Melting pot stirred in land of Betty Crocker

One of the large storycloths in Kang Xiong's Hmong crafts shop here tells an embroidered tale of flight and rescue, of jungles and river crossings, refugee camps, airplanes, and strange, cold lands.

It's a tale that Ms. Xiong has lived - fleeing from the Laos government when she was a teenager, crossing the Mekong River to Thailand, then coming to Minnesota as a refugee in 1980, alone and scared with two young children.

"I cried, I didn't like the food, I didn't like going to doctors," remembers Xiong, now a businesswoman and homeowner. The two-bedroom house in which she was placed seemed cavernous. "The heater made noise, and I was so scared."

For the woman who embroidered this traditional cloth, however - one of Xiong's many relatives back in Thailand - the story is still only half complete.

She is one of 15,000 Hmong residents at Wat Tham Krabok, an unofficial refugee camp some two hours from Thailand, who have languished, largely forgotten, since the UN closed its last Hmong refugee camps in the mid 1990s.

Now, the United States is offering to resettle all who want to come, provided they aren't criminals and can pass a drug test. In St. Paul, which has the largest Hmong population of any US city, that means as many as 5,000 refugees may be arriving as soon as July.

The coming influx has some St. Paulites angry, worried that public funds in tight times will be diverted to refugees' health, housing, and education needs. But city officials and the Hmong community are also hopeful that the resettlement will be a unique chance for an established community of refugees to take the lead in welcoming a wave of new arrivals, guiding them past cultural barriers that they encountered just decades ago.

"We struggled through and we survived," says William Yang, director of the Hmong American Partnership, a nonprofit serving Minnesota's Hmong community. "We don't want them to repeat our struggle, but we'll be happy to show them our success."

Mr. Yang was 6 years old when he arrived in 1980, one of the second wave of immigrants. He still remembers the trip vividly: staying at a Motel 6 in San Francisco, arriving at Minnesota's Rochester Airport wearing sandals and shorts, and walking out into knee-high snow. He kept wondering where all the tall buildings were.

Now, his group is partnering with the Minnesota Council of Churches to assist directly in the resettlement process. It may be the first time an ethnic community group has played such a formal role with its own people.

"We thought, who better to be the face of resettlement than successful Hmong immigrants?" explains Joel Luedtke, director of refugee services for the council, at a seminar for local Hmong interested in sponsoring relatives. He hopes it will become a model for resettlement agencies.

The community is jumping in, filing some 5,000 requests to sponsor relatives. But they're also concerned for those left behind. There are thousands who chose not to register out of distrust of the Thai government, or who were absent when the census took place. The US has indicated this will be the last group of Hmong accepted, and advocates worry that the circumstances of those left behind may deteriorate.

Outside states with significant Hmong populations - California, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, along with Minnesota - few Americans know of the group. But in the annals of refugee stories, theirs is particularly compelling.

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