Dolls made by John Vue between 2016-2020. Vue took up sewing in 2015. Courtesy of John Vue.

Dolls made by Maolor Xiong in the mid 1990s. Courtesy of Maolor Xiong (no relation to author).

Dolls made by Kate Vue (with some help from an aunt) for her daughter in the early 2000s. Courtesy of Kate Vue (no relation to John Vue).

Hmong dolls at T&Y Market in Sacramento, CA, circa late 1990s. Courtesy of Julie Lynhiavue.

The author dressed in her Hmong Txaij Npab traditional outfit posing outside of her family home in 2020, six months before it was destroyed by a fire. Courtesy of author.

A selection of items destroyed in the June fire. The xauv (silver necklace) and hnab nyiaj (money belt) were typically added to traditional Hmong outfits. Courtesy of author.

The dolls were a seemingly trivial loss in the larger scheme of what went up in smoke when a fire burned through my neighborhood in the summer of 2020.

My family was fortunate to have evacuated in time, but only just so. Except for the few items we carried away with us in the van—in the trunk, under our feet, in our hands—the flames took everything in our home. I mourned the loss of our cultural items and traditional garments—like the suitcase of clothes my pog (father’s mother) received more than half a century ago from her mother.

But I became fixated on the dolls; my mother had created roughly a dozen of them in the early 2000s, using fabric and beads that were left over after she made traditional Hmong outfits for my siblings and me. They lived on the top shelf of her closet, where she kept them for us, tucked away, and protected from dust with clear plastic wrap. Occasionally, she displayed them in the living room but they were not meant to be played with; they were for decor, to be admired for their beauty and embroidery.

Hmong dolls created by the author’s mother, Se Lor, in the early 2000s. Photo by author.

Hmong dolls are a rare sight nowadays in the community. As they vanish from homes and storefronts, I worry the story behind them will vanish too. Amid my people’s invisibility in history—fraught with war, persecution, and displacement—women’s contributions to Hmong culture, especially, can be overlooked.

For many years I, like so many, long dismissed these dolls as just that: dolls. But their loss, compounded by the loss of my own traditional clothes, spurred something inside of me. I decided to embark on a search to recover the history of how these dolls came to exist—to ensure that though my family’s were gone, their story would not turn into a blip in our collective memory.

I began my inquiry with my mother, asking her if she remembered why she first decided to make her own versions. She recalled booths selling similar dolls at a local Hmong New Year celebration and soon also saw them on display at a relative’s house.

“I saw these beautiful dolls and liked them, so I just started making them too,” she told me.

Her nonchalance didn’t dissuade me; I knew there had to be more to the story.

For centuries, my people passed down traditions and knowledge orally; our shared stories and experiences created our sense of identity and history when we lacked a formal written alphabet. When I started searching, I knew I would find few answers in books or articles, so I sought information via social media, posting questions like, “When did your mothers or you make these dolls?” and “Around what year did you see these dolls?”

Before I began my investigation, I had always assumed doll-making was part of a traditional mother–daughter rite of passage, similar to learning paj ntaub (“flower cloth” or Hmong embroidery), but that was simply because I had only ever witnessed my mother making dolls. As I spoke to more people, I learned they had a more complex history.

One community member suggested that people started making the dolls in the ’80s and ’90s—when the first and second waves of Hmong refugees entered the United States—to generate income. She recalled making and selling the dolls with her mother at the church that had sponsored their family in Wisconsin. Their dolls’ prices varied depending on the size of the doll and the type of outfit, usually ranging between $40 and $150, but sometimes more. Female dolls were more popular, but male dolls were made, too.

But for many, the work wasn’t done for strictly financial reasons. One person, who came across the dolls in her family’s store in Merced, California, noted that the makers were typically mothers. She observed that like my mom, these mothers would use leftover fabric from the traditional clothes they’d made for their children to make the dolls. For them, dollmaking was a hobby. Another woman shared that her mother dressed dolls in Hmong clothes because her own daughters refused to wear them—an anecdote that would likely resonate with my own mother because my sisters and I had had our fair share of complaints about dressing up for Hmong New Year celebrations. For years, I remember thinking how it always felt like a chore to put on all the pieces and make the outfit look symmetrical and perfect; a blouse and jeans were so much easier to put on.

