Rhode Island Monthly>God is in the Details

God Is In the Details
Woonsocket’s own Sistine Chapel ducked the wrecking ball six years ago. Its second resurrection requires $3.5 million. Can it survive without divine intervention?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 2006

Photographs reproduced here courtesy of Nat Rea.

This piece was awarded 1st place in the in the religion category in the Rhode Island Press Association's 2006 Editorial Awards.



The red and white house on the corner of Robinson Street and Progresso Avenue in Woonsocket has always been a busy but orderly place. The Doiron family has five kids, with eleven years separating the youngest from the oldest. But Yvette Doiron, the matriarch, “ran a pretty tight household,” recalls Dominique, twenty-seven, the youngest. And, like most of the other families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were a working-class, French-Canadian family. The parents of both Yvette and her husband, Ray, moved to Rhode Island from Quebec as teenagers to work in the mills, and Yvette and Ray spoke French as their first language. And, like most families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were also very involved in their Catholic church. They went to mass every weekend, Yvette was the leader of the parish’s Girl Scout troop and a Eucharistic minister, the boys were altar servers, the girls taught Catechism class, Ray was the parish sextant and sang in the choir. St. Ann’s Church on Cumberland Street was less than ten blocks from the Doiron household, and those blocks were heavily trodden by the fourteen feet that resided in the red and white house.

So it was only natural, when the Diocese of Providence announced in 2000 that it was closing St. Ann due to dwindling parishioners and rising building maintenance costs, that the Doirons would get involved. “They didn’t close this church without a fight, let me tell you,” says Sue, the second-oldest Doiron sibling, thirty-seven. “Though we didn’t get as far as chaining ourselves to the church.” What the family and a handful of other former parishioners have done, however, will probably have a much more lasting impact on the fate of St. Ann’s than any short-lived stunt might have had.

One way or another, St. Ann’s was going to be torn down. Either the Diocese would have dismantled it and sold the pieces – “they could have made a lot of money selling the marble,” says Sue –or they would have sold the whole parcel to developers, who likely would wrecked the church to build condominiums or a shopping plaza. A scrappy group of former parishioners hatched the idea of “a major center, a tourist attraction, a place of opportunity for local artists,” says Dominique. In 2001, the non-profit, non-sectarian St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center was born with the Doiron family at the helm. In 2002, the Diocese agreed to lease the building to the group at $1 per year for ninety-nine years. Ninety-nine years is a long time; the group is hoping they’ll last through this winter.

The stretch of Cumberland Street surrounding St. Ann is nondescript, a run-down thoroughfare with a Dunkin’ Donuts, dry cleaners, service station and funeral home, all fronted by big empty parking lots. From the outside, St. Ann’s Church also looks much like any old-fashioned cathedral on any run-down main street in any aging former mill town. Behind the building’s giant wooden doors, however, is the church’s sanctuary, a room so magnificent that it literally takes your breath away.

Smothered in color and light, the sanctuary is ringed by forty-eight elaborate stained glass windows. Its sixty-five foot vaulted ceiling and half of its walls – 20,000 square feet in all – are covered in buon-style frescoes, paintings whose pigments are integrated into the plaster itself and whose angels, prophets, saints and devils throb with brilliant color. Standing underneath them, head tipped back, you almost want to take chunks of the delicious scenes in your mouth and suck on them like hard candy, or climb into them and lie in the grass and pick flowers. Each of the individual paintings is a masterpiece, but the effect of them together is literally stunning. It’s as if a whole world is in this one room. You could spend a lifetime and never see it all.

BOUNDED TO THE NORTH BY THE Massachusetts border and to the east and west by North Smithfield and Cumberland, Woonsocket has the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest per-capita household incomes in the state, trailing only Central Falls and pockets of Providence. “Woonsocket,” says Dominique with a laugh, “has come to be known as the armpit of the state.”

It wasn’t always this way. The late 1800s and early 1900s was a boom time for towns along the Blackstone River, the epicenter of America’s industrial heyday. Woonsocket grew up around Woonsocket Falls, whose thirty-foot drop generated power for the town’s forty or so textile mills. Meanwhile, farmers in the countryside of Quebec were finding it harder to eke a living out of the land, and word spread about the many jobs in New England’s textile mills. By the time Woonsocket was incorporated in 1888, more than 40 percent of the city’s population – some 8,500 people – was composed of French-Canadian mill workers and their families.

