 I would like to take the School of Public Affairs, the Department of Economics, and the Center for Economic Education for Presenting this year's 57th Animal Winter Institute. Let me introduce myself. My name is Mohamed Yusuf. I'm a senior major in economics that is offered through the School of Public Affairs at St. Cloud State University. Immigration. It's a topic. It's highly, you know, highly, it's very much debated. For example, such as the wall, we have asylum seekers and refugees coming to the southern borders. Even celebrities, such as maybe some of you guys know, rapper 21 Savage was recently arrested by IS. So it's really out there. We got a distinguished speaker. Kali Yang was born in Binving refugee camp in Thailand. She came at the young age to the United States and juggling two distinct cultures, one being the Hmong culture and the other being American culture, has made an impact on Kali. Kali is a great juggler because she managed well. She went on to Colton College where she earned her bachelor's degree and she moved on to Columbia University where she earned her master's. Kali came back to the state of Minnesota where she's currently a teacher and an author. She's going to give us a personal perspective in this journey that we were exploring in immigration. And I want, and it's my honor, and I want all of you to give a warm welcome to Kali Yang. Good morning. Can you all hear me? When I saw Muhammad towering over this microphone, I knew it would work well for me. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. I think that my perspective and this little bit over an hour with me will indirectly answer some of the questions that Professor Borjas posed with his talk. And then after I'm done and I'll build a Q&A into my talk, we'll just have a conversation. You can ask me whatever you want and I will be sure to answer in any way I want. That's always my deal. But I am a refugee and this conversation on immigration, particularly in Minnesota, must include the refugee. You know, Minnesota is home to more refugees per capita than any other state in the nation. We are home to the biggest concentration of Hmong, Somali, Tibetan, and I can go on and on for a bit. As a refugee child who came here at six and a half years old who knew only A, B, and C, standing before you today as a writer, working in that language that I had to learn entirely. You will hear that I still hesitate when I speak English. It is in the language of my birth. In Hmong, I'm safe in the shade on a sunny, sunny day. In English, there are rocks in my throat and I've to sculpt them into shape for a bigger world. Hmong is a tonal language. Every breath that I breathe into the world carries meaning. In English, I'm always breathless, so bear with me. As I struggle to be understood in this language, that is still so foreign on my tongue while it is my home on the page, the contradictions of this experience that we're talking about. My first book, The Late Homecomber, I started as a 22-year-old. I was a senior at Carleton College. My grandma, this old woman who had never been to school who did not know how to read or write, she'd always said that education was a garden. I cultivated it in America, and that one day we would reap the harvest together. I would graduate in May. I started dreaming about graduation day, how my grandma would finally leave the car behind and walk with me around the ball spot, how I could show her the little paths at Carleton. And they're so interesting because they were paved over deer paths, and so they curved in the ways that I thought would feel more natural to my grandma's feet. But over winter break, my grandma fell down in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. I went to her and I said, get up, grandma, get up. And she looked at me and she said, Midnight, I cannot get up again. My grandma who had promised me that she would never die. In Bambi Night Refugee Camp where I was born, where the Hmong people got food three days a week because Thailand was practicing a humane deterrence policy. They didn't want more Hmong refugees from America's secret war in Laos streaming into Thailand. And so we got food three days a week, and the number one cause of death was suicide. All of these adults killing themselves because they were all suffering from PTSD, because they fled from one country and they were held captive in the other. I would hear talk of home and I'd ask all the adults around me where home was. For my mom and my dad, it was an imagined future somewhere across the fire oceans. They used to tell me that they understood that the world was round and that if I had a really long needle and the earth was very small, if I poked all the way through from Thailand, I would end up somewhere in Minnesota where my life would take place. For my grandma, it was always a story from the other side of the raging Mekong River. And everybody told me that that wasn't home, that Bambi Night Refugee Camp that 400 acres with 40,000 of us, the place that I'd been born to, that that place wasn't home. So I grew up yearning for a home. Naturally, when I started writing my own book, the book of my grandmother's life, one of the big questions was where is home? My grandma told me that when she died, she would return to the people who loved her before me. Her mom and her dad, my grandfather, her most beautiful little girl. She said that while there's no mong land in the map of a bigger world, my grandma was gonna climb the mong mountain in her heart. She was gonna swing open the door to the house of her youth and everybody would be there and dinner would be ready. They would look up and they would say, why are you so late in coming home? My grandma said that it would be selfish of me to cry for her to stay. And so my first book, The Late Homecomber, is in many ways my crying for her leaving. Not crying for her to stay, but I'm crying for her leaving. It is my young attempt to figure out where home is. And one of the first questions that I posed, one of the first questions that I attempted to answer in the book is how refugees become. So I'm gonna read a little bit from that section. How many of you know who the mong are? Just a show of hands, so I have an idea. On May 20, 1979, my family found themselves wet and shivering along the banks of the Mekong River. My father in his underwear, my mother with my older sister dolly strapped to her chest and her long hair undone. And my grandmother with her shaman's tools clasp in her hands. The Thai air smelled different to them. Instead of moist jungle air, there was a scent, a smoke and people nearby. In the night they had seen the lights beckoning across the river. In the light of a rising sun, they saw the line of the trees that stood away from the muddy bank waving in the wind of a new day. They looked back across the expanse of the river and they felt they were safe. My father said that they should walk up river to look for the rest of the family. He led the way, shivering. The curve of my father's spine was a vulnerable descent of bone on a body that had long been deprived of food. The blades of his shoulders rose high in instinctive gesture to protect his body. My mother and my grandmother trailed behind him. Their wet clothes tripping drops of water onto the soil of a foreign land. My mother Kredo Dao in her arms carefully, her baby was alive. If my family had crossed the river two months later, they would have been massacred. Thailand was no longer taking Hmong refugees from Laos. There were too many coming in because of the continual influx of North Vietnamese soldiers to help the Pathet Lao kill the remaining Hmong. Jane Hamilton Merritt, a journalist from America, recorded the deaths of 200 Hmong people, and families of small children on the Mekong River on July 27, 1979. The group was on a sandbar gathering vines to weave a bridge to Thailand. They built fires and boiled water in old US Army canteens. The women took off their shirts to put over sticks to shelter their babies in the old women. They fed their hungry children. Many of them were little more than skeletons. The adult themselves didn't eat. They saved their lives for the children. Thai soldiers appeared on the Thai bank in jeeps with the machine gun bolted to the front hood. In two Thai patrol boats, the soldiers traveled to the island. The Thai soldiers slashed the vines that tried to connect the people to Thailand. The Thailand had had enough Hmong refugees. On August 2, 1979, Hamilton Merritt learned that a group of 30 to 40 Pathet Lao soldiers had landed on the river island and that the Hmong were massacred. My family