Introduction
In a time of mounting violence and displacement of immigrant communities in the United States, Bic Ngo’s Re-Membering Culture: Erasure and Renewal in Hmong American Education is a beacon of light that points to what we can learn from immigrant communities in this country. This sophisticated book is crucial for critical educators and scholars who wish to deepen their theoretical understandings of how schooling can dismember individuals from their cultures, and also how schools can also be a site of refusal and renewal. Qualitative educational researchers seeking methodologies that challenge the hegemonic knowledge systems reproduced in schools and who instead wish to re-center cultural knowledge and practices would also find value in Ngo’s methodological and analytical approach.
Ngo opens the book with stories of the ongoing violence Hmong Americans have faced from ordinary citizens, law enforcement, and city/state policies. These stories establish the continuance of our country’s imperialism and militarism projects. Indeed, the Hmong community has a long history of violence, death, war and displacement at the hands of the United States (U.S.). Ngo’s careful, critical analysis connects these histories to present-day narratives that position Hmong people as forever foreigners, dangerous outsiders, or dependent refugees awaiting governmental rescue. These narratives manifest as common refrains (e.g. “go back to your own country,” “speak English if you’re in America”) heard by the Hmong diaspora. Ngo vividly names this form of cultural disconnection and erasure of one’s homeland as “dismemberment” (p. 6) and links it to the project of colonialism that keeps hegemonic knowledge and power in its place. Ngo extends this analysis by showing how individualism and meritocracy in schools are another project of coloniality and a site of “structured forgetting” (p. 12) for those of non-dominant backgrounds. Ngo presents this book as a path forward, showcasing how the Hmong community is challenging these narratives and provides a glimpse at what is possible when we tune into the experiences and knowledges that are already held in our communities.
Grounded in a complex theory of re-membering involving re-storytelling, resurgence, and refusal, Ngo offers that we can interrupt and decolonize hegemonic curriculum and pedagogy. Re-storytelling follows critical race theory’s calls for counterstorytelling that can challenge common deficit narratives and the “neutral meritocracy of educational institutions” (p. 9). Resurgence is used to describe how centering families and communities can be empowering as it shifts away from the settler colonial state. Refusal is a critique that is “hopeful and willful” (p. 11), rejecting the individualism perpetuated in schools and foregrounds the importance of relationships. The theory of re-membering permeates Ngo’s approach to data collection and her interpretation of the data as she intentionally centers the knowledges and experiences of the Hmong community alongside her critique of the coloniality of schools.
Informed by ethnographic data collected over the course of two years at an urban high school in a city with the largest Hmong concentration in the U.S., Ngo leverages her critical lens throughout the book to interpret and analyze the experiences, conversations, and interviews gathered. Throughout, Ngo makes visible the everyday experiences of Hmong students and families by immersing herself in the school and community and centering their voices and experiences. Her positionality as a Vietnamese refugee serves as a basis of trust with participants as she shares the experience of war and displacement with Hmong Americans. Through field notes of events, individual interviews and document analysis with Hmong students, parents, and community leaders as well as Hmong and non-Hmong “staffulty” (a term Ngo coins for all school staff members that recognizes their individual contributions to the schooling environment) Ngo collects data both within and beyond the school, illustrating the deep interconnection between schools and their communities.
The book is thoughtfully laid out into three sections that guide the reader through a captivating and intellectual journey, grappling with how schools operate as a colonial entity and toward schools as a site of resurgence and possibility. The first section, “Recognizing the Epistemic Injustice of Education,” illuminates the tensions many immigrant and non-dominant communities face: the divide and subtractive nature between home and school. Her seamless integration of narratives from Hmong students and parents grappling with this tension and her critical analysis reveals how schooling practices often contribute to cultural erasure while also foregrounding the resilience of Hmong families who strive to maintain their values within oppressive systems. In the second section, “(En)countering Hegemonic Narratives,” Ngo deepens this critique by examining how Hmong students, raised amidst American ideals of individualism and material success, clash with the collectivist and interdependent cultural practices that have served as a means of survival for their families. Particularly striking is her reframing of the so-called teenage marriage “problem,” often viewed by outsiders as gender repression as Hmong girls may marry before finishing high school. Through transcriptions from Hmong community leaders, these practices are shown to be situated within broader systems of cultural racism and structural inequity while also reframing it as a method of agency for Hmong girls. This nuanced treatment of a deeply contested topic highlights Ngo’s skill to humanize complex issues with empathy and depth, without resorting to romanticization. The final section, “Claiming Culture,” offers a sense of hope and possibility. Through her exploration of the Hmong culture club’s annual show at the high school and community organizing efforts for representation in schools, Ngo demonstrates how education can be a site of refusal and renewal. These chapters balance critical engagement with marginalization and erasure alongside the possibilities of cultural resurgence, embodying the refusal central to Ngo’s theory of re-membering and offering renewed hope for centering Hmong stories and knowledge in education.
Re-membering Culture offers a powerful, layered analysis to the hegemonic and colonial structures embedded in schooling, and gives readers a brief taste of transformation at both the micro and macro levels. Ngo provides educators, particularly those within K-12 systems, with a critical lens to examine how colonialism is reproduced throughout everyday school practices while also envisioning possibilities for confronting and disrupting these through culturally sustaining practices that center cultural knowledges and lived experiences. Educational leaders, in particular, can learn from the ways Hmong families challenge dominant narratives and advocate for their place, underlining the importance of working alongside community members instead of reigning over them. This book also provides educational researchers with a compelling analytical framework that connects the colonial project of schools to the ongoing processes of cultural dismemberment and the possibilities of re-membering.
As a biracial Hmong educational scholar, I found Re-membering Culture deeply resonant in its exploration of the tensions between confronting the hegemonic narratives of Hmong disposability and envisioning cultural renewal as a pathway toward collective liberation. Ngo’s sharp understanding of how power is situated in schools and functions as a tool of colonialism and imperialism provides a rich analysis of how Hmong students and families are targeted and deemed less than by the dominant society. Rather than pathologizing Hmong culture, this book shifts the discourse toward what can be learned from its values, practices, and ways of knowing rather than what needs to be fixed within it. As Ngo states: Hmong culture “is alive, actively shaped by Hmong Americans on a daily basis” (p. 97). While Ngo provides an analysis that gives context to the structural violence against Hmong in America, it is time for Hmong scholars to continue this work by taking up space, drawing on our cultural knowledges, and recognizing the intersections of our oppressions to shape our future here in the U.S. This book also serves as a broad call for solidarity among oppressed groups, especially in the face of recent direct attacks on our immigrant communities, urging educators and scholars alike to seek what already exists within us to resist and dismantle the individualistic, meritocratic logics upheld in U.S. schooling.
