He was told there would be monsters in America. That’s what the villagers in Laos spoke of: prowling giants and werewolves that would eat you. Lo Neng Kiatoukaysy was not the only Laotian who carried such fears with him to the United States, a place with toilets he didn’t know how to flush, a stove his mom didn’t know how to work, city buses that looked like beasts and an English tutor with a penchant for poking him.
“As a kid,” he recalled recently, “I didn’t like the community at all. I thought that being Hmong was being primitive.… So you are always looking for ways to escape being Hmong.”
Today he sits in his office, the executive director of Milwaukee’s Hmong American Friendship Association (HAFA), as yet uneaten and a little abashed. At 34, his face maintains a deceptively young and cherubic look. Deceptive because he is so far from the frightened 5-year-old boy who, in 1975, crossed the Mekong River with his family in a wobbly canoe, journeyed to a refugee camp in Thailand and, five years later, flew to San Francisco. He has since organized rallies, bent the ears of politicians, dabbled in civil disobedience, grabbed A1 headlines and tapped into revenue founts.
“Primitive” is the word he uses to explain the uninformed fears of his childhood. But though there may not be werewolves in this land, America can devour a poor immigrant. Especially one from Laos. He’s evaded the giant maw and, in the process, sharpened his own teeth on the grass roots of American civics.
After spending a year in Little Rock, Arkansas, Kiatoukaysy and his family moved to Minneapolis in 1981. Still illiterate after middle school, he managed to graduate from high school and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul with a degree in English. He points to an epiphanic moment as a college junior when he was touched by the 1989 film Romero,about the assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. That was a harbinger of his interest in community work after years of growing dispassionate of and progressively detached from the Hmong community.
His first job at a community organization owed mainly to happenstance, but as the group’s only Hmong organizer, he found an outlet that immediately captivated him.
Since taking the reins of the once fraught HAFAin 1996, he has become the chief interface between Milwaukee and its withdrawn, suppressed and fragmented Hmong community, which numbers about 20,000, he says. He has turned down a spot on Gov. Jim Doyle’s roster, passed on far more lucrative jobs in the private sector and waved off the pleas of his community to seek local political office, all so that he can man his perch at the grass-roots organization he helped salvage, overhaul, relocate and cultivate.
His communicative abilities have been most acutely tested in the last year. Last November, when a Hmong deer hunter in northern Wisconsin shot eight other hunters, consequently putting the state’s Hmong population under scrutiny, the media came to Kiatoukaysy to offer perspective and vindication. In February, he helped organize a protest of 600, condemning the fatal police shooting of a mentally ill Hmong man in his West Side home. In these public appearances, he has shown a kind of intestinal fortitude that his community desperately needs but that belies his inner qualms.
“I carry such a heavy weight on my back,” he says, “so that if I make one mistake, there goes my reputation. I carry the whole weight of the Hmong community, and sometimes that’s very difficult.”
HAFAwas mired in a scandal when the then 24-year-old Kiatoukaysy took over. The annual budget, he says, was a paltry $50,000. Board members were abandoning ship. The bookkeeping was in disarray. He sought counsel, finding a network of support at the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee. Given direction, he moved promptly, cleaning house and redoing the books. Most important was his entreating of the city’s Hmongs, to whom he offered aid for reciprocity, part of an effort to overcome the group’s inclination toward intrafamilial clannishness.
HAFA’soperating budget is -currently $1.3 million. With the growth in the Hmong community, politicians have come knocking at the door of its Vliet Street offices, a sight unseen nine years ago. Says Leigh Kunde, Nonprofit Center executive director: “Lo Neng has taken the Hmong American Friendship Association to new heights in terms of services to the community, meeting the needs of new immigrants [and] responding to community issues and concerns that are often broader than HAFA’s own mission.”
Still, old concerns remain, just as new challenges emerge. Kiatoukaysy worries he’s grown too paternalistic and that the community has become too dependent on him. He looks forward to making HAFAself-sufficient so it can continue its work if and when he decides to leave. He has a wife and two children and American dreams of his own. He’s learned he won’t be eaten here. Now he wouldn’t mind taking a bite himself.