Woonsocket’s French-Canadians were deeply religious people and the Catholic Church was the heart of their community. In 1890, with the city’s only French parish, Precious Blood, bursting at the seams, church officials decided to create a new parish. Members of the new St. Ann’s parish envisioned a magnificent building and began knocking on doors and digging deeper into their pockets at Sunday mass to build it. “This was a parish of poor immigrants, of French-Canadian mill workers who were really devoted to their faith, and wanted to build a temple for themselves,” says Dominique. The nickels and dimes started adding up, and by 1917, the French Renaissance-style church on Cumberland Street was completed.

In 1920, looking towards the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the parish, congregants decided to replace the church’s enormous windows with stained glass. Once again, the parishioners dug into their pockets. Plays were staged as benefits. Some of the wealthier parishioners donated the cost of windows as memorials to family members. The windows, shipped from Chartres, France, were installed in 1925. The centerpieces are two windows on either side of the transept, which are so large that, were they laid end-to-end, their square footage would exceed that of the floor plan of an average ranch-style house. Portraying the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, what makes these windows exceptional is their multilayered artwork. In the foreground of “The Crucifixion,” for example, are kneeling worshippers and Roman soldiers on horseback. Jesus on the cross rises from their midst. In an ordinary stained-glass window, behind this scene might be decorative colored panels. In this one, the scene is backed by the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Behind the walls, the hills. And behind the hills, a frightfully churning purple sky. The windows face north and south such that “The Resurrection” is always the brightest window in the building.

Nineteen-forty marked the parish’s 50th anniversary, and St. Ann’s pastor decided that the church’s interior should be decorated in honor of the upcoming golden jubilee. Father Henry Morin had always admired the paintings at St. Matthew’s Church in Central Falls, and he invited the artist, Guido Nincheri, to visit St. Ann’s. Nincheri, who lived in Quebec, had been raised in Florence, Italy, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. He was best-known for his stained glass, but he was an accomplished artist in many media, including painting, mosaic, sculpture, and the Renaissance method of fresco painting known as buon fresco. Michelangelo used this method to paint the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. During Nincheri’s initial visit to St. Ann’s, he noticed that the walls and the ceiling were still unfinished, covered with cement stucco and not plaster. Father Morin was apologetic. Nincheri was delighted.

Instead of applying oil or tempera to pre-existing plaster, fresco pigments are applied to fresh, wet plaster. The chemical changes which occur mean that the painting is integrated into the wall itself. The moment the pigment touches the plaster, it is permanent. The artist cannot remove paint, or paint over anything he has already done. If he makes a mistake, the plaster must be cut away from the entire area and the process must begin again.

The result is that the paintings never fade. They never chip or peel. And the colors are so rich and bright, they look like they’re glowing. “If you come back 400 years from now,” says Dominique, “these colors will be as bright and vibrant as they are now.”

Over the course of eight years, from 1940 to 1948, Nincheri painstakingly covered the entire church with frescoes. He used the congregants as models for his work, integrating more than 400 individual faces into the paintings’ 175 scenes. One of the centerpieces, “The Last Judgment” depicts three devils being cast into hell, two of whom face us. When the time came to paint the devils’ faces, Nincheri went across the street to St. Ann’s school, and asked for the two naughtiest boys in the class. The nun who serenaded Nincheri while he worked is immortalized as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of Church Music, playing the organ over the choir loft.

Roger Nincheri, the artist’s grandson, is cataloguing his grandfather’s artwork, which can be found in 220 churches throughout North America. “I consider St Ann’s to be Guido’s Sistine Chapel, in terms of the size and complexity,” he says. Dominique agrees. “If you take [all of Michelangelo’s frescoes in] the Sistine Chapel as a single piece, this is bigger. By a lot. People spend thousands of dollars to go to Italy, but here it is, in this country, in Rhode Island, right in Woonsocket…It’s part of our heritage. Our ancestors came here and built it.”