was much more fortunate. As they walked along the bank of the Mekong River that May morning, the sun shining over their heads, slowly drying their clothes, they felt the relief of danger dissipating. They were weak from a journey that had taken four years, but in their bellies, alongside the hunger for food, they carried a yearning for the land on the other side of the river. The foundations of centuries of myth, of legend, the soil of so many Hmong dreams. They looked to the land of loss as they walked on the soil of Thailand. Their feet making small prints on the wet earth. They walked for nearly a half mile before they found the rest of the family hovering underneath the overhang of a bamboo robe. Each family had been swept to a different place on the river bank, but they had all walked looking for one another. There was a hungry wait in the air. The children were alive, although many of them had swallowed much water in the crossing. Uncle Ju, my father's second eldest brother and his family had been picked up by a Pathet Lao gunboat at the halfway point in the river. Uncle Ang had seen how the soldiers had grabbed little Nian, but grew tied together to a small float and dropped them into the boat. A soldier had held a gun to the little girls until Uncle Ju went swam to the boat, dragging the rest of his family with him. The boat had zoomed back to Laos. As Uncle Ang spoke, my grandmother started crying, great heaving sobs that made her legs unsteady. Grandma sank to the wet ground, holding her hands in fists up to her chest. There were few words of comfort. Grandma shook her head at the world around them, the men and the women, the children with hollowed eyes and called my grandfather's name. She said, do not let my child die. I have done all I can. It is your turn. Bring him back to me. We gave birth to him together. He is where I cannot go. Bring him across this wide river to this shore to me. You are his father. Bring him back to his mother. The group sat under the rustling bamboo leaves for a few hours in silence. Everybody's hearts were exhausted. The eyelids of the children were closing. They did not sleep, but they rested against each other very still. When the smaller ones began whimpering, the women said the children needed food. So the men got up saying there was little they could do sitting along the banks of the river. The family would walk into Thailand a little and see if there was food to be found. And later, when they could, they would find a way to help Uncle Ju's family escape. Uncle Ang had to lift my grandma off the ground. She leaned on him as they walked away from the expanse of the Mekong River and lost a land that they loved, the land holding their brother, the land holding the grave of their father. The Tatar group's six brothers no longer seven because Uncle Ju was gone and their wives and their children and their mother did not make it far into Thailand before they were spotted by farmers. Refugees have been streaming into Thailand for the past four years since the Americans had left and the Laotian government had started killing Hmong people. The village chief had been notified that a new group had entered into the country and he had sent word to the Thai soldiers, men with guns waited for the group at the end of a dirt road. The farmer stood in place to watch the shivering group make their way toward the men in uniform. A farmer on the road threw an old black t-shirt and a pair of Tatar shorts at my father. The shirt hit him on his arm. The shorts fell to the ground in front of him. My father picked up the clothes and did not know whether to say thank you or not to the silent man who looked at him with unblinking eyes. My mother stopped her slow walking and waited for my father to put on the shirt and shorts. She loved him very much in that moment. She wanted to protect him from the life around them but her baby held her back. I never thought I would see clothes thrown at my husband. She says looking at the floor as if all the years had not erased the memory. When he picked the clothes off the ground and tried to wipe the dirt away, I could not look. My mother could only wrap her arms more securely around her. Her long hair fell about her shoulders. There was nothing to tie it back with. The wind blew the long strands into her face. Her hair had dried since the crossing. She was a proud young woman. I wonder if she had hid behind the curtain of her hair and sought comfort in the small unmoving baby with the fluttering lids. It was not such a long walk but the farmers on the road stared at them and every step felt stiff and hard. Maybe it was an hour. Maybe it was less than that. They had no watches and they were too tired to count the ticking of time. Too embarrassed in their rags with their hunger and their children with bones jutting from thin shoulders. An expression on one man's face is the memory my mother and father both carry even 25 years after the fact. It was only a look but it said that we were not human. Too poor to walk on the earth. It was that in the image of that high man with his red and white turban wrapped around his head looking at them making their way into his country that my mother and father learned what it meant to be poor. To be without a home or clothing to hide in. When they reached the compound they noticed the wire fence as tall as two men standing on each other's shoulders. They were told to get out of the bus and enter the gates. My family hesitated before the entrance. They had escaped from one country and had not expected to be captives in the next. My father's feet stilled. A Thai soldier punched him and he fell to the ground. The man kicked him. My father got up as fast as he could not to hit the man back but because he did not want my mother and my grandmother to see him on the ground. My father looked at the man and he did nothing. He would tell me years later. My heart hurt more than my body. The flesh can take the blows. The heart suffers them. It was the first time I felt there would be no other place they puk out the village where I was born. The soldier who hit me was an older man. I was like a prisoner. I stood still and then I walked into the place they would keep me and I kept thinking. I was a man too. I had a wife and a child but it didn't matter because we had no home anymore. For my mother and father that was the moment they became refugees of war. I was born as a refugee, a stateless child. I did not belong to Thailand and I did not belong to Laos and it wouldn't be until I became an American citizen in order to travel back to Thailand that I would belong to any country at all. All of my life, like my grandmother, I've been searching for that long mountain in my heart and for me it's led me onto the pages. And I remember and the librarian remembers because I'm not too old. She said, there used to be a bookmobile that would come to the McDonough Housing Project to where a lot of the Hmong lives. The McDonough Housing Project had been built after World War II to house returning soldiers. We were soldiers from a different war, an unknown war in the late 80s when we came. I remember going to the playgrounds and standing there because these fast speeding cars would go by and all these people, a lot of them young men would open up their windows and they would throw open bottles at us. Not to hit us but just so that the bottles would shatter around us. And I used to pick up handfuls of broken glass and come home and my mom would ask me, what do you have? And I would tell her, mom, I have diamonds in a world that dreams of them. I thought they were diamonds. My mother would say, what do you want to do? And I told her that I would bury them in our front yard so that other kids could find them. And that's what I spent years doing. But in the hot summers there would be this bookmobile and even across the frigid winters and this bookmobile would come to the McDonough Housing Project. We didn't have a VCR so my older sister, Da, she would hold my hand, we'd climb up this hill, go to the bookmobile and we would ask for books. One day I asked the librarian for a book about my people, the Hmong. She looked and she found me a book with the Chinese and the Japanese and one about the Venomese. And then she looked at me, she leaned down and she said, I'm so sorry, there is no book about Hmong on these shelves. And she remembers me whispering underneath my breath. One day a little girl's gonna come in here. She's gonna find a book about the people who love her best. One day. I never thought that I would be that writer. I never thought that I would be here at the Winter