Culture clash can stymie help

Chue Lee hung up the phone and wept. Her eldest daughter had run away again, and Lee couldn't get the police to find her and bring her home.

She worried about her daughter, then 17, getting into gangs and drugs -- problems Lee said her parents never had to worry about in Thailand. At times like these, she wondered if living in the United States was worth it.

"I wish I could take all my kids back home," she remembers thinking.

Adapting any non-Western culture to the United States is a formidable task. For the Hmong community, which hails from isolated mountain villages in Laos and refugee camps in Thailand, settling in urban areas such as St. Paul has meant a bigger change.

Gang rape and prostitution of young Hmong girls -- often runaways -- is one problem that has emerged and has been hard to stop.

In Laos and Thailand, several Hmong parents said, parents didn't have to worry about their children falling prey to pimps or into the arms of gangs. They disciplined their kids with physical punishment. Parents worked in fields and often left little ones at home, trusting their village neighbors to be watchful.

Marriage was negotiated between clans and came young -- in the mid-teens for many. Rapes were tolerated if marriage followed. Without marriage, rape generally was handled quietly by family or clan leaders, with a payment made to help restore the honor of the victim's family.

By all accounts, Hmong culture does not tolerate gang rape. But some scholars say that in the United States, aspects of the Hmong culture have allowed the problem to flourish here.

"There is ... community denial of sexual abuse, lack of punishment for perpetrators, and learned behavior from watching male family members and friends," says a 2002 Ford Foundation report. "Victims are re-victimized: blamed for the rape, forced to marry the perpetrator, shunned by the community, stigmatized instead of provided with counseling, and held responsible for the ruined reputations of themselves and their families."

The problem comes in mixing Hmong traditions with American culture, many agree. While Hmong refugees are struggling to survive in a culture foreign to them, their children are adapting more quickly and disobeying what they see as their parents' antiquated rules.

"For sure there is a cultural aspect to it, a clash of culture," said Rep. Cy Thao, DFL-St. Paul. "I think if you could overcome some of those issues, I don't think it's just teen prostitution. I think a lot of other social issues within the Hmong community as well will disappear."

Cultural priorities

Hmong and U.S. cultures conflict on a fundamental level, said Lee Pao Xiong, director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul.

In Hmong culture, helping the community is paramount, followed by helping family and then the individual, he said. In the United States, people are taught not to rely on others -- they're responsible for themselves first.

"It's totally reversed," he said.

One researcher found that Hmong teens who come from homes where the parents lack formal education, don't speak English well or resist American traditions were most likely to have problems with delinquency. The researcher, Shanie Xiong, interviewed 52 Wisconsin and Minnesota Hmong teens in 2002 for her master's degree work at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Many Hmong parents make no secret of their frustrations.

"The most complaints I get when I go to community meetings is, 'What can you do to help the parents control the kids?' " Thao said.

Like many parents, they are confounded by the trials of raising teens. But language and cultural differences worsen the problem. Determined to succeed, immigrant parents go to work, leaving their children connected by television and the Internet to outside influences. No villagers watch over them.

"In the village environment, everybody knows everybody. And so you have an element of safety there," Lee Pao Xiong said. "But now in America, it's totally different. I mean, it's very easy for the other kids to come and drive and pick [them] up."

Parents want help in solving their problems with their teenagers.

Discipline quandary

Hmong parents have learned that the rules for disciplining children are different here. Hitting a child can land a parent in jail, and that makes parents afraid to impose such discipline.

Ser Lee, chairman of the Cultural Advisory Group of the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul, went to jail in 1998 after hitting his daughter May. He said he was sent there for arguing with a judge about why he did it.

His daughter had been skipping school, staying out late and using his credit card, and he couldn't make her listen.

Standing in her bedroom and lecturing her, he said, he was going to fake a hit to scare her. He grabbed something and swung it at her. He recalls that it was a broom; she said it was a curtain rod.

A teacher reported bruises on her arm and leg, and Lee was eventually charged with malicious punishment of a child.

Lee said he told a judge that he didn't want his daughter to get hurt or hurt someone else if she ran with the wrong crowd.

"It's a family matter," he recalled saying defiantly. And he was trying to make her be good, not to abuse her, he said.

He spent eight hours in jail before his wife bailed him out, he said. After he performed community service and stayed out of legal trouble for two years, the court dismissed the charge.

May Lee said seeing her father go to jail was a turning point; she decided then to change her friends and change her ways.

The gang problem

Ser Lee had been afraid that his daughter would fall into a gang, a problem many immigrant parents have had to guard against. Hmong gangs were born out of the same forces that led to gangs in early Italian, Jewish and Irish immigrant communities, according to Donald Kodluboy, a Minneapolis public schools psychologist.

"Many Hmong, Laotian and Cambodian gang members tell of forming self-defense groups following assaults or intimidation by other ethnic gang members," he wrote in a 1996 article for the National School Safety Center.

Young Hmong girls make easy targets for gangs because the girls are afraid to report the crime.

The culture also shames females for having sex before marriage -- even if they're raped. Their male counterparts aren't shamed, said Der Her, volunteer coordinator at Ramsey County Sexual Offense Services.

In traditional Hmong culture, daughters are kept closer to home as they mature, said Zha Blong Xiong, assistant professor of social sciences at the University of Minnesota. Sons have more freedom to roam so they can find a wife, he said.

In Laos, there was good reason to keep girls in. It wasn't uncommon for young men to take brides by kidnapping them.

Traditionally, serious offenses within the Hmong culture have been handled between clans.

"We have a saying in our community that if it's Chinese medicine, let the Chinese boil the medicine. If it's Hmong medicine, let the Hmong boil the medicine. Don't let the Chinese boil the Hmong medicines," Lee Pao Xiong said. "So, in other words ... solve it within the community."

But those traditions keep the community from talking about the problem, some contend.

People in the Hmong community who want to protect the girls are afraid to speak out, said Tru Thao, a Ramsey County social worker. They worry that others might think one of their daughters was raped and that will hurt the family's reputation, she said.

As more Hmong children are brought up in the United States, attitudes will change, people grappling with the problem say. But it may take some effort.

"We can go through 10 generations and if we don't make the effort at changing some of those attitudes, it's going to stay the same," Tru Thao said.

The writers are at plouwagie@startribune.com

and dbrowning@startribune.com.