Between two worlds Southeast Asians in Rhode Island seek a better life while struggling with gang activity, poverty, and a legacy of violence BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

EARLY THIS OCTOBER, as the leaves turn a Rhode Island shade of red, people from as far as Minnesota and North Carolina will gather in Warwick to celebrate the Hmong New Year. If the celebration is anything like last year’s, some 3000 people will spend two days eating purple sticky rice and papaya salad. The baseball diamonds and volleyball courts of the Mickey Stevens Sports Complex will be transformed into venues for traditional Hmong dance and perhaps some heated matches of tujlub, a game that involves spinning large wooden tops.

In Laos, the Hmong New Year usually falls at the end of December, a time of year marked by pleasant weather and the closing for two weeks of schools and government agencies. But when the Hmong people started resettling in Rhode Island, with its cold winters and the inflexible work schedules typical of America, they didn’t know what to do, says William Nouyi Yang, president of the Hmong United Association of Rhode Island. Eventually, Hmong communities all over the US started choosing times to celebrate the new year that were as close as possible to December while still offering hospitable outdoor weather.

For the generation of Hmongs and other people born in Southeast Asia, but raised in the US, the bending of this ancient tradition to suit a different climate suggests the challenges they face in their new home. Like previous immigrants groups, they seek a better life, but struggle with gang activity, disproportionately high amounts of poverty, the legacy of violence in their home countries, and other social ills. And while Latinos have been gaining momentum in recent years on the Rhode Island political scene, local Southeast Asians are still working to muster a similar degree of recognition. This heterogeneous group — dubbed "the 1.5 generation" by 27-year-old Maliss Men, spokeswoman for the Cranston-based nonprofit Project AIDS Khmer — also walks a very difficult line between the lives they have built here and the lives their families left behind.

Though she lived in Cambodia until she was six, for example, Men is struggling to retain her Cambodian language skills, which gets harder as the years go by. "Once you’ve lost your language," she says, "you really lose your culture, because you can no longer communicate with the older generation." This position between the generations, however, also puts the 1.5-ers in a unique position to voice — in English — the needs of their distinct communities and to use their familiarity with the system to advocate for change.

The 10,000 or so Southeast Asians in Rhode Island are primarily Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Hmong (an ethnic group primarily from the highlands of Laos). The Cambodian community is the largest by far, with more than 5000 residents statewide. And though the four groups are commonly referred to in the aggregate as "Southeast Asian," Molly Soum, herself the state’s liaison to the Southeast Asian community, says, with not a little bitterness, that lumping the groups together is overly simplistic. "It’s better for other people to call us ‘Southeast Asian,’ " she says. "They used to call us ‘Asian.’ They think we’re all Chinese."

What unites the disparate communities, says Soum, is the legacy of the older generation: the terror they experienced in their home countries, their struggles as refugees, and the difficulties they faced after fleeing for their lives and arriving in the US.