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.This trend may signal a gendered shift in the creation of surnames.Generation after generation, a legend has been passed down that details how the Hmong people and the patri-clans came to be(Leepreecha 2001).There are various versions of this story, but the basic theme is much the same.20 A great flood came to the Earth and the only living beings remaining were a Hmong brother and sister who were saved by hiding in a large drum.Alarmed and distraught by their situation, they didn’t know what to do.The brother suggested to his sister that they marry so they might have children to repopulate the earth.“I can’t marry you, you are my brother,” she said.He persisted and she refused.After a time, the sister suggested a contest to settle their impasse.They agreed to roll stones down from the mountain-top and if the stones had managed to go back up the mountain and were lying together by morning, the sister agreed she would marry her brother.The brother devised a plan to trick his sister and so that night as she slept, he carried both stones to the mountaintop and laid them together.Upon seeing the stones together the next morning, she kept her word and agreed to marry her brother.The wife gave birth after some time, but the creature was deformed without a head or legs and resembled a pumpkin.They asked Saub (the Creator) what to do next and he advised them to cut the creature to pieces and throw the parts around their house and farm and so they did.When they awoke the next morning, they found little huts had appeared in all those locations.They were delighted when they saw a human couple in each hut! Each of the couples had a name that sounded like or symbolized the place from which they had emerged.For example, the Vang (Vaj) patri-clan came from the garden (vaj).When the couple asked Saub what they should do next, he said they should perform wedding rites for each of the couples, and never allow their descendents to marry people from their own patri-clan.I concur with Leepreecha (2001) that the origin folktale creates a sentiment of shared descent and conceptually binds all Hmong people 20 I borrow from Leepreecha (2001), Donnelly (1994), and the elder storyteller in the film Great Branches New Roots: the Hmong Family, St.Paul, MN: Hmong Film Project (1983), to construct the oral history here.50Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugeestogether.The origin story also sanctions Hmong separation into descent groups whose members may not intermarry, thus establishing a basis for kin categories within Hmong society.A uniquely Hmong schema of collective identity and kinship identification emerges when the oral history is combined with other practices like using correct kin terms in social conversations, and linking one’s family to all other clans by tracing kinship ties.In daily life, relatedness also materializes as a vital social force.The extended patri-clan ( xeem) and the lineage system ( caj ces) form the basis of Hmong social organization and family life (Dunnigan 1982).Lineage and sub-lineage groups are important markers of identity and relatedness and are often much more relevant in people’s daily lives than xeem affiliation.Everyday decisions that many Americans think of as falling in the realm of the nuclear family (parents and children) come under the decision-making powers of extended Hmong families or even larger extended family groups.The tsev neeg (house family) might include a man, his wife or wives, and his sons and their wives and children (Koltyk 1998:39).Occasionally thesedecisions will be passed on to the pawg neeg (a sub-lineage grouping), which may have formed an entire village in Laos, but today refers to a group.This assembly is composed of several households that share close agnatic ties with one another and perhaps paternal grandparents.On occasion the group may even include a husband’s affines, the patrilineal relatives of his wife who are called the neejtsa.In terms of residential arrangements, many Hmong people still live in close proximity to members from the male side of the family (patrilocal residence).In a study of a multi-ethnic urban tenement in Chicago, Dwight Conquergood found only the Hmong wanted a degree ofcloseness that required “side-by-side proximity” to relatives(1992:124).Marriage (Kev Sib Yuav)Marriage is considered vital in every Hmong person’s life and is the basis for establishing ties with other family groups
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