Do you know who the Hmong people are? Neither did I, but their community is far from invisible. Brenda Song, a Disney star famous for roles like Wendy Wu or London Tipton, is Hmong. They are from parts of southern China but settled in other places in Asia. They don’t have a country of their own, and due to political changes and war, many had to flee and find safety in America. That is the story Jasmine Vang shares with us: a classic tale of immigrants assimilating into a new world and slowly losing parts of their old world, just to fit in. 

Jasmine Vang nearly made me cry with this show because of how much I related to her experiences. Being also a child of immigrants who came to Canada after a war and seeing those same stories being told solidified the struggle of identity. Did you know there was a cool Asian? Like, the cool Asians were the Japanese kids or the Vietnamese kids because their food was delicious, but Taiwanese, Indonesian, Hmong: no one really knew them. Do you know what the problem became as a kid trying to fit into a primarily white school? You started hiding who you were. Jasmine talks about shoving her Hmong-ness in a box and hiding it: becoming more white to fit in, but it doesn’t stop there. Her identity was challenged even at home, about how she wasn’t Hmong enough. How her being a Hmong teacher was silly to her mother because she couldn’t pronounce certain words. 

Hmong 101 brings you on an educational journey of doubt, a longing to belong, and the evolution of identity. Jasmine is charismatic in her delivery of this show: a show that has landed in my top picks for the Fringe this year and one of the shows I’ll be watching another time.