This is the opening speech of Yuepheng Xiong. I first met him at a conference and heard this speech. It was very touching and educational. It's about the history of Hmong during the China years. It's kind of long, but worth the reading. He is also the owner of the first Hmong bookstore called HmongABC. You can visit this site from my links.
It is my great honor to be invited as your keynote speaker for this invaluable conference, where Hmong history, culture, religion, politics, and women leaders will be talked about now, and more in details in the workshops. Today I feel both humble and privileged, because it is my first time to be a keynote speaker at such a conference. I hope you won�t be terribly disappointed.
I want to take this opportunity to thank President Becky Thao and members of the Hmong Student Union for your invitation and hospitality. I�ve enjoyed being in Oshkosh and being with all of you, young, energetic Hmong men and women who have so much to offer to the community and to the future of the Hmong. I want to commend you for the excellent work you have done in putting together this 14th annual conference. It has been the visions and efforts of young Hmong like you that help direct and improve our livelihood. I want to congratulate the Hmong Student Union for its leadership in the past 14 years. I, however, have to confess that I have not attended your previous conferences, which I truly regret.
Today, it certainly is a great honor to be here with all of you. I want to tell you that I like very much the theme of this year�s conference, �Digging Roots, While Building the Future.� The only drawback for me as a history student is that I was trained to learn and to talk about the past, not to predict the future. With this in mind, I may not do well on the second part of the theme about building the future. However, I will try my best not to completely disappoint you. I could not foresee and don�t want to predict the future of our Hmong, but my belief is that our future is built or improved upon our past. And if we know our past, we will have a better foundation to create a better future.
The problem that we have had until recently is that we don�t know much about our history, our roots. I have seen many young Hmong men and women who are so lost in their own world, full of confusion, despair, and low self-esteem. I was one of them. As I grew up in the remote countryside of Laos, I heard clich� from my parents, grandparents and from the community saying that the world was flat; that the Hmong were not as intelligent as other nationalities; that the Hmong were not as good looking as other nationalities; that the Hmong could not govern their own people; and the list went on and on. Without knowing our history, we took these sayings for granted without questions, but at the same time, we were growing up with shame and without national pride.
Before going too much into our ancient past, let me share with you a more contemporary story. In the summer of 1996, four Hmong Americans and I attended a two-month Hmong history course in Xiangtan University in Hunan Province in China. The course was taught in Chinese language. Our interpreter was Xiang Chunming, a young Hmong man from West Hunan. He just graduated with his BA that year. Before meeting with us, he did not know much about Hmong history and culture. He was completely assimilated into the Chinese society. His Hmong identity was nearly lost. We tried to provoke a discussion on Hmong issues, but he did not show much interest. He could careless about the future of the Hmong. He did his job, which was to interpret for us. By interpreting for us throughout the course, he learned as much as we did, if not more. Since 1996, he has become a new Hmong man, one who knows his own history, culture, and his own identity. He has become a stronger person, mentally. I met Xiang Chunming again in March of 2000, almost four years later. He has so much national pride for being a Hmong. He cried in Hainan Island when we talked about the future of the Hmong, a nationality without a country. A few days later, we arrived in Zhuolu, northwest of Beijing. There, we visited the three stone statues of Hmong king Chiyou and two Chinese kings, Huangdi and Yandi. I was about to kneel down to pay my respect to the Chinese king, Huangdi, but Xiang Chunming stopped me. He said, �We only kneel down before Chiyou, our Hmong king; we don�t kneel down for Huangdi and Yandi, who are Chinese and were enemy of the Hmong.� I was shock how patriotic he was, and I was afraid, especially when we were taken there by a local Chinese official. I share this story with you because this is an example of a young Hmong man who found his own pride through knowing the history, the roots of his people, and has become the best Hmong that he could possibly be.
There are so much that we can benefit from our past, which buried many, many roots. And I completely agree with this year�s theme that it is time to dig our roots. The deeper we dig, the more we will be convinced that the Hmong are indeed a very ancient people with a very unique history and culture. We are one of the oldest human races on the surface of the earth. Many scholars can easily say that the Hmong were in China before the Chinese. As Jean Mottin said, �Of their prehistory only one thing is certain, that is that the Miao were in China before the Chinese, for it is the latter [Chinese] themselves who indicate the presence of the Miao in the land, which they, the Chinese, were gradually infiltrating, and which was to become their own country. �
Now let me share with you our Hmong history, our roots. But please be prepared to hear the unexpected. History has not been very kind to our Hmong. For at least five to six thousand years, the Hmong were constantly at wars against the expansionist Chinese, who tried to take over Hmong land and to eliminate the Hmong by suppression and assimilation. Our ancestors had gone through so much of suffering, trying to protect our people from elimination, and they managed to do so. Other strong nationalities like the Xiongnu and the Manchu were completely eliminated by the Chinese over the centuries. I�m surprised to see that the Hmong have survived with much of their culture, after five or six thousands years under Chinese oppression. Without their continuous resistance, the Hmong could have been disappeared from history like the Xiongnu. We owe much respect to our ancestors.
According to historical records and archaeological findings, the Hmong originated in the Yellow River basin. In 1936, there was an archaeological discovery in Jiangsu province, known as the Liangzhu Culture. This culture is said to be as old as 7000 years. In 1996 in China, there was an international conference on the Liangzhu discovery. Some scholars have argued that this Liangzhu Culture was a Hmong culture. In his article �The Birth of Civilization in the East � The Liangzhu Culture,� Wang Zunguo stated that Liangzhu was a Hmong culture belonged to Hmong king Chiyou. Chen Jing is a Hmong scholar in Nanjing who pays special attention to the Liangzhu discovery. He also argued that Liangzhu was a Hmong culture. He said that it was because of the flood from the Yellow River that the Hmong moved northward all the way to Zhuolu.
next