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Chong Moua
Chong Moua is a PhD student in the history department at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. She was the last of her siblings to be born in Laos and came to the
United States with her family as refugees in 1989. She is interested in how Hmong people
create Hmong subjects through the production of cultural artifacts such as oral histories
passed down, writing, literature, art, and political and social organizations. Her
recently completed master's thesis, "Writing Into Being: Constructing the Hmong Subject in
Kao Kalia Yang's 'The Latehomecomer'", explored the ways in which Yang, a Hmong American
woman, constructs a female Hmong subject through the technology of a family memoir
centering around the life of her paternal grandmother. Yang's creation of a female Hmong
subject served to counter a Hmong subject that, through history and recent events that
made regional and national headline in the American media, pathologized "Hmong" as "male"
and "militant." Chong plans to continue her research by looking at how the Hmong subject
can be used as a case study to explore how the figure of the refugee, with its ambiguous
social and political position, can expand our understandings of statelessness and the
processes of belonging and citizenship.
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