IT’S WEDNESDAY, BINGO NIGHT at St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center, and though it’s only 4:40, the church basement is already half-full. The mostly elderly crowd is lining up their bingo daubers like many-colored soldiers on the tables, and hunkering down over baskets of French fries and games of cards.

Bingo is just one of the many offerings on the calendar. The building is open from 1 pm until 4 pm every Sunday afternoon for tours. The organization tries to offer at least one event each month. Some notable recent performers were Elisabeth von Trapp, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Community College of Rhode Island chorus and orchestra, and the Ocean State Summer Pops Orchestra. A production of Carousel is slated for May, and the Providence Singers are performing Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” in June. Ultimately, the organization hopes to use some of the un-frescoed part of the sanctuary as gallery space for local artists, and to host weekly events that serve as an anchor for the Center’s calendar, such as a Sunday afternoon piano recital series. When he’s really thinking big, Dominique envisions removing the pews so the sanctuary can be used for weddings, banquets and balls.

The word is not out yet, however, and Center events are not always well attended. When von Trapp performed, it drew 100 people; in a room that seats 1200, “it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” says Dominique. Even when the Vienna Boys’ Choir visited, he recalls, “there were only about five or six hundred people, which wasn’t enough to pay the bill of bringing them in.”

Part of the problem is the church’s location. The old joke about having to pack a bag to travel from Providence to Warwick has some truth to it; Rhode Islanders are notoriously reluctant to travel more than a stone’s throw from home. What’s more, says Dominique, “it’s hard to get people to Woonsocket because they still think of it as a burned out town with nothing to do.”

Ticket prices are very reasonable. Events are usually pay-what-you-can, and the most expensive to date were $10. Ironically, however, this may deter visitors accustomed to performances at Providence’s Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium or other such posh venues. “There might be people who think that ten dollars isn’t going to get you much,” says Sue.

Bingo brings in about $1,000 each week, which was just enough to cover the building’s heat and electricity in 2004. Given the rising cost of oil, however, Ray says that this winter will decide whether the organization can stay afloat. St. Ann’s needs more than to just stay afloat, however; major structural repairs are necessary. The building has four different kinds of roof – slate, copper, rubber, and gravel – and all of them need to be repaired or replaced. The roof in the building’s north tower is leaking, which has destroyed some of the decorative stonework on the outside and some fresco work on the inside. The entire heating and electrical systems need to be overhauled. Right now the Doirons and a core group of 20 volunteers do all of the work, but most of it is band-aid work, like patching leaks. They need more volunteers, and they need more money, fast. According to a building survey, the necessary repairs and upgrades will cost an estimated $3.5 million.

The organization has received some funding from the Rhode Island Foundation, the City of Woonsocket and Preserve Rhode Island, among others. Recently, Lowe’s and the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded a $100,000 grant that the center will use to repair the slate roof in order to preserve the frescoes, which are starting to show signs of water damage. Senator Jack Reed has secured a $300,000 federal appropriation which will become available sometime in the next year. But St. Ann’s has lost out on at least as many grants as it has secured, and its finances are increasingly precarious, meaning that the $300,000 may arrive too late.

“The premise of the lease is that we would be solely responsible for the building as long as our organization was in existence,” says Ray. But this guardianship causes a Catch-22; before they will allocate repair funds, many grantors require a building’s owner to take financial responsibility for unforeseen costs associated with the project. Because the building is owned by the Diocese, the organization cannot agree to these terms, and therefore is ineligible for the funds. Further, many grantmaking organizations will not fund religiously-affiliated organizations. Although the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center is technically not religiously affiliated, “every piece of art in this building has a religious theme,” says Sue. That the building is owned by the Diocese does not help.

“We’re sort of hoping some of our programming will become more successful,” says Dominique, acknowledging that “it still may not be enough to cover the costs” of keeping the building open. Beyond that, the organization does not have much of a plan to get through the winter. Still, Dominique describes the mood among the organizations’ members as “nervously optimistic.” Nickels and dimes built the church, Sue reminds him, and nickels and dimes will save it.

