She remembers feeling scared and anxious during her first few years in public school. She said she wants to help those students feel like they have a home in Appleton, too.

Vang can relate to the need for support and the challenges the Afghan refugee students could face. She also had spent a bulk of her childhood in a refugee camp, something few of her classmates could identify with. She didn't speak the same language, eat the same foods or wear the same clothes as the other students at her school. In his two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, her brother and his family slept in one room, she and her mother shared the other and her other three brothers slept in the living room.Īs a teenager, the first few years were challenging. One of her older brothers invited Vang to stay with his family of seven in the city, despite the cramped quarters. Vang, the youngest daughter of seven kids, suddenly found herself calling Appleton home. It was the summer of 1989 and she couldn’t believe how green the grass was or how nicely the streets were paved.Ĭompared to the refugee camps in Thailand she had lived in for the previous six years, these seemingly everyday signs of life and order seemed shockingly out of place to her. The book has been criticized for excessive focus on Hmong in Minnesota (the focus of Vang’s first book) and in the upper Midwest to the exclusion of some other areas of Hmong resettlement such as Arkansas.APPLETON - Chia Vang was 15 years old when she moved to Appleton. The book has been recognized for documenting the role of Hmong Christianity in the United States, in contrast to previous studies that focused on religion as a site of difference between non-Christian Hmong and a majority-Christian population in the United States. Credit also goes to community leaders among the Hmong who used their loyalty to Americans and their opposition to communism during the Laotian Civil War to build social and political capital for their people. It argues that the timing of the Hmong migration, coming after the societal shifts of the Civil Rights Era, gave Hmong people greater opportunity for social, economic, and cultural success in the United States than many waves of immigrants before them. It focuses on people who entered the United States as “refugees” rather than as “immigrants”. Described as “both ethnography and an insider’s account”, the book’s methods include “archival research, oral history interviews, and observations of community gatherings.” The book describes the migration of 130,000 Hmong from Southeast Asia to the United States following the Vietnam War, and the evolution of Hmong communities in the United States, starting with early networks based on kinship ties, and evolving into formal organizations and churches.

Vang is best known for her book 2010 Hmong America: reconstructing community in diaspora. The program was developed in response to growing demands from Asian-American students calling for coursework that reflected their life experiences the Hmong were the largest Asian ethnic group on campus, representing 2% of the student body. There, she established an interdisciplinary Hmong Diaspora Studies program, of which she is the director.

She began teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2006 where she became the first Hmong tenure-track faculty member. She received a bachelor’s degree from Gustavus Adolphus College (1994), a master’s degree (1996) and Ph.D. As a child, she and her siblings spent summers harvesting vegetables and selling crops alongside her parents.

Her parents were farmers, both in Laos and in Minnesota. She was displaced by the Vietnam War and resettled in Saint Paul, Minnesota as a child. According to Astrologers, Chia Youyee Vang's zodiac sign is Gemini. Chia Youyee Vang is a famous Professor, who was born on Jin Laos.

May tchia vang