Cultural preservation was another motivation that emerged behind the creation of the dolls. One mother, inspired by her neighbor, made about 50 of these dolls in the mid ’90s—two of each from different groups of Hmong—to capture traditional attire in a time when Hmong had so little representation in the United States. Her daughter told me her mother gave only a few away (similar to how my mother gifted two—one to an aunt and one to a Hmong cultural center) but she saved most of the dolls as keepsakes. They were too precious to sell after all the time and effort spent on making them.

To finish one doll, it could take several weeks, one person explained, though this ran counter to what my mother had said—that if you were dedicated, you could complete a doll in just a few days. I wondered if my mom was exaggerating, but I had no experience with sewing to venture a guess; by the time I was old enough to start learning, she didn’t have time to teach me as she did my older sisters, and I had become too busy with schoolwork to devote time to the craft.

Close up of the three striped patterns on the sleeves of the author’s doll, representative of the traditional Hmoob Txaij Npab style. Photo by author.

I presented my mother with a photo of a doll that she had once given to me. “Even sewing these tiny parts was quick and easy?” I prompted, referring to the three striped patterns on the sleeves, which was representative of our Hmoob Txaij Npab (“Striped Arms Hmong”) traditional style.

My mother seemed taken aback. “I can’t recall,” she told me. “It feels remarkable now that I was able to make these.”

One of the questions I’d hoped to answer in my search was whether the dolls were invented in the United States or if they dated back further, like the story cloths that originated from the refugee camps in Thailand and were sold to foreigners to generate income. The Central Valley region of California seemed to have been a hub of production, but the dolls were also found in Northern California where my family lived, as well as other places with large Hmong populations, like Minnesota and Wisconsin. Yet there were those who had never seen the dolls before, which also made sense to me; during the dolls’ heyday, social media didn’t yet exist. You would have only learned about the dolls by coming across them at someone’s house, a Hmong market, or at the New Year.

Now that these dolls are scarcely, if ever, seen outside a home, I assume the doll makers of yesteryear don’t have time or are not able to make them anymore (I think of my mother, whose hands are no longer as nimble). I suspect, also, that the dolls are not as needed in the way they were before—there are less laborious ways of preserving and reproducing culture now.  And when it comes to income, other sources of work have become more accessible; making dolls is no longer a financial necessity. To make them now, you need passion and devotion to the craft itself.

I don’t expect I’ll ever find a single place or person of origin behind the dolls, but it is enough for now that my search has unearthed a richer history than I once thought.

My mother, fittingly, was the source of that realization. To my delight, our conversations unlocked a childhood memory from when she lived in Laos, of girls a handful of years older than her playing with dolls cobbled together from scrapped fabric, bamboos, and sticks. They were not adorned with beads and complex patterns, but they wore traditional black clothes, often tied together with a bright-colored belt—seemingly early iterations of the dolls I’d come to know. When my mother saw the dolls at the New Year all those years ago, she remembered the dolls of Laos.

Even after her mother, my niam tais, couldn’t corroborate whether those makeshift dolls existed or not, my mother insisted: “It was such a distinct memory.”

Investigating the dolls led me to uncover intertwined narratives that I had not considered before: my people’s plight and diaspora, the labor and creativity of Hmong women, the preservation of a culture, and the love for dolls and make-believe.

And the dolls gave me something the fire couldn’t take away: a reminder of how, amid despair and loss, our history and traditions can survive through the act of remembering.

The post The Hmong Dolls We Lost, and the Story I Found appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At Hmong New Year, these young musicians will perform traditional songs on the qeej, the music coming into harmony with the jangly rhythm of the coins dangling from their vests.

The qeej is significant to the Hmong community; it binds people to each other and to their culture. It’s also one of dozens of practices, places, events, groups, and people included in the Merced Cultural Asset Map, which was created last year by the Alliance for California Traditional Arts in collaboration with The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative. Our goal was to engage Mercedians in reflecting upon their own cultural assets (what we refer to as “cultural treasures”) and stimulate sharing and dialogues. Ultimately, we wanted to strengthen the relationships necessary to tackle some of the most critical community issues like reducing violence in neighborhoods or keeping kids in schools.

And these are real issues that need to be dealt with in Merced. But it was also important to us to show that Merced is more than just its issues. Merced is more than the daily newspaper and TV stories focusing on gang violence, unemployment, poverty, and conflict among its diverse communities.

