Craft in America

Growing up, I've always asked myself the question of what is it mean to be Hmong you know? and it wasn't until a few years ago that I learned about that or the idea of what it meant to be Hmong when I was out in mom's garden. I'm out in mom's garden with her and she has this huge gardens. All these beautiful produce, there's vegetables everywhere, but there's this weird section of the garden where everything is overgrown and it's dying. I remember I asked mom, I said, "Mom, why aren't we harvesting that over there?" "...Like, why are those look, like why do all that produce, it looks like it's just dying?" And she said, "Honey, that area we purposely overgrow it with all the produce and let it die so we can gather the seeds for the next years, you know, for the next harvest, for the next, for next year. And I realized that that's what it really means to be Hmong. That one generation will have to sacrifice part of themselves so that so the next generation gets to grow. When you realize that somebody has given up their life so that you can have life, it changes the way you talk to people. It changes the way you care about people and for me it changed the way I cook.