Rhode Island Monthly>Brave Hearts

Brave Hearts

Young Afghan women are studying at Roger Williams University, gaining political and financial skills that will help rebuild their ravaged country. What no one anticipated was that these students would change our lives as much as we’ve changed theirs.

Beth Schwartzapfel
May 2005

This piece was awarded Rhode Island for Community and Justice's 2005 Metcalf Award for Diversity in the Media.



SHE HAD HEARD OF JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME. She had heard of “Ah-nold” and Times Square. But other than that, Mahbooba Babrakazai wasn’t sure what to expect when she arrived in the United States of America. She was exhausted after two days and two nights of travel, starting in Kabul, Afghanistan, continuing through Islamabad, then Karachi, Dubai, Zurich, and finally arriving in New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on a rainy night in August 2002. So when she and her four weary fellow travelers thought they had missed their last connecting flight to Boston, they sat down on their pile of luggage and tried to decide what to do next.

It turns out that they had misunderstood about the flight to Boston. Paula Nirschel and a small entourage of supporters, expecting them in New York all along, had already piled into a van at Roger Williams University. In the van were Nirschel, her husband, University president Roy Nirschel, and the school’s dean of business, Maling Ebrahimpour. A sign that Ebrahimpour had made was on the seat beside him, its blue letters spelling out Mahbooba’s name in Dari Persian. Meem. Heh. Bey. Waw. Bey. Hey Gerdak.

On the way to the airport, Nirschel’s husband tried to prepare her, gently, for the possibility that it still might not happen. Visas, exit permits, navigating customs in five countries – not to mention cold feet – were a lot of obstacles for a handful of young women to handle on their own. “Everybody said, Paula, really, they’re not going to be on the plane,” she recalls. Logically, even after her months of dedication and work, she knew they might be right. And yet, she says, “I knew they were going to be there.”

Needless to say, the travelers were there, the inaugural class of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, a scholarship program that Nirschel had dreamed up less than a year earlier.

While many in America turned inwards after 9/11, Nirschel was glued to the television. The images of Afghan women haunted her. “It was like an out-of-body experience. Days and days would go by…I actually could not sleep.”

She got on the phone – to Washington, to Kabul, to “anybody who would talk to me at the state department.” She was making up a scholarship program as she went along until eventually the details took shape. Her husband offered the first one at Roger Williams University. Nirschel used that scholarship as leverage and sent out letters to 3,500 college presidents around the country, asking for additional help. Robert Finn, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, offered roundtrip airfare for the first group of students, and assembled a group of U.S. Foreign Service officers, Afghani academics, and government ministers to interview applicants.

Nirschel then hand-picked women who planned to return home after graduation to serve their countries. She designed the program knowing that there were two potential stumbling blocks. She realized that many recent graduates get lured at graduation time with American salaries and jobs. She also knew that students who’ve spent too much time in the U.S. can find returning home very alien. So each June, the students go back to Afghanistan. Nirschel helps them secure internships with nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and other groups. The summers spent working at home allow them to help support their families, build their resumes, and stay grounded in their country.

As a result, “these women…will end up in key positions,” says Nirschel. “President Karzai and ministers I have spoken with…are waiting for educated women to help to run the country…They’re very eager to get them back.”

So when Nirschel pulled up to the terminal at JFK Airport, she knew she was looking at more than her dream coming to fruition. She was looking at a handful of trailblazing women who will help rebuild Afghanistan from its shattered ground up.

Mahbooba, for her part, was flooded with joy and relief when she finally laid eyes on the people whom she still calls “Mrs. Nirschel and Mr. President.” Any concerns about whether the Americans would be friendly evaporated when she saw Ebrahimpour’s sign. “My name? In my language? I was like, Wow! We have somebody waiting for us!”

The group piled in the van and headed towards Bristol. After a short orientation, the women would spread out to Universities all over the country: the University of Montana in Missoula, Notre Dame College in South Euclid, Ohio, the University of Hartford in Connecticut, and Bristol’s Roger Williams University.

AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, there have been some growing pains and reshuffling as the program evolved. A couple of the women transferred to different schools. Another made the difficult decision to leave the program and return home. Overall, however, the arc of the Initiative has been an upward-swinging one. Three years after the program’s inception, thirteen Afghan women are studying at universities throughout the United States. Several of the women from the first group to arrive are now preparing for graduate school and threeAfghan women now attend Roger Williams.

Mahbooba Babrakzai, twenty, and Nadima Sahar, nineteen, are juniors, and Arezo Kohistani, twenty-three, is a sophomore. All three women grew up in Kabul, but as teenagers all three moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Mahbooba explains that when the Taliban came to power, her parents knew that she couldn’t go to school anymore. “They didn’t want a future for me that was dark and I’d have no ideas,” she said. “That’s why my parents moved to Pakistan, to get my education. And then whenever the Taliban went, they would move back to Afghanistan.”

That is roughly what happened. The Taliban fell just as Mahbooba finished high school. “I was joking with my mom,” Mahbooba says, “that the Taliban were there until I was finished with my school. When I was finished, I could go back.”

In fact, just after she graduated from high school, her father heard on the radio that there was still time to take the Kabul University entrance exam. “He was so happy,” Mahbooba recalls, “and he was telling me, there is a chance, so me and you are going back to Afghanistan.”

They left the rest of their family behind in Peshawar and returned to Kabul so Mahbooba could take the test. Mahbooba says the house felt cold and empty without her family. She passed the exam and enrolled in medical school at Kabul University and was a few weeks into her first semester when she got a scholarship from the Initiative.

Mahbooba’s major is financial services – she plans to get a masters in finance when she graduates – but she changed majors a number of times before making up her mind. In Kabul it was medicine, but when she arrived in the U.S., she switched to computer science, then engineering.

Now that she has settled on business, Mahbooba sees the possibilities of women’s empowerment in finance. One summer Mahbooba’s job was in Afghanistan’s new Ministry of Commerce; she helped a woman secure a small grant to open a women’s clothing shop. The shop sells business suits, casual clothing, and party dresses for women. It is the first female-owned business in all of Kabul. Under the Taliban, Mahbooba wrote in an email, women often made and sold clothing. But since they weren’t allowed to own a business, “they would sell their hand made products to shops and those guys would keep the most profit.” Now women get to keep the profits.

Arezo Kohistani arrived in 2003 as part of the Initiative’s second generation of students. When Arezo finished high school in Peshawar, she got a job as an Operations Assistant with the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Islamabad. Her father, a lawyer, also worked for the U.N., so the family moved to Pakistan and lived there until the Taliban fell and they were able to return home. While in Islamabad, Arezo started a chapter of the youth-run NGO Youth and Children Development Program, which offered weekend classes in English, math, and Islam to Afghan refugees. The Youth and Children Development Program originated as a series of secret basement-schools for children in Afghanistan who were unable to attend school under the Taliban. However, even in Pakistan, where children were able to attend school, Arezo was not surprised to find that their desire to learn was fierce. Even before the Taliban, Arezo explains, Afghan schools were only open intermittently. The years of civil war that ravaged the country meant that it was not always possible, or safe, to keep them open.

When the family returned home after nine years in Pakistan, their house was in ruins. The seven members of Arezo’s family – her mother, her father, Arezo and her two sisters and two brothers – now live with Arezo’s uncle and his family while they slowly rebuild.

Nadima Sahar moved to Peshawar with her father and 3 sisters when she was nine or ten. Her mother was a lawyer with the World Food Program, and stayed behind in Kabul to secretly continue her work. Each morning she would put on her burka and take a cab to her office. What gave her away, though, were her trips to Pakistan to see her family. Though she only visited two or three times a year, the Taliban kept catching her as she crossed the Khyber pass. They gave her many warnings until one day they put her in jail. She was released with another, more scary warning this time: she had better not get caught again, or else. She was in the midst of despairing about how she might see her family again when the Taliban fell.

Nadima is a political science major with aspirations to become Afghanistan’s first female president. She plans to attend law school after graduation. Dr. Jennifer Campbell, Assistant Professor of Writing Studies, taught her for two semesters and says her student is a force to be reckoned with. “Nadima Sahar says she’s going to be president of Afghanistan?” Campbell says. “Then Nadima Sahar is going to be president of Afghanistan.”

