Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER: In the early 2000s, Hmong Americans from Minneapolis and Saint Paul flocked to a little town called Walnut Grove in southwestern Minnesota. The city is best known for Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote about life in the town. The Hmong immigrants were drawn to farmland, jobs at local factories, and the slower pace of life. But a generation on, the Hmong Americans who came to the region are facing a challenge familiar to other rural Americans. How do you give young people a reason to stay? Jon Collins has more.

TERRY YANG: Yeah, around here is Asian food.

JON COLLINS: The Bubai food store serves all of Walnut Grove's just over 800 residents, half of whom are Hmong descent. Instant mashed potatoes and bratwurst buns share space on the shelves with Thai fish sauce. Wrapped egg rolls sit in a warmer on a counter.

TERRY YANG: I think mostly what the Asian people are needing. Not everything, but part of it. So it's better than nothing.

JON COLLINS: At 63 years old, Terry Yang is ready to take a break. He came to Walnut Grove almost two decades ago and started what is now the only grocery store in town. Yang raised 10 children in Walnut Grove.

TERRY YANG: Make sure they go to school and got their diploma, and then they can go to college. When they finish, they can start their own life anywhere else they wanted to.

JON COLLINS: Yang tried to retire last year. He'd spent his life working for the store while his children grew up. None of them now want to take on the same burdens of running a grocery store.

TERRY YANG: It's time for me to take some time, and visit my kids, and stay with them before time is over.

JON COLLINS: Yang's friend, Loy Woelber, started working as an administrator in the school district in 2001 right as Hmong American families started moving to the area. He still remembers kids and their parents lining up to sign up for school. Woelber, who has German roots, and the Hmong American families connected through their shared rural backgrounds.

LOY WOELBER: For a while there, when I had a bunch of chickens, then I'd-- new families would come, I'd bring them a chicken. It was a welcome gift, and we'd butcher the animal in the morning and be able to have a party in the afternoon, and it was just a lot of fun.

JON COLLINS: But over the last decade, Hmong migration to the town slowed, then sputtered, then all but stopped. Woelber says the population in Walnut Grove and surrounding towns has started, once again, to drain away.

LOY WOELBER: All the men and women in the Hmong community that I got to be around all these years, their kids are all gone. Again, it's kind of come back around, and now we're like everybody else.

JON COLLINS: Woelber knows personally the dilemma faced by Hmong parents, as they watch their children leave for better opportunities. He gets a little choked up thinking about his own family.

LOY WOELBER: My five children have graduated, all from this system. All had an amazing experience because of, here, they're in a little town, and they get to have a multicultural experience. I want them to all go get their careers, but at the same time, I don't want them to leave.

JON COLLINS: At the only gas station in Walnut Grove, 18-year-old Sheila Vang is working behind the lunch counter. She'd like to stay in Walnut Grove. It's safe. She likes that she knows the regulars pulling up to the station on motorcycles. She wants to study marketing a half hour away. After that, she's not sure.

SHEILA VANG: Yeah, it's because the town is so small. I'm kind of worried about finding a job here. So, yeah, I plan to go, probably, to Walmart, look for a job over there because one of my sister lives over there. So, yeah, that's the plan, yeah.

JON COLLINS: Vang says her graduating class is split between those who would prefer to stick around, but like her, face challenges finding work, and those who want to experience life in a bigger city.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LAURA INGALLS WILDER: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I will be telling a part or a fragment of my story here tonight. This is Walnut Grove, a busy, growing village on the edge of civilization.

JON COLLINS: Walnut Grove residents are proud of their small town and its history. They host a yearly pageant in honor of Laura Ingalls Wilder. But even after two and a half decades in the area, Kou Thao has never even been to the pageant. Thao is part of a generation of Hmong Americans who grew up in the area, put down roots with their own families, and have taken on positions of leadership. He serves on the city council of Tracy, Minnesota, next door to Walnut Grove.

KOU THAO: We still have a lot of the elder population here, and I feel like it's important for us younger folks to stick around too for them because all of us can't just uproot and leave here, and then just kind of leave them out here by themselves.

JON COLLINS: More than two decades ago as some of the first young Hmong Americans in the area, Tao and his friend, Peter Thor, would get together to play basketball. Thor, almost 40, is now the assistant principal at Marshall Middle School, about half an hour from Walnut Grove. When Thor's family came to the region in 1992, he didn't have Hmong American role models. He wants to be that example for the kids growing up now.

PETER THOR: My generation was growing up, you didn't know what you could hope for or what you could be because your parents didn't know either. I feel like my generation kind of had to go through all that stuff to kind of just show kids growing up now that, hey, you can kind of do whatever you want to do.

JON COLLINS: Thor's four young children have mixed Hmong and European ancestry. He says, that sort of mixing of cultures has become the norm in the schools.

PETER THOR: We're going to live here for the foreseeable future. It's not like we have a homeland to go back to. This is our homeland. We're Asian-Americans, and we're Minnesotans.

JON COLLINS: There's a mural painted on the brick wall of Terry Yang's grocery in Walnut Grove. It shows a girl in a typical pioneer dress, representing the town's ties to Laura Ingalls Wilder. She's standing next to a girl dressed in traditional Hmong clothing. In a few places, the paint has begun to peel and the colors have faded. Yang knows that things change, including his grocery, which helped sustain Hmong Americans as they moved to the area and is at the heart of what Walnut Grove has become.

TERRY YANG: We built it. We established it. And if no one interested when we don't want to do it, so we just kind of close down or sell it. [LAUGHS]

JON COLLINS: You would like to have someone carry it on, though?

TERRY YANG: Yeah, we would like some.

JON COLLINS: Yang says, people need a grocery store. From Walnut Grove, I'm Jon Collins, MPR News.