Institute actually. I took a few economics courses that Carlton did not do well, people. Did not do well. But that's the beautiful thing about life. We end up in the places we never expected. In the words of my father, if the sky that he lived under can fall on him, if the earth that he walks on can throw him off, anything is possible. When the most intelligent men of this country, those who worked for the Center Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, when they suggested using the Hmong in the war in Vietnam, they never thought that there would be a Hmong writer like me emerging of all places right here in the heartland. But here I stand before you. The impossible happens. Every day I look in the mirror and I think about the two others who died so I could be here in that wretched war. And the genocide of its aftermath, I am reminded that impossible happens every day. And so maybe today, more than anything, I'm here to talk about the costs. And maybe I'm here to show you the benefits of what happens on the short run and the long run when we talk about refugees in a place like Minnesota, in a country like America. Now I'm gonna read a little bit from my second book. It's called The Song Poet. A writer doesn't just become in a language because he or she has a story to tell. We become because we want to push the parameters of meaning within that language. You want to make room, make space, build castles where there had only ever been huts. And so this book, The Song Poet, pushes the genre of the memoir. It is, instead of chapters, I have tracks. They're tracks of Song. He's a Song Poet in my tradition. It was my father's voice that took me onto the stage today. And so I'm gonna read from one of his songs. And it is a song that is incredibly appropriate to read here because my brother too, the one I'm writing about, was here at St. Cloud State University for a moment in time. He did not graduate, but he was here for a moment in time. And this is, so I'm going back. This is high school. This is Andover, Minnesota, the Anoka School Districts. We made headlines all over the country. Rolling Stones talked about the epidemics of suicide in the Anoka School Districts because they had a don't ask, don't tell policy. This is with LGBTQ youth. This is with students of color. And so Tzu was the only Hmong boy at Andover High School at the first. And he started as a ninth grader. By 12th grade, Tzu decided that he would drop out because if he didn't, he said he would die. This is the conversation that we had when he told my parents that he was gonna drop out. On a dark rainy night, our father called for a one more family meeting. He presented Tzu with two choices. Tzu could return to school or get a job and leave home. Our mother sat on the sofa beside our father far enough so that she didn't touch him. She held pieces of tissues in her hands and pushed them up to her face to cover her eyes as our father spoke. She contained her tears. She did not contain her mouth. She had listened and she had loved and the years had grown too long and the words she wanted to say to our father has stood inside and all we could do was watch as our mother fought our father for our brother, who he too was fighting for. Our mother said she would rather Tzu be safe at home than thrust into a world that would not welcome him. She said that our father could blame her for being too soft on Tzu if he wanted to, but she was not going to let Tzu alone take the responsibility for what had happened in Andover. She said our father could blame himself if he wanted to because a father has as much to carry as a son. She said what our father did at work was no different than what Tzu did at school. He was just pulling through and the only reason he didn't quit was because unlike Tzu he had children to feed. He was no more of a success in America than Tzu, his son. Did anyone give him automatums, tell him to leave? At first our father tried to speak over her saying that the meeting wasn't about him or their relationship, but Tzu. It was for Tzu, it was about Tzu, but our mother would not be quieted. She couldn't stop. She had her hands over her heart. She ripped the tissues in her hands into shreds, yet her voice did not crack. The words did not slur or slow down. And at last she said, I'm so tired of loving you both so much in America and seeing you fall into yourselves instead of standing up for the men you are. The more our mother spoke, the smaller our father became in front of her. The air he breathed in so he could be big for us leaked from his body with each statement that she made. It was Tzu who came to his rescue. Tzu raised his hand at our mother, a stop sign. He tried to speak but no words came out of his lips. He gestured toward Max. He didn't want to leave Max who adored him. Max was only four years old. Tzu looked at Max sitting on the stairwell. Max looked back at him. Our father said, I do not want you to be an example for your little brother Max on how to survive in this country as a long man. Perhaps our father thought his words would motivate Tzu. We watched them slice our brother apart. Max heard our father's words. He snapped his head in our father's direction. He had been sitting by the stairwell to block Tzu's exit. Should Tzu make the decision to leave? When Max heard our father's words, he got up. Max said, Tzu is my brother, he cannot leave me. Life without Tzu is no life at all. I would rather die than live in America without my brother by my side. Max locked his gaze with our father's. He tilted his chin up. Max walked to our father and he held on to his arm. Our father moved away from Max's hold. He stood up, he paced in front of Tzu. He couldn't keep his pacing even. He walked with a limp. The balls of his feet burned with each step. The flesh tender and abused by the long nights beside the tall machines at work. The stretches of standing and walking, carrying iron and steel. He walked a small stretch of the dim living room into the light of the dining area and back again. He said, this is what happens to feet when they stand and walk without rest the night through. He held out his red hands, the tight stretch of white lines, his lifeline and his heartline colliding in a sharp bee across his callous palms. He said, this is what happens to human flesh when it cuts into steel, it suffers. He said, I want you to have a life that is better than mine. I don't want you to become a machinist like me. I don't want you to live your life with men and boys far stupider than you, telling you that you don't belong here, that you are no good for this country, telling you to return to a country that you do not have. I want you to have a better life than me. I want you to be better than me. Zhu looked at our father. Zhu said, what if you're the best man I know how to be? Our father shook his head. He didn't want to accept Zhu's words. For the first time in his life, he heard the words of a son to his father. He knew what it was like to yearn for a father to raise a son and to burn to make him better than you. And Zhu had tried to keep him safe in his fantasies of fathers and sons, but Zhu could no longer save our father from himself. Our father said, you cannot be me and survive in this country. Zhu said, then I cannot survive in this country. Zhu was our first born American, the one we had all been looking forward to. You know, after I was born in Bambini refugee camp, my mother had six miscarriages after me. All little boys who fallen from the clouds tried to try at life with us, but we only got for three days a week. And so every time I looked at my mom, she would give me what was in her hand, what was in her mouth. She never had enough food in her body to sustain more life. When we came to America, my mom and I came with dreams that maybe my older sister and I would become educated. My father used to carry me to the tops of the tallest trees in Bambini refugee camp because we couldn't leave the camp. If women and girls left, oftentimes we saw them coming back, crawling on the ground, blood seeping in between their legs. If men and boys left and they came back, if they did at all with broken limbs, blood seeping into the earth. So my father used to take me to the very tops of the trees and my very best clothing, and used to have my mother's take pictures of us. And he would say, may I look out there, one day your feet are gonna walk on the horizon as your father has never seen. He would hold my tiny, tiny hands and my father would tell me, the size of your hand and your feet, these things are not determined, your life trajectory. My daughter is not a child