Encouragement from her mentors at Roger Williams, not to mention her mother’s striking example, helped Nadima to develop the confidence to voice such lofty ambitions. Though there are now women governors of several Afghan provinces, and there was a woman candidate in the recent presidential elections, there’s a segment of society that doesn’t view these as acceptable jobs for women, Nadima says. She initially thought she might study business, or medicine but changed her mind. “The only way I could really make a difference is to get involved in government,” Nadima says.

Campbelladds, “She’s got this completely quiet demeanor, but you don’t want to mess with Nadima.”

IN SOME WAYS, THESE THREE ARE serious young women. They’re determined to succeed and devoted to their country and their religion. They spend far more hours studying than most of their peers. Their professors are unanimously impressed with their dedication and their focus. The women pray five times a day. They will have their marriages arranged when the time comes. They do not date. They do not drink or go to parties. Nirschel says this single-mindedness is because they are on a mission to become role models for the women of Afghanistan. “They take that responsibility very seriously,” she says

The women are also hilarious and fun to hang out with. They are relaxed, laugh easily and often, and tease each other constantly, though they are too polite to tease most anyone else. (Arezo laughs as she tells Nadima the word in Dari that she uses to describe Mahbooba. All I can get out of her is that it is a small bird. Suffice it to say, she says, that “most of the time I just tease her. I call her small and cute, and she says, ‘don’t call me that!’)

They love shopping, and it took them some time before they learned how to manage their work-study paychecks wisely. “My first paycheck,” Arezo laughs, “all gone to Target.” Now they have a code--don’t look at things you can’t buy.

“Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Nadima, look at those shoes!’” Nadima teases Arezo. “And I’ll say, ‘Arezo, you are blind’,” which is their code for ‘don’t look at things you can’t buy.’ “And Arezo will say, ‘right, I have no eyes.’”

But even as she describes the self-restraint she has mastered, Arezo shakes her head in mock sympathy for all the things she does not buy. “We feel really bad for the clothes. They will really miss us if we leave them there.”

The women love the ocean. Nadima calls it their soulmate. Arezo said that she had seen the ocean in Pakistan, but it was not until they were homesick that they realized how comforting the ocean can be. “Whenever we feel sad,” Arezo says, “we just go and sit.”

While all three women are friendly and warm, Arezo and Nadima agree that Mahbooba is the most outgoing, social, and talkative of the three. Lindsay Toto, a Roger Williams University senior who is one of Mahbooba’s closest American friends, says that the most important thing she has learned from Mahbooba is how important laughter is. Before she met her, Toto explains, it was easy to get overwhelmed by school and lose perspective. But Mahbooba “told me her dad is someone who makes everyone laugh when times get bad…so I can tell that’s from her family.”

IT’S CLEAR THAT THE AFGHAN STUDENTS’ lives have been changed by the Initiative. What’s less predictable is how American students have been altered by it, as well.

When they first arrived on campus, for instance, the Afghan women encountered many misunderstandings about Afghanistan and Islam. Countering these misconceptions was part of the women’s mission when they put aside their fears and got on that plane in Kabul. “If I I think the people would not be friendly to me and therefore I am not going,’” Nadima asks, then “how could we change the negative perspective that people have about Afghans and about Afghanistan?”

Mahbooba’s friend Lindsay, for her part, says that Mahbooba’s presence at Roger Williams has changed her mind. “Having been a freshman during 9/11,” she says, “I think a lot of students had reservations about having students from Afghanistan come over here.”

But Lindsay says that “having met Mahbooba really changed my life. When you start to view people as individuals…to be able to see that people have homes, and families, and love, and go on and live their lives every day, despite the difficulties,” then one really starts to gain understanding.

When she first arrived, Arezo was taken aback by some of the questions that her fellow students asked. “They were asking me, ‘ooh, you’re from Afghanistan? Have you ever had TV in your country? Do you know what apple is? How can you wear such clothes?’ On media, they just show Taliban, and mujahedeen, fighting on the mountain, and women wearing burka. So they think that we are living in the caves.”

