Week 8 - The Hmong Culture of Textiles

Alyssa Vang - ASA 141- Week 8 - The Hmong Culture of Textiles

      Growing up in a Hmong family, my parents were pretty traditional in the beginning of me growing up (but that’s just probably because I was a kid), but since I’ve gotten older my mom has become more Americanized about rules and my dad is still pretty traditional but he’s slowly becoming more lenient on some things.  My mom had me when she was sixteen so I lived with my grandparents for awhile until my parents were able to take care of me.  Because of the distance between my parents and I I never really grew up to their style of rules. This lead me in the future to resent things because they didn’t see the way I grew up and there was this gap in between. To me then, my parents were very traditional and I hated it, I use to hate that I was Hmong and that our rules were so strict and stupid. But as I grew older and went to college I was able to find out more about my culture of where we come from and why we are where we are, I’ve became more thankful for it. I appreciated my parents more and they might not know what I’ve learned but I can slowly see it in their actions.

           Since I’m the oldest in the family, I’m closer to my mom and From what I heard my mom does not know how to sew clothes in from what I heard my mom does not know how to sew clothes or embroidery. I remember when my grandma was telling my mom that she should teach me how to do the paj ntuab but my mom said she never knew how to make them and from that I was never able to learn it from a child. In Laos, lots of girls learn how to sew paj ntuab by the age of 5 and when they grow into adults they advance in this textile skill.  As a design major, I always wanted to learn and sew my own embroidery textiles but because I never had anyone to teach me personally, I think it’ll be hard for me in the future to learn and advance from. When I came into Davis as a design major, I incorporated a lot of my designs with Hmong textiles (the photo above is an example) and used the western design of the clothes to put it together. I’m hoping that in the future I’m able to learn how to my my own textiles for my own designs because like the reading it tells a story of who you are and where you come from. But because most paj ntuab now a days are made through sewing machine I feel like it’s not the same anymore. Would it still have the same meaning if it was machine made instead of hand sewn?