The Mong Oral Tradition

A people whose language had no widely used written form carried its history in speech, and Yer J. Thao asks what that means once the elders who held it are living in a country that recognizes only writing as record. The book follows Mong oral tradition through the rupture of 1975 and resettlement, arguing that the loss of oral transmission is not a soft cultural cost but the loss of the archive itself. Note the spelling: Thao writes Mong, reflecting the Green Mong convention, and that choice is part of the argument. It belongs beside the folktale collections here, which preserve the stories but not the practice of telling them. For scholars of education and oral history, and for readers wondering what exactly is at stake when a grandparent stops speaking.