Mahbooba was asked how many camels she owns. She was also asked the apple question. “The apple one was really funny,” she says, “because they were like, A-H-H-pull.” Mahbooba laughs when describing her sarcastic response to this question: “OK, no, I don’t know what apple is.”

The women answer each misconception with a careful explanation. And maybe a giggle. For example, Kabul is a big city, a bustling metropolis of honking cars, shoppers, kids playing in the street. For holidays and special occasions, the women wear elaborate and colorful costumes, threaded with gold and hung with beads. But even in Kabul, most days, they wear jeans, or a long skirt, with pants underneath, and a headscarf. Many women in Aghanistan’s more remote providence wore burkas long before the Taliban came to power, but the women explain that Islam requires only that a woman cover her hair. They feel somewhat sad about it, but they’ve decided not to cover their hair while they are here. Since the purpose of the headscarf is to discourage men from staring, the women know that wearing them would defeat the purpose. “Here if you wear the veil,” Arezo says, “everyone stares.”

All of the women’s parents, mothers and fathers alike, went to Kabul University. Their parents have always been proud and encouraging, and pushed the women to live up to their potential. “If you want to be someone,” Arezo recalls her father saying, “be the best one.” She laughs as she repeats her father’s motto to Nadima. “If you want to be teeth, be the top teeth.”

So when their classmates’ questions revealed certain assumptions – that the Afghan women were not street-wise or savvy, for instance, or that they were not valued by their families – the American students, in fact, revealed themselves to have a limited understanding of Afghan culture. “They were feeling very sorry for us,” Arezo recalls, “and I was thinking, ‘What do you mean by this?!’”

The women admit they had their own preconceived notions of the US before arriving, which has helped them to understand where the American students are coming from. To combat ignorance on both sides, Nadima says, “usually when we give any presentations in our classes, we focus a little bit on Afghans.”

Arezo did just that with her final project for Computer Science 101. It’s hard to imagine how an Introduction to Spreadsheets project could relate to Afghanistan, but Arezo constructed a multilayered spreadsheet about opium production and the Afghan economy. The women also give speeches about their country and their culture, both on and off campus. Recently they gave a lecture about Afghan culture and Islam to a lecture hall packed with 200 of their classmates and professors. When the University launched a journal called Reason and Respect: A Journal of Civil Discourse, Nadima wrote a thoughtful piece called, “Ramadan, the Month of Fasting,” in the inaugural issue.

Nadima has also engaged other students, even those who were initially hostile. The Roger Williams University College Republicans, for instance, are a rather outspoken bunch. College campuses tend to be bastions of liberal thinking, but this group has pulled some pretty head-turning right-wing stunts. In February of last year, for instance, they offered a “whites only” scholarship in protest of affirmative action. Shortly after the Afghan students arrived, the group’s chairman, Jason Mattera, wrote an article attacking Islam in the conservative campus paper.

Nadima wrote her final paper for her Expository Writing class in response. It’s an essay Nadima’s professor, Jennifer Campbell describes as a twenty-page dialogue about why Mattera should understand what Islam really is, instead of the misrepresentations he’d made. (Nadima politely describes their conversations as her attempt to clear up a little misunderstanding about Islam.) Even two years later, Campbell remembers this paper for how compelling it was, how earnest, and patient. “She’s…unfailingly sweet and unfailingly polite,” Campbell says. “But at the same time, she is like girl of steel. She will go up to anyone, and in a very loving way, she will engage them.”

IT IS 10:30 ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, and Arezo pads to the door of her dorm to let me in. She is wearing slippers and blue flannel pajamas with clouds on them. On the way to the room that she and Nadima share, we step over empty beer cans in various states of crushed-ness. Arezo jokes that she had a few drinks. I joke that I won’t mention as much in the article so her parents won’t get the wrong idea.

It is an Afghan custom to offer food to guests, so Arezo has prepared classic dorm room fare: a Tupperware full of microwave popcorn. She also offers me sugared almonds, an Afghan delicacy which she brought back from a recent trip to California. They are delicious.

Arezo and Nadima have set up pillows on the floor of the room they share, which reminds them of home. Arezo is sitting on these pillows, rewriting notes from one of the day’s lectures, when Nadima breezes in.