of poverty, of war, and of despair. She is hope being born, the captain to a more beautiful future. When we talk about the future of this country, when we talk about immigration and refugee policies, we're talking very much about lives like mine. We're talking about the short run and the long run. I stand here before you as the most widely published Hmong American writer in the world. Come from Minnesota. A place that is not known for its diversity, that on most racial equity measures is really, really bad. We are like second worst in the nation. In terms of incarceration rates, in terms of standardized test scores and the achievement gap, ownership, how much people get paid. And yet somehow, Minnesota is right here, home to all these refugee populations. It will be home to the biggest mosque in North America. These are the contradictions. These are the realities that we're speaking about. Professor Barra has said this morning that the numbers, it's not about the numbers for him. It is about the vision of the country that we wanna build. When people introduce me as a Minnesota author, everybody outside of the state look toys. I'm not exactly what they expect. This is the land of Garrison Keeler. We have Louise Ertrick. They don't imagine somebody who's standing for eight. It looks like me. When they introduce me as an American author, whenever I leave America behind, do you know that people are even more shocked? The world doesn't expect an American writer that looks or sounds like me. Jean-Yalee Coupillard. But here today, I'm here to talk to you all about immigration, about refugees, about the short term and the long term. What has gained and what has lost. And I'm really proud to do so. So I'm gonna move away from this podium to that beautiful seat that my agent says I should have. Generally, under good weather conditions, I like to wear really high heels. And it's very hard to stand for long periods of time. But that's not the problem today. So I'm gonna take that seat and we'll let the Q and A begin. Again, you can ask me anything you want and I will answer it any way I want. I think this should be interesting, particularly for those of you interested in economics. You will see that the way I respond to it, the way I live and breathe economics is perhaps different from the books that you study. Thank you. It always takes a break first. My question is, your words and your books are very well written. Do you have a specific phrase or paragraph or just sort of any line from your books that you would say is the most impactful to you or says the most about you as a person or as a writer? Really good question. If you ask me on a different day or in a different hour, I'll have a different response for you. Can y'all hear me? But today will be this one. In the late home comer, I wrote about how I visited my grandma on her deathbed. My grandma's this old woman who when we first came to America, lived in California. My family lived in Minnesota. This is pre cell phone days, so we didn't have the money to make the long distance phone calls. I hated the subject, the verb and the noun, but I learned how to write in English so I could write her love letters in California. And I knew that my grandma would never be able to read them because she never been to school, but I thought if she could see them, if I press hard enough on the pages, she could feel my love burning through. Every letter was always the same. Hello, grandma, I'm here in Minnesota and you're not here with me. The kids here, they don't know that I have a grandma but I have you, I have you. What do you do with her every day now? To be honest with you, I still write those very same words in my journal whenever I miss my grandma. She's been gone now for nearly 15 years because it was her death that brought my journey into being a writer. No, but when my grandma was on her deathbed, I went to her and I cried. And I cried at demanding that she wake up, telling her that I was there, telling her that everything was gonna be okay, that I just wanted her to wake up. And my grandma raised her entire hand in my head, and she said, may night, grandma knows. Grandma knows. And I said, I love you, grandma. And she said, grandma knows, may night. And I wrote this in the late home comer, but it is true. In all the languages of the earth, in all the richness of words, there is no equivalent to my grandmother's one may night for me. In the end, you know, we could not do what was asked. I couldn't stop my tears. And my grandma could not continue talking. But I carry her one may night with me everywhere I go. People ask me all the time, where do you get your courage from? Just standing in front of people without numbers on your side. Where do you get the courage from without a speech in hand? That old woman. That old woman with a single tooth, who she wouldn't let any dentist in America take out so nobody could make her dentures. So her single tooth was really, really long, you know. She never said no to me when I offered her food, because she grew up as an orphan. She said that she never knew the feeling of being full. That there was a hunger always eating at her inside. And so no matter what I offer her, ice cube, Jolly Ranchers, bones, my grandma said yes. You know, my grandma who taught me when I was just a little kid, that if I send the wishes on the stars, sometimes they won't come true because the stars are simply too far. But if I send my wishes on the airplanes, it means that they are somewhere in the world waiting to be found, and that life will take me there. Do you answer your question? Tell us about the suicide rates. Are they declining over the years, or what's the status of that? In refugee camps across the world, suicide rates are high. In Banvinai refugee was particularly high because of the humane deterrence policy. Because all over the camp, you'd hear the sound, and there'd be these women crying, and they'd be crying from the hollow of their being. And they were always crying, why are you dying here in this place that does not want you? Get up, get up so that we can go home. And when people heard that, especially the adults and the elders who remembered a time when they could wander free, the only way out was simply to die. So all these people were dying. But the interesting thing about the rates, and I don't have the particular rate for you in Banvinai refugee camp, was that according to the documents of the time, there was more births in Banvinai refugee camp proportionately than any other place in the nation. A third of them all died in the war with the Americans. Another third was slaughtered on the genocide of its aftermath. Before the American planes flew out with those 2,000 officials, there was a declaration in Gosampathet Laos, the leading communist paper, and it said it is necessary to extirpate down to the root of the Hmong minority. And my family didn't know, so many Hmong people didn't know that that was what was in the papers, because so few of us could read or write. And so we waited for peace when these trucks came, and they loaded all the remaining men and boys, and they never returned. When the women and the girls started searching, my grandma said they found them fallen on the jungle floor, rotting away with the leaves. And so when they came from my dad, and my dad was only a boy then, but when they came looking for him and his brothers, they fled into the jungle. Uncle Sai, my uncle, becomes what they call the leader of the rebels, because he was the first one to run, leading thousands of families behind after him. So I don't have the particular numbers for you, but suicide is very common. Here in the States, among the youth surprisingly, and the elderly folk, relationships and homes in America are not so suited for intergenerational living. You know, there is no tax form in America that will allow you to document the reality of any intergenerational life. And so for a while there, the biggest suicide rate was among our elder. And now we're a community without many elders people, which is why I feel a great deal of urgency to do the kind of work I do, to live the kind of life I live. Thank you for your presentation. I was very well done. My name is Tony. And it is said that in the absence of redistribution, that growth is at the very least a necessary chemotherapy for the cancer of poverty. And yet in economics of today, we continue to promote growth as development. Does trickle down economics work? When I look at the lives around me, of my mom and my dad and my aunts and my uncles, no, doesn't. My mom and dad live in a house where they cannot make the