Trying to leap from a peasant society to industrial America, many Hmong ended up in poverty or on welfare.
There are now about 180, 000 Hmong in America, roughly a third of them clustered in Minneapolis and St Paul.
In 2004 America agreed to take in another 14, 000 or so Hmong who had been staying at a Thai temple.
She had heard stories of how Hmong people did not have a country, how we always had to leave places behind.
The feeling that she was Hmong did not happen until the preparations for America began as her family was being processed.
America then took the Hmong in, with communities growing in California and Minnesota, where Lutheran church groups tried to help out.
You are going to America as Hmong from the camps of Thailand.
This week the Thai army loaded 4, 351 ethnic Hmong onto lorries and drove them to the border with Laos, whence they had fled.
Until the war in Indochina, the Hmong were a small, isolated community of farmers living in the highlands of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
For example, 29 percent of Vietnamese-Americans, 38 percent of Hmong-Americans, 33 percent of Laotian-Americans, and 37 percent of Cambodian-Americans do not complete high school.
When I was growing up in Central California, which is home to a large population of immigrants from Southeast Asia, thousands would gather to celebrate Hmong New Year.
So, with that, Cambodian, Loa, Hmong, Vietnamese - they're largely immigrated to the U.S. via political or refugees because of war and, in that case, their circumstances are different that would affect their educational attainment and their income levels.
The issue for Asian-Americans is, because there is a high median family income, this issue is it's harder to get the resources and the services to low income Asian-American communities and, also, when you break it down by specific ethnic groups, the Hmong, the Bangladeshi, they have poverty rates that rival the African-American poverty rate.
And what you'll find in the Midwest, the Hmong population - there's a lot of ginseng farming, not that push for educational attainment and just, in general, those groups still don't overshadow the fact that even East Asian descent Asian-Americans have higher rates of poverty and still higher rates of not having a high school education or less than a high school education, as well.
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