“It was challenging to be an American at school and Hmong at home. The Sunday school teachers told the girls, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ They showed us their college photo albums of happy, smiling people in beautiful places. Our church, the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, was a supportive environment for me. I walked up to people in the street or the grocery store, saying, ‘Hi! Are you Hmong too?’ “We moved to Minnesota when I was in high school, and I was excited to be among a larger community of Hmong people. I remember flash cards and a circular toy with a lever that I pulled to tell me the alphabet. They’d only taught us a few words, like how to ask for the bathroom, in the refugee camps. We went right into school, without any understanding of the language. They gave us huge coats because we were skinny little refugee kids. “We came to the United States in the winter.

She is the author of The Bride Price: A Hmong Wedding Story, a family memoir about balancing two cultures, centered on her refusal to follow the traditional Hmong custom of the groom’s family paying a “bride price” to the parents of the bride.

Olaf and has worked with public policy organizations on issues important to refugees and immigrants. She earned a sociology/anthropology degree at St.

After her father’s death, she and her mother and brothers spent two years in a Thai refugee camp before resettling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1981. Mai Neng Moua ’95 was born in Laos sometime in the early 1970s (like many Hmong, she is unsure of her actual birthdate).

Mai neng moua the bride price