Hmong Means Free

One of the foundational books in Hmong American studies, and still among the best places to hear Hmong people account for their own lives at length. Sucheng Chan built it from oral histories with three generations — people who farmed in Laos, fought or fled the Secret War, waited in Thai camps, and then started again in California — and she lets the testimony run long rather than cutting it into quotations that prove her points. Her own long introduction supplies the history a reader needs to follow it. What makes it durable is the range within it: the grandparents and the teenagers do not agree about what was lost, and Chan does not resolve that for them. Read it after The Latehomecomer if you want the scholarship behind the memoir. For students, teachers, and anyone who wants the diaspora in the words of the people who made it.