Doodle Bug and Marmalade

Photo by Jeff Wheeler , Star Tribune

Bryan Thao Worra reading a piece at Intermedia Arts earlier this month.

Maverick artists Ka Vang and Bryan Thao Worra, who share family histories of secrecy and shame, use their writing to agitate for change in the Hmong community.

Kay Miller

In Laos there are two rivers, one serene and clear, the other dark and murky, that define and nourish the land. Hmong writer Ka Vang is the cool Nam Khan River, says her husband Laotian-American writer Bryan Thao Worra. He is the brooding Mekong.

"We have two totally different approaches to life," Vang said. "But we arrive at the same destination."

Over the past eight years Vang and Worra have become an Asian power couple who have challenged Hmong early marriage, teen pregnancy, domestic violence and polygamy -- drawing death threats in the process. In a tribal culture that had no word for art, they are among its literary vanguard, using edgy contemporary poetry, plays and stories to document the Hmong experience and heal its ills.

"They are mavericks. They don't waste a lot of time dinking around with the more nuanced politics of the Hmong community. They find those who are ready to collaborate and move forward," said Mitch Ogden, a University of Minnesota graduate student who is writing his dissertation on Hmong literary and film production.

Vang and Worra met eight years ago at a conference in Menomonie, Wis. As a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she had written about an Eau Claire teenager named Lee Vang, who delivered an 8-pound baby boy in a YMCA bathroom and left him in a garbage bin to die.

At the conference Vang was surrounded by Hmong who were angry at her insider portrait that tried to put events into the larger perspective of Hmong customs. Why, they demanded, had she aired the community's dirty linen?

Quietly, Worra slipped her his Hmong Tribune card. In 1998 he had left his job doing Hmong refugee resettlement work in Washington, D.C., and moved to the Twin Cities seeking his Southeast Asian roots.

"I don't know what made me turn it over," Vang said. On the back Worra had penned a poem of admiration for her courage. She waited a year before calling him.

On their first date they found themselves laughing at the same cheesy scenes in "The Red Violin" and discovering a shared passion for science fiction, "Star Trek," poetry and social justice. They married three weeks later. The couple live in the heart of St. Paul's Hmong community.

"They're Asian-American artists who aren't afraid to talk about issues such as race, culture, gender, class -- difficult issues that a lot of writers shy away from," said Vietnamese-American artist Bao Phi, who organizes shows for artists of color at the Loft Literary Center.

Worra, 34, has written more than 100 articles, poems and stories for more than 60 international publications, making him perhaps the most widely published Laotian-American. His new book of poetry, "On the Other Side of the Eye" (Sam's Dot Publishing, $10), about transcultural adoption, is due out in August. He is constantly organizing shows, mentoring young artists and highlighting their work through video posts on YouTube.

Vang, 32, is a playwright, fiction writer, poet, journalist and painter who was born in Long Cheng, Laos, and spent years in a Thai refugee camp before her family resettled in St. Paul. By refusing to marry in her teens, Vang flouted Hmong tradition and was, at 24, "an ancient, hopeless cause for my parents." She jokes that she's delayed having kids so long that older Hmong ladies offer herbal remedies to help her conceive.

"Ka is a tremendously important voice, especially for young Hmong women. She breaks lots of stereotypes about what an Asian woman is supposed to be," Phi said.

Vang's satiric, magical realism short story, "Ms. Pac-Man Ruined My Gang Life," helped her win a Bush Fellowship and has been included in the two most prestigious Asian anthologies. She has received numerous artist grants, performs spoken-word poetry across the country and has had her plays performed here and in New York. Her journals are filled with drawings.

Worra's work resonates with wisdom. Yet Hmong elders mutter when he expresses opinions at community meetings: "He has no right to speak. This is a Hmong issue. Why are you with him, Ka? He's not even Hmong."

Childhood on the move

Worra grew up with a fable: His adoptive father was an American pilot for Royal Air Laos and Worra was told that in 1973 an Australian furniture-maker friend brokered Bryan's adoption after the man's housekeeper had a son born out of wedlock.

His childhood was largely happy, if lonely, as his white adoptive family moved first to Montana, then to Alaska and Michigan. In each state, Worra was mistaken for whatever dark-skinned minority was reviled in that locale. The murder of a Chinese man mistaken as Japanese in Detroit by two unemployed auto workers bred a sensitivity in Worra "that prejudice and racism are things we should be working to overcome in all communities."