mortgage or the rent without our help every month. You know, for many years, they worked in the factories of Minnesota. And if you work in the factories like my mom and dad's and you go deaf because the machines are so loud. And so they both suffer from hearing loss. My dad in the 2012, during the last economic depression, he lost his job. He had 15 of his fellow Monco workers who worked at night shift for the largest manufacturer of hard materials in the world. It's the International Corporation, you know, in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. They worked there on the night shift. During the day, every man was only asked to run one machine, but at night all the Monc men were asked to run four or five. And one of the older men had caught such a bad carpal tunnel that he couldn't. So one day he went to his younger man. He said, could you run one extra machine so I could run one less? And the younger man went to the supervisor to ask if that was okay. And the supervisor said, F you. And then my dad and the men, they said that could you talk to us, that we want to talk about safety. Because they knew that, yes, that day it was, you know, but the other day could be any one of them. And so they said, can we come in tomorrow early to talk about safety? The supervisor said, yeah. Then I say my father and the 14 men went into the office to try to talk about safety. And the supervisor said, I can find men like you anywhere. If you don't go back to your stations, then leave the company. And my dad said, he stopped for a moment. And the man said, think about your children. And that's what my father knew. That his supervisor didn't understand them at all. Why would men like them work in places like that if they were not thinking about their children? Yes, maybe they had taught us that they could survive, but they had not taught us what they were worth. And so they left the company. And the company said that they walked out. They didn't get unemployment. They lost all their benefits and health insurance. And that's the reality of trickle down economics, you know, for lives like ours in America. My mom lost her job at Wells Fargo because she was putting these, she's only my size. So she was putting these high files up. So she kept them lifting and lifting. She grew shoulder spurs. And after the shoulder surgery, it took her a long time to recover. So they sent her a letter saying, we gave your position to someone else. Trickle down economics. And no company now wants to hire my mom or my dad because they're hard of hearing because their hands don't work the same anymore. Good morning. My name is Kim and my family's been in Minnesota for only six generations, which is short. And I wanted to say you look like a Minnesotan and sound like a Minnesotan to me. So your testimony today, particularly about your brother and your father is a testimony to how hard it is to maybe be a man or enter manhood in particular, whether you are an immigrant or not, I think in the economy. And it's an important testimony. But you are a contrast to that. And what I'd love to hear from you is how your experience was very different from your brothers. You went to Carlton, one of the most elite institutions in our country for education. You are an extraordinary writer and speaker and thinker. So what was different and are you glad you're here? I'm gonna answer your question in two different ways. The first is that people oftentimes ask me if I feel the restrictions of my culture or the men in my life. And whenever my father was there at the talks of me, he would often ask, do they ask you what it's like to be my daughter? And I would say kind of. And my father would look at me, he would say these words and he looked at me very seriously and he said, you may not, you will do work that will go beyond your gender. It will go beyond your people. Your work is for a greater humanity. Do not be diminished by the presumptions of others. It takes such a man to raise a daughter like me. With that said, Sue from a, you know, and over high school, I also had three sisters who followed him there. Shwally was beautiful. She had long thick black hair. And so the kids somehow she fooled them all into thinking that she was the most fashionable senior in her graduating class. The girl had three pairs of jeans, but she fooled everybody into and over high school to vote her as the most fashionable girl in the school. She lived, people used to spit and throw things at and she's still doing therapy for that. Taylor escaped, she left and over high school to graduate from Central so she'd have a chance at something. Della and I, we grew up in the St. Paul Public School of Systems where they were the, and now if you didn't know, Hmong students are the biggest population in the St. Paul Public School of Systems. So I graduated from Harding High School. At high school over 51% of the people were Hmong. To go from that to Carleton, you can imagine the culture shock for me and also for the people at Carleton and also them for the people at Harding sending me to Carleton, right? Like for example, right now at Carleton there's one Hmong girl in the graduating or in the freshman class. I just visited yesterday, you know? The difference is that I think to my father and my brother's suffering, I knew that there was no room for failure. And so I fight the way my mother fights, the way my grandma fought. The interesting thing about Hmong history is this, most of the men and boys died in the war with the Americans. We are raised in families with matriarchs. My grandma raised seven boys to become men, two daughters to become women. Shortly after my father was born, my father was her youngest, my grandfather died. And so then my grandma, she was an herbalist, a medicine woman, a healer. She took pills so that she would not have her period ever again. And she never identified herself as either male or female in conversation. When you're raised by a woman like that and you see a man like your father whose poetry lives only within our homes, the homes within the walls of our home. My father's voice dies in the world that we enter. I still remember very clearly, being in third grade and my dad going to conferences with us, he got his shoes from the church basement so they were big on him. And on conference nights, he always dressed up so he wore the nice shoes, but they were too big. So every time my father walked, the shoes would slap the ground. And all my teachers, all these white women would say, you know what, my father made it to them. He would hide his hands because they were really rough and he didn't wanna embarrass me or doubt. And the teachers would say after wear them, my father didn't wanna shake their hands because they were women. I wish I had the courage then to say that, to speak to the truth of it. He didn't wanna shake their hands because he didn't wanna hurt their hands. That when human flesh cuts into metal, it suffers. But I was only a kid. And so I let those words slide by. Those words sliced Sue in a different way. They debilitated him in a different way. Now I have a 15 year old brother. You know, when my grandma died in 2003, mom and dad had a little, their youngest was my sister who was already 10. And grandma said to my dad, if you go on your knees when they carry my body by, something will happen, it will change your life. My father didn't go on his knees, but he slipped on ice because we live in Minnesota. When they took my grandma's body out of the funeral home and nine months later on Thanksgiving day, November 26th, 2003, Maxwell was born. Another little boy. A little boy who was six years old or four years old, five years old. We took him to preschool and over elementary school. And none of the kids wanted to talk to him because he said garage like a large, he had a thick accent because mom and dad both speak with thick accents. So all the kids, they wouldn't talk to him. And on the bus, he sit by himself. And this story gets to the heart of my response. Maxwell, on that very, that particular day, all the seats were full. And so he went and he saw a boy with beautiful blonde hair and blue eyes. And Max sat down beside the boy. The bus started moving. The boy turned to him and Max said his eyes turned dark. And he told Max to get up. There's a rule. You cannot get up on a moving bus. And so Max crouched all the way home. And that day, I gone into the Onoka public schools, Onoka to do diversity training all day. Eight hours of speaking. I went to the bus stop to get him. And my little brother comes and his legs are shaking because he can't barely get down the bus stop. And