our children grow so fast into the pop culture," he says, "[but] I don’t blame them." As a member of the 1.5 generation, he knows how lonely it is to be not quite like your parents, but not quite like your same-age peers, either. In this conundrum, he sees his purpose. Speaking of the younger generation, he says, "As community leaders, it’s our responsibility to make sure they know they’re not alone."
