KaYing Yang, a longtime social justice activist, gave a lecture titled “Transforming Cultures to Create Gender Equity”. The lecture was a part of the Southeast Asian Heritage Lecture Series as it dealt with Hmong culture. KaYing Yang described the hardships that Hmong girls experience throughout all their lives simply due to their gender. Females are not as important as males in Hmong culture which results in serious sexism. From their birth boys are favored, given more attention, provided with more education. Also, once girls grow up they are forced to marry young and to do whatever their husbands say, even if he is abusive. According to KaYing Yang this serious issue that often goes unknown and unmentioned.
The message of KaYing Yang’s lecture affects me personally because I am a female. Although I don’t live according to an incredibly sexist culture, I still see the importance of helping other women overcome sexual injustices. I know that they are worth more than their Hmong culture believes. As a female I also know that they are strong and can overcome the obstacles that KaYing Yang mentioned. Women have been oppressed in many different
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Yang mentioned how Hmong culture makes its way into American school systems and communities. She described how it is hard for a school counselor to help a Hmong child that is having family issues. Often times outsiders don’t know the culture and don’t quite understand how complex it is. When a Hmong child is having a hard time due to his parents fighting the teacher’s initial thought would be to talk to the mother and have her solve the issue. However, in Hmong culture, as has been mentioned before, Hmong women are quite powerless. They have to stand by their husbands no matter how abusive they are. This is very hard for an outsider of the Hmong community to comprehend, so it makes others in the community quite powerless to help as
Hmong gangs started forming in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s for protection from other neighborhood youth and school bullies where large members of Hmong refugees settled. Unlike many Latino and African American youth gang members who came from a broken family, Hmong gang members are mostly from a good home. They often come from intact homes with supportive and loving parents. However, the young Hmong generations found themselves caught between two completely different culture, the mainstream American cultures and the traditional Hmong culture. At school or in the public, children are American; but at home, Hmong children are in another totally different world.
In her book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman describes the story of the Lee family and the frightening task they had to to undergo to provide their daughter with medical aid. The Lees along with the other thousands of Hmong immigrants, tried to understand the and navigate the complex and sometimes confusing healthcare system in the United States. As the book points out, the values and ideals of the Hmong culture and the United States health care system are not always the same and sometimes come into great conflict with each other. Lia Lee was unfortunately the person stuck in the middle of this great conflict.
1. Walt certainly demonstrates the term culture bound in the movie. He was an angry neighbor that if anyone’s ball went into his yard, it was long gone. To me it felt like Walt’s views were fenced in his own house and weren’t going to change. Surprisingly, by the end of the movie, he opened up to his Hmong neighbors next door.
Growing up as Hmong-American youth, I was raised by a father who joined the military when he was twelve years old. He was forced into the Vietnam war fighting for safety, peace, and a relationship with the United States of America. Through this military influence and discipline at such a young age, my father accepted the military lifestyle. He carried it over from the Vietnam war to my family today. Growing up, my father was always strict on me, especially when it came to my appearances and education.
The Hmong community definitely can relate to this video because the Hmongs like many Asian descents are not expressive towards their feelings to one another. Even though the video sent out a positive message about how important communication is, it also shows a different aspect of the parent and their child’s way of living. By understanding that concept of the minimal communication in most Hmong families, communication may sometimes lead to confrontation and arguments that leads to emotional and verbal abuse. Research shows behavioral problems and at risk behaviors are less likely to occur when families identify as having a positive communication and more likely to occur than they have
The author was trying to show how the difference between two cultures can influence in health care. The author showed how the difference between illness and disease also affects the forms of treatment. It is important to recognize the patient’s cultural beliefs because this may help us to recognize how effective the given treatment can be and in what ways we can enhance the treatment without sacrificing the patient’s cultural beliefs. The author also showed how both the parents and the doctors care about Lia but what they thought was best for Lia varied. The doctors thought that the parents were harming the treatment by not being compliant and the parents thought that the doctors were hurting Lia by giving her so much medicine.
Gender inequality is a very important issue in today’s world that needs to be solved. While it may seem that gender inequality has only been an issue in recent years, it has been going on since humans were living in caves. The stereotype that “men are strong, women are weak” began all the way back when humans were primitive. The primitive men were always the hunters and laborers, and the women were the ones who stayed at home, took care of kids, worked with agriculture, and made food and clothes. The labor women did was, in many ways, more difficult and stressful.
Sharyn Graham Davies traveled to Indonesia and observed a group of people, the Bugis, and took note of their five different genders. Davies observed how each of these five genders interacted with each other, how they were viewed in society, and how they stuck to or broke gender norms. Davies argues that even though the Bugis have five genders they still only have two sexes. Davies concludes that in the Bugis culture gender is more important than sex in determining your role in society. This book also helps to compare and analyze American culture and its way of thinking between sex and gender.
To further explain, in the Girl Rising documentary, viewers are taken through the life of a young girl, Suma, in Nepal. She was only six-years-old when her parents exchanged her obedient working hand for money. She was then sent to a home where she would do chores such as washing the dishes, cut firewood and maintain the farm. At her next working home, Suma’s employer’s forced her to eat their scraps, and called her “unlucky girl”. At this home, she was sexually abused, but she did not let that define her.
The ! Kung tribe is a group of nomadic hunters and gatherers that mainly reside in Botswana, Angola, and Namibia. Recently, the Bushmen have had to transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a more common sedentary one. In both lifestyles, gender roles of men and women have existed, starting at a young age and only strengthening as children matured. Gender roles of the !
He argued that adopted materials might not be the best sources to teach Hmong heritage to Hmong youths because some of the information were often miss-informed and thus created inaccurate accounts of what really happened. The disparities caused confusion and thus information can be articulated inaccurately to Hmong youths who are learning about their history without any historical background. Teachers should empower Hmong Youth by varying their resources from different online sources to ensure that the information is accurate. A teacher should not limit the scope of their instruction to school curriculum but expands on knowledge with multiple avenues of information to participate in academic discourse and allow Hmong students to make their own connections and understanding. Educators need to use multiple sources to engage Hmong students so that information can be articulated accurately as to avoid confusions and misinformation.
During the 1890’s until today, the roles of women and their rights have severely changed. They have been inferior, submissive, and trapped by their marriage. Women have slowly evolved into individuals that have rights and can represent “feminine individuality”. The fact that they be intended to be house-caring women has changed.
Throughout the film, there are umpteen numbers of scenes one can be put faced to the blatant sexual objectification of not some, but all female characters in the film. The very first glimpse of such objectification can be seen through the character of Xiao Mei. Although not a main and significant character in the film, Xiao Mei was one of the younger masseuses working in Lin Dong’s parlour. She too, like Pingguo and her husband, had come to Beijing from a small village town with the hopes and dreams of living a better life. Being a young girl, she too knew that she was only as valuable as far as her beauty would go and as sexually available she was.
She therefore, becomes a victim of a pre-existing socio-cultural male favoritism. Furthermore, the concept of girl-children are subjected to all multiple forms of oppression, exploitation and
The Confucian perspective of woman is distinctly stated: “The female was inferior by nature, she was dark as the moon and changeable as water, jealous, narrow-minded and insinuating. She was indiscreet, unintelligent, and dominated by emotion. Her beauty was a snare for the unwary male, the ruination of states”(Guisso, 1981). In Chinese culture, girls mostly marry into the husband 's family, depart from their home, and concentrate on the well-being of their husband 's parents. China 's feudal tradition ceaselessly subjected women to submissiveness by their father, husband, and even their son owing to a patriarchal and patrilineal system.