Like thousands of Hmong people at the end of the Vietnam War, Vang’s family fled to a refugee camp in Thailand to avoid persecution from the communist government in Laos. She was born at the camp and lived there for the first two years of her life, while the family waited to be admitted into the United States on a special visa.
Once they arrived in Wisconsin, things weren’t easy for her. They seldom are for immigrant children. She remembers wanting to fit in badly. She was bullied and didn’t have many friends. To escape, she turned to computers and video games.
In high school, she took every computer class possible (at the time, many were simply teaching children to type). “I was always fascinated,” she recalls, so she asked a computer teacher how she would be able to make games or work with computers.
“She just looked at me and shot my dreams down,” telling her there was no way she would be able to do that. Vang remembers being overwhelmed with the “feeling of embarrassment, the feeling of not [being] valued. It really hurt my pride and then I just thought, ‘well, she must be right because she’s an authority figure and I respect her.'”
Following traditions from what she calls “the old country,” Vang married at 16 and had a son at 17. She didn’t go to college even though her parents wanted her to because she was expected to put her family first.
But don’t mistake this for a tragic part of Vang’s story. On the contrary, becoming a mother is what brought her back to her culture. Whereas she’d spent her childhood wishing she was like everyone else, “being a mom changed me into figuring out who I was and my place in the world,” she claims. “I wanted my child to know about where he came from and who he is.”
It was in her twenties that she had the “courage to just embrace who I am, love myself, love my culture, love that it’s OK to be different and just be happy with what I have to bring to the table.”