I said, Max, why are your legs shaking? He goes because I crouched all the way home. And then he shared the story with me. I cried more than Max well did. My heart suffered more. The next day, Max went back to school and I went to get him again. And I said, Max, how was it? He said to me, it's okay, Kelly, I sat by myself today, I found a seat. But you know what? And I said, what? He said, I left my book bag on the ground in case another little boy or little girl wants to sit by me. No one took that empty space by him all year long. The blows that our brothers and our fathers suffered hit us in equal measure. But the thing I know is this, I cannot go to the future without my brothers and my father by my side. Success is when we travel forward as a community. We can all run by ourselves. I am where I am today, not because I am extraordinary. I am where I am today because I stand on the shoulders of those men who are lifting me as high as possible. After this talk on my way home, my father would call and he would say, how did it go? And I would tell him how I think it went. And then he'll say, the sun will rise again tomorrow and you'll get another chance to do a better job. Sue, I wrote very intimately about in the song poet when I asked him, Sue, are you sure? I can, you know, do you feel okay with me writing this? He looked at me and he said, Galea, I am so tired of being judged for who I am not. If I will, if I am to be judged, I let the world judge me for who I am. And that's the reality of our lives. I want my brother and my father to be judged for who they are. Do you have mentors that you would point to that have really affected you non-family mentors that have helped you succeed and make your way? That's a great question. You know, a lot of teachers don't realize this, but to refugee and immigrant children, a lot of the times our first friends are our teachers. So I have Ms. Swanson who used to ask me a question every day just by the fact that there was some 30 of us in the room and I never answered her back. You know, she would ask me so many questions and in my head I came up with all kinds of answers for her. I remember one day I had on this huge t-shirt, blue t-shirt, and Ms. Swanson said, why are you wearing a blue shirt? And I didn't ask her, I didn't answer her, but in my head I was like, because I've never been to the ocean and I'm swimming in blue. And I was so proud of my response that I drew her a picture to illustrate and unfortunately I'm not a good illustrator. My response to her, to her question. But the teacher that really changed it for me was this woman called Mrs. Gallatin. Like a lot of other immigrant and refugee children in this country, we are educated by white women, predominantly. And Mrs. Gallatin was this Irish woman with a red face and all she did was laugh and yell. There was no in between. So when I went, her honors, her IB classroom, my older sister told me that I should be very quiet and that I should not wear a lot of eyeliner. Mrs. Gallatin did not like people with eyeliner. And so I didn't wear a lot of eyeliner. I sat in front because I didn't talk. I was a selective mute. And so I follow her with my eyes. But the thing about Ms. Gallatin was this, we lived in this house with rotting walls and so it was always moldy and I was always sick. And like a lot of children all over this country, I sniff, I sniff. You know, if you don't have Kleenex, you sniff it in, right? You don't blow it out. And so I sit there sniffing and Mrs. Gallatin would always say, do you need a Kleenex? And so I realized that she cared about me, not just my silence, not just the work I did for her on the page, but that she cared about me. One time Mrs. Gallatin read a paper that I wrote about Romeo and Juliet. The question was, is Romeo and Juliet a question of love or lust? You asked this to a ninth grader who's never been in anything and you know, there was no response. And so that night I wrote to her about the only love story I knew about my mom and dad. How they feel like they, when they were young, they made a choice. They chose each other and so now they wake up and they fight the same fight every single day just to end up in that same bed at night. And I wrote very aggressively that Romeo and Juliet, you know that we cannot know if their story about love and lust because they died too young. They didn't get to fight that battle through. Mrs. Gallatin stopped me in the hallway and she said, you're gonna be just fine in college. And I said, why? And she said, because you understand that the stuff in the book and the response to them isn't the stuff that you find in the books. It's the stuff of life. You'll be just fine. The best teachers push us for our highest possibilities. They don't set our limits. That's what Mrs. Gallatin did for me. So my best friends, my first friends were my teachers. The only people who came to our house who were not mong were Mormons, Church of Latter-day Saints people. The Mormons could really speak mong. And there was a wave of marriages between Mormon young men and mong young women, you know, in the housing projects. They come and they would talk about God and then they get married. I didn't know what was going on. So I was really scared of Mormons that they would come and marry me one day. So whenever we used to see the Mormons in the Church of Latter-day Saints, people coming, we locked the door and hide. That's what we did for years, you know. It was my teachers who I interacted with daily who shaped for me a gender America. An America that was far more patient than the America I saw around me. You know, at Kmart, people were impatient when my mom and dad tried to ask questions. People, you can see they do this or they hit the counter because my mom and dad have such thick accent. At school and particularly on the page, I always felt ahead forever. I could see the people on the other side. And so I could travel as far as I wanted in whatever way I wanted. In America, right, we're taught that the shortest distance between any two point is a what, straight line. People are my answer straight lines, not a straight line. And on the page, I could do that in a way that I couldn't do in math class, in economics, or in other subjects. And so it is those first teachers who taught me that you can capture the attention of an audience that hold it tight and take them on a journey to places they've never been and that in the process, they might even be thankful for that adventure. Anybody else? And if I didn't answer any of your questions, you should re-ask because everybody deserves more than one chance to get it right, okay? Yeah. Hello, my name is Chokes. You touched upon something that has always troubled me about so much emphasis on the individual in United States and that is the intergenerational families. And that's about the importance of community. In a lot of African countries, we have a saying that most people here know that it takes a village. I'm wondering if you've thought about in any way based on your background and the history you've lived here from a policy perspective, this is a country so much driven by laws. If you've thought about some kind of way to policy-wise to encourage intergenerational families because I think it addresses a lot of the issues, so many issues we have in this country. That's a wonderful question. I think about a lot of things. Some of them I say out loud and some of them I don't. Some of them I write of and some of them I don't. But my older sister, when you first came to America, like generations of immigrants and refugees, our mother and father said we needed doctors and lawyers to survive in America. Lawyers can protect the rights that we've never had enough of. Doctors can heal what is broken in our bodies. My older sister died because she won the North Unelementary School of Spelling B in third grade because without speaking English, she memorized most of the dictionary and she could take away, piece together a unit of the English language and take it apart again. And so then we decided that she would be an excellent lawyer in third grade and that's what she is now. And so she deals with policy in a way that I don't deal with. But she doesn't get to speak to the departments, the different organizations, the institutions that I do. And so I feel like through my work, I am influencing policy because I get to influence people. My father tells me that even if a person never picks up one of my books, whenever I have a microphone to amplify the strength of my weak voice, whenever I have a microphone, I get to write on the surface of the human being. So