Worra had his mother's name and a photo, clues that would become part of his 13-year search for her. When Vang got a Jerome Foundation grant in 2002 to research Hmong folklore in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, Worra joined her travels.

"I just had this feeling that if we went back to the beginning where it all began that we would find some clue," Vang said. "I had no idea that we were actually going to find his mother."

The Laotian embassy gave Worra the name of the ancient temple in his mother's village at which her family might have worshipped. Their timing was impeccable: At the temple they met an old monk who had just returned from exile in Thailand.

Worra held out a paper with his quest translated into Lao: "Do you know Mitthalinh Silosoth? She is my mother."

Oh, yes, the monk said, Mitthalinh's sister -- actually a very close friend -- lived just three blocks away.

"We found ourselves in front of this restaurant in one of the most awkward conversations," Worra said. Through a translator they learned that Mitthalinh lived in Modesto, Calif. Worra had traveled halfway around the world to find out that his mother was living halfway across the United States. The next day he and his mother talked by telephone. "It burns itself into your bones, the feeling that first time you hear her voice," he said.

To unearth Worra's past, they have had to penetrate layers of lies, secrecy and shame, Vang said. They learned that the adoption broker was an intelligence officer who was murdered in Bangkok, his severed head sent back in a box to the Australian equivalent of CIA headquarters. Worra's adoptive father probably was a covert operative working for the CIA, which largely funded Royal Air Laos.

Worra's mother told him that she also was adopted and learned in her teens that she was Laotian, not Indian. She said that Worra's birth father was a farmer who rejected her because she lacked the cooking and farming skills he expected in a wife.

Worra does not know if any of this is true.

"For transcultural adoptees, our lives are written in pencil," he said. "Everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant."

Stairs made of bodies

Vang's own history is luminously painful, but emblematic of what many Hmong endured to immigrate. She was born in Long Cheng, a secret CIA base that was under constant attack by the Pathet Lao. Her father was a high-ranking Hmong military officer whose importance and affluence was marked by having two wives.

"My mother was actually the second wife of my father. In the community that's a very bad status." At this Vang starts crying. This is the first time she has talked publicly about the polygamy in her family.

"I was born in April 1975, right before the U.S. was to exit from Southeast Asia," she said. It was a dangerous, chaotic time. Vang's father was in Vietiane. Her mother was told to leave everything but her child and valuables and head to the airfield for a secret flight to Thailand.

Word spread through the base. Thousands of desperate people pushed and shoved to get into the back of the cargo plane, climbing over trampled bodies that formed a stairway. Her mother fell, the infant Vang strapped to her back, and was pulled to safety by a distant uncle.

Weeks later her parents reunited at a refugee camp in Thailand. Her father maintained a relationship with both women in the United States. Vang grew up feeling like a "double minority." Even as she absorbed the poverty and oppression of immigrant life, she was disdained by her own community: It expected the first child of a second wife to be a boy.

How do we recover?

Nothing prepared the Hmong for their unprecedented, jolting immersion from a tribal culture into America. They had no language to articulate the wrenching experiences of war, dislocation, resettlement and fracture of their once-cohesive culture. Providing that new language is the work of artists.

"How do we recover? How do we rebuild our lives?" Worra asks. "When you don't have a way to express what you're going through, it's like a hydraulic machine: What you push in one end comes out 10 times more powerful and sometimes more destructive at the other end than if you expressed it in healthier and more productive ways."

So they have organized forums of Hmong women writers and gatherings to discuss the sense of danger that arose after Hmong hunter Chai Soua Vang murdered six deer hunters in Wisconsin in 2004. They worked with Ilean Her, executive director of the Council of Asian Pacific Minnesotans, on prevention of teen pregnancy and drew community wrath. Last summer, even as his adoptive father was dying, Worra took time to advise a Toledo Asian group protesting a racist DJ who was placing prank phone calls to Asians.

On a Thursday night Vang and Worra help draw a young, mostly Asian crowd to a poetry jam at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. There are seven of the area's finest spoken-word artists. Their poetry is raw and exquisite. It bathes listeners in waves of truth and contradiction.

Worra knows he might never be accepted in the Hmong community, a truth that tears at his soul. And Vang knows there are times when, despite her own eloquence, she must invoke the names of her father, grandfather and uncles to be taken seriously. She craves the Hmong community, even as she needles it to change.

"It's in my veins. It's who I am."

They are so different, these two artists. But their lives merge together, two powerful rivers, toward a single destination: the truth.