Minnesota Science
Vol. 48, No. 1
Understanding the Hmong Will Help Helpers Help Them
by Larry Etkin
Try moving to, say, Laos. Bring along parents and young children. Try to earn a living and adapt to local customs. And try to find people able to help you. That's the situation, in reverse, for extended Hmong families moving into large U.S. cities.
Minnesota is a center for Hmong population in the U.S. Many professionals and service agencies struggle to provide Hmong with needed and appropriate help, but few people understand the Hmong. That may, however, change a bit through research by family resource management specialist Sharon Danes, and her former graduate students Kathleen O'Donnell and Doaungkamol Sakulnamarka.
Educators, service providers, doctors and other professionals who work directly with middle generation Hmong are a group that Danes says needs help understanding "the dynamics of the Hmong couples, and what their concerns are in everyday life, what pieces they have maintained from their own culture and what they have begun to change."
"You have the elders who often for language reasons aren't out beyond the Hmong culture much, and you have the children who may or may not have been born in the U.S., but who are very comfortable here. And so you have this clash of cultures, and the middle generation adult or parent gets caught in the middle, responsible for supporting both generations."
Cultural differences are particularly apparent with health care, Danes says. "In the U.S. most people are going to respond to 'How do you feel?' with their physical state of health. Hmong look at a combination of physical health, mental health and spiritual health. Our culture generally does not even recognize spiritual health. And so we asked whether Hmong people go to a western medical doctor or to a shaman, or to both. Some still do go to both."
Hmong even define sick differently. "In the Hmong culture, you are not sick unless you cannot perform your everyday responsibilities," says Danes. "You have to be practically on your death bed before you really say you're sick."
Danes' material focuses on how daily life decisions, such as where to go for medical help, are made by the Hmong. Not all are made only by the individual. The spouse, extended family members, and even clan leaders can be involved in resolving some family conflicts or issues.
"The decision making part, who's involved in certain discussions, that can be very telling if you're trying to get something done in that community, in terms of how to go about it," she says. "It would be an absolute must to go to the clan leaders when people have said their clan leaders are very involved in that particular decision," she says.
Understanding these Hmong social dynamics can be very useful to service agencies. Ramsey County extension educator Janice Rasmussen says, "It should help us work more appropriately, and a lot more effectively, if we understand where they are coming from and how they are dealing with the old and the new, and with sorting the differences out."
Results of this research are in a new publication of the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station. Middle Generation Hmong Couples and Daily Life Concerns is available for $1.50 (plus tax) from the MES Distribution Center, 20 Coffey Hall. 1420 Eckles Ave., St. Paul, MN 551086064. Ask for item number MR?6202.
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[SIDEBAR]
Home Front: Who Helps Whom?
"A piece that might be particularly interesting to community workers relates to the strong gender roles you hear about as having existed in Laos," Danes says. Her study asked what kind of help middle generation Hmong received from organizations, from within the Hmong community, and from each other within a marriage.
"Do men help women alone, or do women help men alone, or is it only in groups? We found that a lot of things happen in mixed genders when they help each other," Danes says. "There are also certain indications in the data that reflect some of the traditional gender roles that you hear about the culture. But at least with the indications we have here, it's not as strong as you sometimes hear, as others talk about the Hmong.
"Of course, what goes on in the confines of a home maybe different from what goes on or is reported in the public arena. And, what most of us in the U.S. culture would be viewing is what is portrayed in public."
Which isn't too different from the U.S. mainstream. "It's not something people think about on an everyday basis," Danes points outs. "What goes on in the household even in our own culture, in terms of the dynamics of decision making or gender roles and what we portray in the public arena may be different in many ways."
PHOTO CUTLINE: Middle generation Hmong are sandwiched between parents who need
help dealing with English and the western culture, and their children for whom
traditional Hmong culture may be alien.