Nadima is a mentor in the Bridge to Success Program, which pairs Roger Williams students with minority students at Newport’s Rogers High School. That night the Bridge to Success crew has gone to the Providence Black Repertory Company’s production of Cheryl J. West’s Jar the Floor. Nadima and her mentees all enjoyed the show, and Nadima fairly glows as she sits cross-legged on the floor of her room and recounts the story of the play, in which four generations of African-American women gather for the family matriarch’s birthday. Nadima is also on the mock trial team, so we chat a bit about the case her team recently won at a regional championship. She loves these sessions, partly because they help her look forward to law school, and partly because they’re good training in seeing every story from many different angles. “Most of my friends in mock trial are Republican,” she says, “but they accept other people’s opinions, whether they agree with them or not.”

I tell the young women about an email conversation I’ve been having with the President of the College Republicans, Mike Martelli. I’ve brought a transcript of some of the emails Martelli and I have exchanged to get the women’s thoughts. “Personally I am not a fan for the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women,” Martelli wrote. “Last I checked, [the Afghan students] would be returning to a culture where women are second class citizens and are not valued…Seems to me that we wasted something there, considering their religious leaders love to oppress them.”

Nadima recalls her conversations with Mattera and is not particularly surprised. “To me, it seems like a really ignorant opinion,” she responds. “It’s the twenty-first century.”

“He was only talking about Taliban,” Arezo says. “Before then, women were doctors, governors, judges, pilots….they should learn about religion and culture and country and then talk.”

“He is expecting a country that has been in constant war for 24 years to have women presidents?” Nadima asks. “Countries with peace have no women presidents!”

Echoing her friend’s sentiment, Arezo asks, “Why does the US have no woman president?”

The women stress that this young man’s sentiment is in the minority on campus. For the most part, they say, their reception here has been warm and welcoming. “Everyone welcomed us with a smile on their face, and was really helpful in helping us to get used to the environment,” says Nadima. But as much as the women dismiss Mattera’s criticisms with a wave of their hands, his sentiment nevertheless strengthens their resolve. “This makes us stronger,” Nadima says. “It makes us more ambitious to prove ourselves…When I become the first female president, I can prove to him that women are truly not slaves.”

“I used to say I want to become the first female president,” Nadima adds. “When I hear things like this, now I say, I must become the first female president.”

I remember what Professor Campbell said about Nadima. Get out of the way, Mattera. Here comes the girl of steel.

NADIMA, AREZO, AND MAHBOOBA might have liked very much to go to Kabul University. Twenty-five years ago, professors came from all over the middle east – indeed, all over the word – to teach there. The University hosted a busy exchange program. But a quarter century of civil war, then a repressive regime that valued obedience over knowledge, followed by air strikes and ground wars to unseat that regime, have left the university in ruins. Mahbooba was a student there for part of one semester, so she speaks from experience when she says that students there are suffering a lot. “A lot of things are torn up,” she says. In the winter, the dorms have no heat, and “the food is not, like, good.” At first, this sounds like the kind of comment any college student might make about cafeteria food. But then she continues. “The government is not rich enough to feed everyone there…Even if there is something to eat, it is not sufficient to give you energy.”

Arezo recalls walking at night with her father. After 9 pm in Kabul, the streets tend to empty out, so it was quiet. It was also winter and very cold. Arezo noticed a group of young people huddled under a streetlight, and she asked her father what they were doing. There was no electricity in the dorms, he explained, so the students had brought their books outside to study by the streetlight.

The Initiative to Educate Afghan Women will be most powerful when it succeeds into obsolescence, when women come to the U.S. to study in order to participate in a rich cross-cultural exchange, not because they have no other options.

The thirteen women will return to their country with U.S. educations. Then they must roll up their sleeves and crouch under that streetlight with the students from Kabul University. Together they will rebuild Afghanistan’s universities, its hospitals, its infrastructure.

“We know that…one or two people cannot do a lot for the country,” Arezo says.

“But we can do our part,” says Mahbooba. “I can’t wait to go and do my part.”

Providence Phoenix>Between Two Worlds

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."