Hmong American Senator Mee Moua Dishes on ‘Gran Torino’

Nichibeutimes - Senator Moua from Minnesota was the first Hmong American elected to public office in the United States. She was recently interviewed through an Asian American empowerment forum VisualizAsian.com with Gil Asakawa and Erin Yoshimura and had a few thoughts on Clint Eastwood’s film “Gran Torino.”

It’s the first Hollywood movie to really feature the Hmong people. Clint Eastwood plays an embittered Vietnam vet Walt Kowalski who is dealing with his own demons and a changing neighborhood. The film’s name comes from a scene where Thao Vang, a young neighbor is forced by Hmong gang members to try and steal Kowalski’s prized 1972 Gran Torino. His relationship to this teen and his Hmong family is at the heart of the film.

“I thought the history lessons and dialogue between a young women and the main character were really great. The exchanges were pretty realistic I thought the directors did a really good job of researching the history and bringing it out in the dialogue,” shared Moua. “I thought the cultural themes in the movie could have done a better job… For example, Hmong Americans don’t bring food to someone’s front porch and leave it there as an offering. We just don’t do that…in fact in our culture you make offerings like that to ancestors at their gravesite. We don’t bring offerings to peoples doorsteps. I thought that was odd.”

As for some criticism that the film casts a negative light on Hmong Americans by showing Hmong on Hmong violence. “Sometimes a lot of these pretty harsh crimes are perpetrated in within your own ethnic community. Recently there have been seven homicides in the city of St. Paul, three of these homicides I believe were the victims were Hmong American. Two of these I believe it was Hmong on Hmong. I had a conversation with the police chief in St. Paul and I believe the other four were black on black. So while my heart is a little bit nervous about that portrayal, that is a reality in some of the communities. Not necessarily just unique to the Hmong community but I think that is the reality that other ethnic communities can really identify with — the community person victimizing their own people.”

Senator Moua even shared that when film producers were scouting out locations that she pitched St. Paul as a location since the original script was set in Minnesota. “One of the suggestions I made to them is if they are going to be showing these things about Hmong on Hmong crime, they ought to shoot here and have one of my lawn signs in the front yard of a Hmong American family and I should have a cameo showing me door knocking at one of the homes so that we can have a competing, alternative image of Hmong Americans. They didn’t really buy that,” laughed Moua.

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Mee Moua also recently appeared on VisualizAsian for an interview to speak about her role as Senator to the general community and as a representative of Asian American too.

Some more on Mee Moua

Born in Laos, Moua came to America with her parents when she was nine, part of the diaspora that uprooted Hmong from the Laotian highlands following the United States’ departure from Indochina in the mid-1970s and scattered them around the world. Moua’s family spent three years in a Thai refugee camp before eventually settling in St. Paul, which would soon be home to the largest single concentration of Hmong refugees in America. (The 2000 census counted 43,000 Hmong in Minnesota, most of them in St. Paul and the northern suburbs. Unofficial estimates have placed the current number as high as 70,000.) Intelligent and driven, she became the first member of her family to speak English fluently, excelled in school, and, initially with a career in medicine in mind, earned a scholarship to Brown University in Rhode Island, where she graduated in 1992. She went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Texas and a juris doctorate from the University of Minnesota’s law school. Later, as a young lawyer with Leonard, Street and Deinard in the Twin Cities, she worked on the successful St. Paul school board campaign of an uncle, Neal Thao, and became familiar with the legislative sausage grinder as a lobbyist for Hmong–owned businesses. In 1998, she married Yee Chang, a St. Olaf grad and businessman, and with Chang bought a house on the East Side and started a family. They have three children.

“If I wanted to do something,” Moua says, “I’ve never felt I had to hesitate because of cultural constraints. Plus, it always served my family’s—and my community’s—purpose for me to be assertive and aspirational. In each extended Hmong family, there are one or two people who serve as the ultimate resource. I may be a lawyer, but I’ve helped people muddle through medical and financial problems, providing advice and counsel and helping them think through their issues.” That has required maturity, judgment, and the development of interpersonal skills that, she says, “have proved very helpful professionally.” In Moua’s case, “professionally” means politically. The attributes she needed to help her kin adjust to American life have contributed to her growth as a resourceful policymaker and campaigner.

More on Mee Moua in the Age of Obama