I don't know how many of the young people in this group will work in policy, but I hope that some of what I said will channel the way you think about it, the way you go about it. It's like that light. I feel like as a writer, I'm shining a light and in my case, I'm shining it toward the darker corners of the room. I'm not interested looking at looking where everybody is looking. And so in that way indirectly, I think I'm working on behalf of the very same policies that have built me. I'm a welfare kid. A lot of the staff, my father, my mother and lots of refugees who came here, like a lot of them, they came with very low skills. So they came to Minnesota because of the factory and they came here because of the great public school system, the school system that's raised me. We are far from the myth of the model minority. The longer the most linguistically isolated group in America, we're like the second poorest in the nation according to the census. So policies, we live and we die because of the policies that are in place. So always I'm thinking about them. Anybody else? Yes, I have a question. Thank you for being here today. Welcome to St. Cloud and sharing your story. One of the more profound experiences that I had was with a colleague of mine in which he shared his experience. We were at Mung Village and he talked about his flight into a refugee camp and what his family experienced. And I couldn't repeat it today because I would break down. But I spent a lot of time in St. Paul which now has more of a mature refugee community and running around Lake Veylin and seeing the families in the Mung Village. And live by Lake Veylin. And the neighborhood revitalization. For St. Cloud that is now in its infancy of welcoming a new refugee community. What would you have for a recommendation for us in St. Cloud to learn from dialogue and from those experiences that you shared with us? It's a really good question. My grandma was a healer again and a shaman, a medicine woman. She always said to me, every time you have the opportunity to help somebody, remember that you have the power to hurt them. I get asked a lot of times by like mutual assistance organizations about the question of trust. How do we get these different communities to trust us or the churches? How do we get them inside our doors? And I always think about it this way. In Minnesota we have this tendency to think that we are living, we're walking past each other. There's this understanding that we are in our own stories. We don't understand that we're all characters in the same book. In Minnesota people are nice, but they don't really want to interact with other people's stories beyond a given job responsibility or a certain role that they play. I think the real answer is this. Who are you? What kind of character do you want to be in somebody else's story? What part of their memories do you want to rest in to grow old in, to live on forever? That's how I think about it very personally and let that guide my interactions with others. As a teacher, oftentimes I'm in a position where I'm expected to teach, to disperse and share knowledge, but the reality is that knowledge changes. When I was a kid I was taught that matter could not be created or destroyed. And now I know that with massive amounts of energy we can create small bits of matter. Knowledge changes all the time. The fundamental thing that doesn't change about human relationships is who we are to each other and how we choose to be within another story. And so my question is really about me and about you. How do you, what kind of memories? My grandma used to say, may night, although you're young, one day you're gonna be an old woman and you're gonna sit by some window somewhere. Your teeth might be gone and all of your favorite foods, you won't be able to eat them anymore. She used to say, the men and the women who you loved, who loved you, they will be gone too. It will be your memories that you talk to. Go into the world and make the kind of memories that will be your friend. That's how I think about it. And I think of every person who's in a position to help thinks about it that way. We don't have to worry so much about all the other things. Those one-on-one experiences will build the people you're looking to, you're hoping will come forth to represent, to stand strong as a fabric of this community. I think that in St. Paul you have models of organizations that have done it really well and the ones that haven't. Many of the ones that haven't are long gone. Relics of another time. The St. Paul Public Schools is struggling and it's struggling because it is not yet understand that its biggest population are Hmong students. So they have a handful of Hmong teachers, one or two Hmong nurses, a few counselors and nothing in a curriculum to represent the people they're teaching. And the stories that they will live and the world that they will bring on. It is that understanding, I think, that shapes who we are to each other on a very intimate level and then a very entirely communal level. That's how I think about it. If you have the power to help, you have the ability to hurt. If I'm gonna be a character in your story, what kind of character do I wanna be? How should this memory rest for you and me when the day is done? That's how I operate. In your time in Minnesota and generally speaking, what assumptions have you found we Minnesotans have made about you? It's a really good question. First one, people always think that we're more mature than we are. You know, like my little brother who's 15, when people talk, particularly when white folk talk about him, they kind of refer to him as a young man on the very same level that when they're talking about a white kid, they'll say the kid. And so they always presume that we're older than we are. You know, just cause I was quiet, people thought I was really mature. I had a whole lot of growing up to do. There are all of those conversations about my maturity. You know? I think that the people assume often that who I am is somehow against the culture that raised me up. And the reality is that because for a long time I was an unmarried woman traveling across the country speaking and teaching and people would say, how does your people feel about you? I get that question often and a lot. And the reality simply is they're really proud of me. Every time there's an elder in the room, they come up and they say, we're so happy that you're finally telling our story. You found the words that we've been waiting for. I've never had one older person come up to me and say, why are you doing that? Why is that not appropriate? That's inappropriate. And then there's just this really simple reality. So much of what I do is history in the making because I come from a community that is new to what is Britain. Because when the Minnesota Book Awards gave me three Minnesota Book Awards, right? They not only awarded the first Hmong person a book award, but then they gave two book awards to one person in the same year, which has never happened in Minnesota history, the history of the book award. When the song court becomes a finalist of the Daines Literary Peace Prize or the National Book Critics Circle Award or the Chautauqua Prize, for the first time there is a Hmong story on the docket, written by a Hmong person. The fact that we are living history is something that a lot of people don't understand. Oftentimes you get cast into the traditional, not the progressive. How will we have survived then without a country on our own? You know, we're the ethnic minority, we don't have a country. We've always lived in the mix of stronger majority cultures and yet a language persists, a culture exists. You know, these are just the simple facts of life. I think these are just a few, and I can go on and on. I'm an interracial marriage. I'm married to like a bald and white guy with glasses and facial hair. You find them all over Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, you know. And whenever people find that out, a lot of my audience are curious. They wanna know how it is like, how my family received him. I never get asked how his family received me. And he's in the room right now, but I think my family was much more open and easy because there's so many of us and his family was so much smaller and tighter. It was so much harder for me because there was so much about me that they didn't understand. And yet to survive in America, we understood so many more of the components of who Aaron is and where he comes from. So there are all of these presumptions that come into play, personal, intimate and then professional