By Gregg Aamot
The Associated Press
Yer Xiong lives a quiet life with her eight bilingual children in her tiny clapboard house in St. Paul, Minn., where posters of Laotian cities and Hmong newspapers are a link to the past.
Her respect for tradition is deep, but it has its limits. When Xiong told her ex-husband he wasn’t welcome to live a dual life with her family and his new wife and child, she was rejecting a practice with deep roots in her culture.
“When he wanted to come back, she said no,” said Xiong’s daughter, 17-year-old Pa Houa Yang. Listening to her mother and then interpreting, she said: “If he really loved her and respected her, he would not marry another woman and would not want to be away from her.”
Xiong and Yang, with some trepidation, agreed to speak out about what they and many Hmong American women consider a lingering and hurtful prevalence of polygamy in their communities.
“It goes on,” said Yang, a high school senior who was born in Thailand and moved with her family to the United States about a decade ago. “My friends at school, we talk about it. We’re against it.”
No one has been able to put a finger on the number of people involved in polygamous families in Minnesota. The state has about 42,000 Hmong, including more than 24,000 in St. Paul, the largest Hmong population of any American city. The Hmong aided the CIA in Laos during the Vietnam war and came to the United States as refugees.
Blong Xiong, a social sciences teacher at the University of Minnesota, came up with a rough figure after interviewing about three dozen families for his doctoral dissertation on Hmong American family life.
Based on his understanding of clans and his discussions with those families, Xiong estimates between 270 and 450 men are practicing polygamy in Minnesota, each with an average of two wives and 14 children. That would mean that as many as 7,600 men, women and children are living in polygamous families.
While those figures are a best guess, Xiong, who is Hmong American, was surprised by what he learned and plans more research. “My interest is in finding out if these relationships are still formalized, or if they’re informal — like having a mistress, which would still have an effect on children,” he said.
Some leaders in the Hmong American community, frustrated by polygamy’s staying power, want a broader public discussion of the practice, even though they fear it could lead to unfair characterizations of traditional Hmong culture. Besides being illegal — bigamy is a felony in Minnesota, and grounds for denial of U.S. citizenship — polygamy leads to depression and other problems for women and children, they argue.
While polygamy remains secretive, it has been getting an airing in some Hmong-based publications.
In March, an Appleton, Wis.-based magazine called FutureHmong published an article that criticized polygamy. The editor, Blong Yang, said he received hundreds of responses, mostly from Hmong men who defended the practice.
One reader, a 24-year-old man who identified himself as Song, wrote: “When you make polygamy illegal, you take away people’s rights ... People who choose a polygamist lifestyle should not be ashamed, it is your right.”
Polygamy exists as part of a quiet Hmong subculture that’s dominated by patriarchy and traditional values, Yang said. It’s not unusual for Hmong girls to be pushed into marriage in their early teens, or for women to seek men whom they know are already married.
But polygamy is also done for practical reasons — for economic security for women, many of whom are older and can’t speak English; and to make sure children grow up with both parents. Part of that stems from the Hmong experience in Laos, where plural marriage offered support for women and children in tough times, such as war, said Blong Xiong, who lived in Laos for 13 years when he was a boy.
A St. Paul man named Chong welcomed a reporter into his house to talk about the two families he lives with in the same East Side neighborhood. Chong, who married his two wives in Laos before they fled to the United States 14 years ago, moves back and forth between the families. He has 15 children, including a son who he said disappeared in Laos.
Wearing a white T-shirt with “America” printed across the front, Chong — whose last name is being withheld to shield him from possible prosecution — spoke through an interpreter in his tiny stucco home. He said: “People don’t understand the benefits. If you went to a Hmong funeral, you would see big families, and what you would see is a lot of support. I want to have a big family.”
His wife quietly folded laundry while Chong talked. Asked about being one of two wives, she said she often wished that she was Chong’s only wife, but agreed to stay married when he took a second wife.
“Yes, I do feel sad sometimes,” she said through an interpreter. “I would have preferred to be the only one, but I let him do it, because he would be like an angry child not getting his way.”
Yang, the high school senior, plans to attend college next year. Meanwhile, she said she knows some Hmong American girls who are already married and worried about their husbands taking another wife.
Curled up in a chair at her house, speaking over the din of four younger siblings, she said she’s determined to avoid that fate. Her mother, Yer Xiong, who has no formal education, wants Yang to put off marriage until she’s finished college.
“I’ve learned from what happened to my parents,” she said, “and it will help me build a strong family in the future.”
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