ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Paj Ntaub: Weaving Women’s Voices Across Generations, is a UW-Madison based project which brings together female Hmong American students and older Hmong women to record and creatively re-write the gendered refugee experiences of Hmong women while expressing their contemporary situations. Based conceptually on paj ntaub, floral-patterned embroidery traditionally sewn by Hmong women, the stories of this project, interwoven across generations, aims not only to foster heritage awareness, but to provide a space in which Hmong women’s voices are heard, and to cultivate a Hmong writing consciousness.
This project began over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year, during which a group of Hmong American students planned and conducted oral history interviews with older Hmong women – both family and non-family members. The students then creatively rewrote these narratives based on the materials from the interview, interspersing reflections on their position as interviewers, and as Hmong American girls. Narrating recollections of wartime, refugee camps, transnational migration, and the resulting negotiation of individual and community identities, these stories speak not only of the memories, experiences and opinions of older Hmong women, but those of the younger generation. What therefore emerges from these stories of cross-generational collaboration are the evolving dynamics of Hmong female identity across space, and across time.
Paj Ntaub: Weaving Women's Voices Across Generations hopes to be a living and growing multimedia archive, enabling the many untold stories of the Hmong refugee movement to be acknowledged, and to be preserved. This project is generously supported by UW-Madison's Center for the Humanities, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Asian-American Studies Program and the Hmong Studies Consortium.