To help us identify cultural treasures, we brought together a core group of eight local community members with Hmong, Mexican, Caucasian, and African-American backgrounds. This task force met every two weeks at the United Way offices in downtown Merced during the summer and fall of 2013. Since the gatherings began at 6 p.m., we thought it would be hospitable to have dinner for people. We knew food could provide a way into conversations about local culture and the different ways in which people practice and value traditions.

We ended up inviting well-respected cooks identified by the task force members to prepare meals for our meetings. It was a treat: We had meals from different parts of Mexico, Laos, and an unforgettable African-American soul food feast that included baked beans, collard greens, fried chicken, and banana pudding. The meals opened up a conversation about other cultural traditions, as well as deeper discussions about Merced’s cultural landscape. Once we had people talking, we found that our role as facilitators was to listen and create a space for others to talk to each other.

We asked members of our task force to collect surveys designed to identify cultural treasures from across south Merced County. They attended municipal events, went door-to-door in their neighborhoods, and interviewed people they believed were significant to their community.

After we compiled the more than 100 surveys, the group had the difficult task to choose only four cultural treasures to highlight in short films. In addition to the qeej, the list included the Mexican folk dance ensemble Grupo Folklórico Juan Colorado at Planada Elementary School, the highly admired soul songstress Cheryl Lockett, and the South Pacific Dance Company.

It was a privilege to follow up with these community treasures, visiting them for a conversation and to produce short film vignettes. Each visit showed me how highly invested these people are in the larger Merced community. For instance, the director of the South Pacific Dance Company, which specializes in Tahitian and Polynesian dances, brought Hawaiian culture to the Merced area in 1974 and developed a school and a well-known dance competition and festival entitled, Kiki Raina Tahiti Fête. Rebecca Ka’awela Manandic, endearingly known as “Auntie Becky,” has spent years training a diverse group of dancers of all cultural and social backgrounds at her studio in central Merced. During the holidays she organizes a series of performances in senior centers to teach her young students to recognize the value of elders and to encourage interaction between the generations.

We’re proud of the breadth of experiences captured by the Merced Cultural Asset Map. You can see that Merced is vibrant. It has theater shows; culturally deep rituals mediated by Hmong shamans; diverse food choices that include chia lemonade, seafood gumbo, and Oaxacan tamales; and important cultural organizations such as the Central Valley chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society.

The task force also dug deep into their communities to find artisans that do much of their work at home, such as Ye Her, a Hmong elder who does paj ntaub (“flower cloth”), which is a reverse applique technique that requires a high level of hand sewing skill to layer fabric that is cut and sewn using hiddens seams to form intricate patterns used on traditional clothing, wall hangings and other items. Teresa Ceja is also listed as a cultural treasure for her skills in knitting, cross-stitch, embroidery, and Mexican deshilado (open embroidery) that involves cutting threads and taking them out of a weave of cloth to create lace-like patterns within the material.

Once we identified and mapped these treasures, we wanted to share what we found so we organized an event in January at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center. The event awakened all of your senses. As soon as you entered the space, smells of flowers and food lured you in. The crochet work of Doris Caldwell invited inquiries, the performances of the Hmong dance group Ntxhais Ntxim Hlub (“Cute Little Girls”), and the Gospel singers Janisha McMillan and Todd Marion Jr., truly lifted spirits.

The best part was how the performers, cooks, and artisans engaged with each other and the older and younger generations interacted in such convivial manners. The dancers from Grupo Juan Colorado and Ntxhais Ntxim Hlub enthusiastically watched each other’s moves and together they cheered on praise dancer Jessica Daniels, who choreographed jazz and modern dance movements as homage to her spiritual belief.

In addition to the performances, we scheduled workshops in Polynesian dance, as well as storytelling and verbal practices in the Hmong and African-American communities. A Gospel class, led by one our own task force member Jerome Rasberry, ended up transforming into a lively cross-generational discussion of music, race, and cultural beliefs in Merced.

People lingered to talk long after the last workshop was over; there was a sense of warmth and togetherness, and people weren’t quite ready to leave. Loretta Spence, another task force member, articulated what so many of us were feeling: The project showed off Merced’s talents, and made people feel good about themselves and their community. Many asked about when this event would happen next and how they could contribute and participate.

It was also a reminder that we don’t take enough time, nor create the special kinds of spaces where we can learn about and appreciate each other.

The post Where You Can Find Hmong Shamans, Oaxacan Tamales, and the Blues appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.