More than 25 years after Hmong began arriving in the United States, tradition has kept alive what some Hmong women consider a lingering and hurtful prevalence of polygamy in their communities.
“It goes on,” said Pa Houa Yang, 17, a high school senior from St. Paul 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. About 39,000 Hmong live in Wisconsin, 15,000 to 18,000 of them in the Fox Valley. Minnesota 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.
Lo Lee, president of the Hmong-American Partnership in Appleton, said he doubts there are many polygamous families in the Fox Valley. “I can’t tell you there are none, but I have not seen anyone,” he said.
Lee thinks there are more in St. Paul because its concentrated Hmong population.
“That’s different from the way it is here, and there are more from the older generation there. I have not met anyone here in the young generation who has two wives. Our second generation is well-educated, outspoken and aggressive. The females understand their rights and the men understand too,” he said.
Others disagree.
“It’s just my opinion from what I see in our community, but I’m willing to bet that of those age 50 and over, it’s probably a minimum of 50 percent of Hmong men who have more than one wife,” said Blong Yang, 32, editor of the Appleton-based magazine FutureHmong.
He stressed that many of those marriages took place decades ago in Laos, and a high percentage of polygamous families do not live in one household here because it is illegal. “They live as individual families but with one head of household.”
In March, FutureHmong published an article that criticized polygamy, and 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.”
A problem that’s ‘hush-hush’
Yang said few Hmong talk openly about polygamy because they’re afraid they will be seen as disrespectful of their culture.
Yang, who was 7 years old when he moved to the United States in 1978, said he thinks younger Hmong are continuing the practice as it’s handed down by their families.
“It’s an ongoing problem in the Hmong community that’s kind of hush-hush,” Yang said. “It’s still practiced on a daily basis by Hmong elders, and it’s starting to spill over to younger kids that are growing up in America. My concern is that a handful of people are trying to justify and push this.”
A quiet subculture
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 of means whom they know are already married.
Appleton’s Lee also recalled how women widowed in war-time sought the protection of a polygamous household.
He said that when he lived in Laos, Hmong men married more than one wife when the first wife was unable to perform her duties because of illness or other reasons. “Couples rarely divorced.”
Polygamy was born of necessity, he said. Families were often large and many hands were needed to farm and raise the livestock and children.
‘A machismo thing’
Ilean Her, executive director of the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans, a state advisory board, said she wasn’t aware of the extent to which polygamy is practiced in Minnesota until she began fighting a bill at the Legislature last winter that would have legalized marriages performed by a Hmong family representative, or mej koob.
Opponents argued that the legislation would legitimize a tradition they believe condones polygamy and underage marriage. The bill was withdrawn from consideration and never received a vote.
“There are men in their 20s having second wives now, and it’s seen as a status symbol,” Her said. “I think that nowadays, it’s more of a machismo thing. The attitude is, ‘If you don’t behave, I will get another wife.’
“Lots of people in my generation, people in their 30s, said it would never happen because we were the first to grow up in American society,” she said.