Op-Ed: Losing our Hmong dolls led me to unearth a piece of my culture (via latimesopinion)
When a fire burned my family’s house in Oroville in 2020 the dolls were a seemingly trivial loss in the larger scheme of what went up in smoke.
For many years I, too, dismissed these dolls as just that — dolls. But after the fire I wanted to find out more about them — to recover some part of my heritage.How new arrivals remade the east San Gabriel Valley — and assimilated in it. , but that was simply because I had only ever witnessed my mother making dolls. As I spoke to more people, I learned they had a more complex history.
For one mother, inspired by a neighbor, she made about 50 dolls in the mid ’90s to capture traditional attire in a time when Hmong had so little representation in the U.S. Though some were given away, she saved most of the dolls for cultural preservation and as keepsakes — for her, they were too precious to sell.
Now that these dolls are vanishing, I think one reason may be that, like my mother, whose hands are no longer as nimble, the doll makers of yesteryear don’t have time or are not able to make them anymore. I suspect, also, that they are not as needed as before — there are less laborious ways of preserving and reproducing culture now. And when it comes to income, other sources of work have become more accessible; making dolls is no longer a financial necessity.
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