Vang: Courting rituals, a stuffed chicken and egg rolls (and eye rolls) at Hmong New Year

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The jingle reached me first.

As my family walked into the St. Paul RiverCentre, the air hummed with hypnotic jingles from millions of coins sewn onto traditional Hmong clothes. Then I saw a sea of vibrant colors from the same festive garb worn by many of the thousands of Hmong people who gathered in downtown St. Paul this past weekend for a two-day Hmong New Year celebration.

Bringing my children to this annual festival is my small way to try to preserve their Hmong heritage. It’s a noble goal, but also one fraught with logistical hiccups and familial resistance, mostly from my children.

The first thing I did after we arrived was purchase sparkly, homemade balls for my kids — essential equipment for a traditional game. This ritual, a cornerstone of traditional Hmong courtship, involves young men and women facing each other in tidy lines, tossing the ball back and forth. In my youth, it was a flirtatious exchange: boys and girls trading smiles, singing kwv txhiaj (traditional rhyme songs) and — if all went well — exchanging phone numbers. Today, however, the game seems to have morphed into something more ... parental. All around us, moms and dads were tossing balls with their own kids, presumably teaching them the art of culturally significant flirting.

I took this opportunity to launch into an impromptu TED Talk for my children. “This ball,” I said, holding it aloft like a relic from an Indiana Jones film, “is your history. Marriages have started with these balls. Families have been built. Dynasties have collapsed because of these balls. You are not Hmong unless you toss a ball! This is not just a game — it’s a 1,000-year-old ritual steeped in —”

“Can we throw it now?” interrupted Jahia, my 15-year-old daughter.

My son, Shao, refused to toss his ball with a girl his age. “I’m in a committed relationship!” he declared loudly enough to draw a few chuckles from the father of the family tossing balls next to us. The mother of the family frowned because I promised her Shao would toss balls with her daughter.

“You’re 10,” I replied, my voice dangerously close to a hiss. “This is not cheating. It’s culture.”

I pivoted to my daughters, suggesting they toss their balls with some teen boys nearby who I offered to call over. My 13-year-old, Shia, fixed me with a look so withering I half expected my reflection to evaporate. “If you do that,” she said, “I will never come back here again.”

Cue the awkward silence. Thankfully, my mother-in-law, Judy, and sister-in-law, Lisa, arrived by then, having come straight from church. They are not Hmong. Judy’s family is mostly Irish, but she’s got French and a host of other European ethnicities running through her veins. Although I have been with my husband for 16 years, this was their first Hmong New Year, and I found myself suddenly desperate for them to love it. It was as though the Hmong New Year was an extension of myself, so if they didn’t like it, then that meant they didn’t like me.

We browsed food stalls bursting with Hmong classics — papaya salad, pork sausage, pho, barbecued pork belly. Lisa decided she wanted egg rolls and Judy picked the fried rice. I tried not to take it personally, but my frowning face betrayed me. Of all the yummy Hmong food, my in-laws wanted egg rolls and fried rice, which aren’t even Hmong dishes. Judy noticed my disapproval and changed her order to papaya salad. Lisa? She doubled down on the egg rolls. My kids, meanwhile, opted for hot dogs and burgers, reminding me they’d eaten nothing but Hmong food for five days straight. “This,” I muttered to myself, “is why I have trust issues.”

After lunch, we meandered through the exhibit hall, weaving around clusters of people and booths offering everything from traditional clothing to plush toys. I was determined to find a souvenir for Judy to commemorate her first Hmong New Year. Since most vendors only accepted cash, my purse was brimming with a few hundred dollars, ready for the occasion.

Then Judy spotted it: a stuffed black-and-red chicken. Not an intricately embroidered tapestry, not a piece of traditional clothing, but a quirky stuffed chicken. She declared she had to have it. I offered to pay, but she insisted on covering the cost herself.

Did the chicken remind her of her childhood on a farm in Hamel, Minn.? Or was it just Judy finding beauty in ugly things? Either way, she seemed delighted, and that, I suppose, is all that mattered.

As we wandered around more, I became a human walking Wikipedia telling Judy and Lisa everything I know about Hmong culture. I told them the Hmong New Year is called “Noj Peb Caug,” which translates to “eat 30.” Hmong New Year marks the end of the rice harvest season when families gathered after a year of working in the fields, sharing a 30-day feast before joining community festivities.

“Hmong people like to wear their wealth, historically,” so they sew their silver coins onto their clothes, I told them. “Since the 1800s, Hmong people have been using French silver coins to decorate their clothing. Remember, the French were our colonizers.”

By the end of the day, I felt the weight of cultural preservation more acutely than ever. It was not just about teaching my kids or navigating curious in-laws — it was about carrying the memories of myself as a 10-year-old girl running through the old Civic Center before dawn, watching my father, Ying Vang, organize one of the largest Hmong New Year festivals in the country with 50,000 people attending every day. It was about holding onto the pride I felt in high school when former St. Paul Mayor George Latimer publicly thanked my dad with a certificate of appreciation for his work resettling Hmong refugees in St. Paul and coordinating the Hmong New Year celebration. Another vivid memory from those years was being 17 years old and falling in love with a Vietnamese boy at the celebration. We didn’t toss balls, but he purchased and gave me flowers. That’s another courting ritual during the festival.

As we left the RiverCentre, Judy turned to me, clutching her chicken. “When Brian brought you home 16 years ago,” she said, “It was clear you had a passion and loyalty about your culture. Now I understand why — it’s beautiful.”

And just like that, the day became perfect — not because it was smooth, but because it was real and I added the 2024 celebration to my collection of important New Year memories. Also, Shao thanked me for not asking him to cheat on his “committed relationship.”

“I was once 10,” I told him. “Just hold on to your memory of the 2024 Hmong New Year celebration when you had your first committed relationship.”