levels. The number one response I get, compliment I get from white folk after my talk is, that wasn't what I expected. I didn't expect your story to connect so intimately with my own relationship with my grandmother or my mother or my father. And so the fact that I continue to be a continual surprise, I think speak to some of the presumptions and assumptions that people make. Anybody else? Thank you for coming today. The first time I heard you speak was at an ESL conference. And when I read the late home comer, I could not put it down. And when I finished, I went out and bought two more copies and gave them away so that others could read your grandmother's story so they could learn. Maybe learn how to be more relatable. So as another white lady trying to be a teacher and specifically an ESL teacher, can you give us your thoughts and ideas about how I can be more relatable to our newcomers? You know, my father has all kinds of ideas. Like instead of, he built a watering system for my mom's garden where he put a pressurized hose and then he poked holes into the gardening hose. That was a disaster. One night he made a candle, a candle, like the old way he said. So he made himself a candle and he went to bed and he almost died. Because the candle smoked over the whole room. And so he has all these ideas. And one year my father had this idea because we had to cut down the tall trees in our backyard and over. And over has all these rules about what you can and cannot do. For example, you can only water your lawn at certain times. But anyway, my father, we didn't have the money to pay the professionals. So my father had this idea that he was gonna carry two ladders. He was gonna carry one ladder on his back, put one up against the tree, right? Climb up that ladder, untie the one from his back, tie it to the tree. Climb up that ladder and cut down the tree limbs one at a time. And he's like an older middle age, you know, heavier man. And so I'm like, daddy, I think that might be legal. And my father said, if you're worried about legalities, you go stand by the side of the road and tell me when the cops are coming. And my brother-in-law said to my father, dad, let me go because when I fall, my bones will heal faster. And my father says, if you intend to fall, then you're not going up. So we're all standing around watching. I'm by the side of the road. And my dad, you know, sets up a ladder against the tree, climbs it, undoes the one from his back, ties it on, climbs up. And he successfully cuts down the tree limb one at a time. When he's done, I run to him and I'm kind of impressed. So I said, hi, dad, that's amazing. And my father looks at me with this look of great disappointment. And he says to me, may I, if your teachers had learned how to ask you, is there another way of thinking about this? Is there another way of doing it? If you had learned how to ask your teachers, is there another way of going about this? Then you would have exploded the whole classroom and brought the world back in. All over Southeast Asia, people cut down trees this way. You can't do it because you didn't learn how to do those knots. But I think that is the challenge with the American education system. There's not a great deal of flexibility. We generally think that one way of doing something is the right way. We have a right way and a wrong way to go about it. And from a teaching perspective, you know, like from a young age, I remember, I knew how to use a long knife. Long knives are huge and they're sharp. They look like swords. But then we learned about safety and we learned about how parents, you know, if you use long knives, then maybe child services will come in and take you away. And so then I couldn't tell anyone that I knew how to use a knife. And so I pretended to use, I started out in the American terms using a bread knife on everything, right? All the way through into home economics when I was properly taught the way to do it. That's the thing. American classrooms don't have room and don't make room for all these kind of knowledges and ways of going about something. And that oftentimes silences students, particularly those from a different language or a different culture. You know, because even the way, even the way we express love is different. In my own, the gesture of love is to sweep somebody's hair away. So when my father expresses that he loves me, it hurts a lot because his hands are really rough and it tangles with my hair. And so every time I have to make sure that my face doesn't show that I'm in pain because he might stop, you know? When you really love somebody, you sniff them in. You don't kiss them. Kissing is a rubbing of surfaces, right? When you sniff them and you take their scent inside of you. And so all of these different ways of doing gives me a greater diversity in options on and off the page in life. And I think the best teachers, particularly in the ELESL classroom, who are working with those students is to make as many windows and doors into those walls as possible to allow and to set up your students to contribute. Because that's the thing. Students fail when they feel they have nothing worthy to contribute. You know, for me, when a student walks into a classroom, I'm very aware, if I don't have anything to learn from that student, I am not equipped to teach him or her, or them. Not equipped. And so those are the, those are, I think, the missed opportunities of my life. Same with stories. You know, when we learn about the Greek gods, if somebody had asked me about the great Shaman Shigyi, you know, all, all, if I ought to do is think back. Every single classroom, what classroom really demanded that I had everything, that I could give everything I had to give, that it was okay and that there was room and space for it to be useful for others? Very, very few. I can count on my hand. Is that useful? Yeah. One more question. Thank you. That was extremely nice. Your story is very unique. You have a refugee background, but as you can tell, people are, there are immigrants from other countries too. Other background too. What message do you have for them? Do you think, can you suggest something? Like I have my own struggle. I have lived here for how many years now? About 20 years. I still have an accent. My kids speak native English. I have my own struggle you can imagine. If you could advise me or people in my shoes, I will be grateful. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I've come to believe that our accents are part of our stories too. You know, I've never had trouble understanding my students or they tell me there are many chickens. I know exactly what they mean. Do they need to ask? Probably for an A, but not in my classes. We don't make room for each other's accents very often in the life in America, particularly here in Minnesota. Well, the interesting thing is that I went, I met a linguist actually at, I forget the university now, but I met a linguist who was like the foremost expert on the Hmong language, and she says you have an accent. And I said, isn't it a Hmong accent? And she said, no, it's a Minnesotan accent, you know? Here in Minnesota, I only hear the Hmong underlining my words. But the moment I am actually talking to linguists, they all say you're from the Midwest. You're from Minnesota. You know, accents are a part of our stories. And I'm at this point in my life now where I try to wear mine as proudly as possible. Because my daughter, who is only five, says this, mommy, when you're really old and you die at your funeral, I'm gonna remember the way you say certain words. And I say, you are? And she goes, yeah. Because daddy says it different. Mimi and Poppy say it different. Your parents don't speak any English, but the way you say that word in English is different. I'm gonna remember that about you. And I'm like, of all the things she can remember about me, that is a good thing, you know? And so, I tell my students, sometimes you live a life with an accent, and those accents will find their way to the page. The key, the art, is in making the accent a part of your story, drawing other people's attention, so they don't see it as a deficit. So they see it as a flavor, a scent that exists there to enrich, to empower. That's where the art lies. So I like your accent. Thank you all for having me, thank you. Hi guys, I would like to thank Kalia Yang for, again, for her personal journey and sharing on her personal journey. It's time for a break. It's a, I think about a 10 minutes break. Hopefully you guys can be back and have your phones turned off next time. So thank you again, guys. See you in 10 minutes.