By Diana Turnbow, research assistant for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum
Shua Vue and her daughter Xue Lee live in Gentry, Arkansas, located 30 minutes west of Bentonville, Arkansas, home to Walmart headquarters. Their family has been running a poultry farm as independent contractors for Simmons Foods since 2005. They are part of a close-knit community of Hmong families1 that purchased chicken farms in Arkansas and produced breeder or broiler chickens for large food companies. Shua Vue is an expert gardener and cultivates traditional Hmong vegetables and medicinal herbs in her two greenhouses.
Shua Vue and Xue Lee represented the Hmong community from northwest Arkansas in the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s program The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region which was supported by funds from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool. The mother-daughter duo prepared traditional Hmong dishes in the foodways kitchen, participated in panel discussions, and spoke one-on-one with visitors at the festival.
Diana Turnbow, Research Assistant with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, spoke with Xue Lee at the Folklife Festival this summer.
What are some of the challenges of running a commercial poultry farm?
Running a chicken farm is a 365 day, 7 days a week job. No sick time off. No vacation time off. The contracts are usually 10-11 months long, but even when the chickens are moved out, you are only able to take a couple of days off at the most to relax.
Also, you are putting yourself at risk to have long-term health issues going into the area where the hens and roosters are to pick eggs and remove dead chickens. It really has opened my eyes to how our food is produced and grown in the U.S. Especially with livestock.
After so many contracts or flocks, you have to renovate or upgrade your chicken houses. Knowing that we had expensive upgrades coming up, this past March we decided that with the farm completely paid off, we no longer had to run the poultry operation. Now we’re solely growing vegetables and working as farmers’ market vendors.
Can you speak about the Hmong connection to farming, both in Laos and as refugees living in urban areas of the United States?
I’m sure you’ve heard the statement “Food is life” and that is definitely true in Hmong culture. Many Hmong families relied on government assistance when they first arrived in the United States. They were very frugal with their money and found having their own access to vegetables and produce was an important economic choice. They had come from an isolated region of northern Laos where they had to grow their own food to be able to live.
Especially in the Midwest, if they didn’t have land, Hmong families rented land from local farmers to grow and sell vegetables at farmers’ markets. When I was twelve-years-old, I remember my family rented land outside of Green Bay, in this little town called Pulaski. We would plant cucumbers and the farmer would buy them from us. That is how we earned extra money for the family.
Could you tell us about your mother’s greenhouses?
My mom wanted to grow a variety of vegetables so that she could become a farmer’s market vendor. She also grows traditional Hmong vegetables and herbs for medicinal purposes. One of her greenhouses is so big that she has space for flowers.
She grows a traditional banana leaf plant that is really popular in Hmong households. I joke, whenever we visit Wisconsin or Minnesota or even Sacramento, CA you can tell it’s a Hmong house because you can see a lot of banana leaf plants all over.
Could you describe some typical Hmong vegetables and how they are used?
So popular things that you will see are Hmong cucumbers and pumpkins. The cucumbers are long and round. They’re not like the little dill cucumbers. They can grow 1 to 2 feet in length. We cut it in half and then we scrape the inside out into a bowl and add icy cold water and a little bit of sugar. It is the most refreshing thing that we eat in the hot, humid Arkansas summers. Hmong pumpkins are green and smaller than the pumpkins most American know of. We make soup with it. We first boil the pumpkin and let it cool off. Then we add a little bit of sugar, so it’s got a sweet flavoring to it. We eat a lot of pumpkin soup throughout the summer and into the early fall.
How do you and your mother work together to preserve Hmong plant knowledge?
My mom’s second green house is smaller, and it predominantly houses her herbal medicine plants. All of the medicinal plants looks very similar to each other, almost identical, but there is a different Hmong name for each of them.
I don’t have the green thumb that my mom has. I’ve tried growing things and they’ve died very quickly, which is disappointing and discouraging. After being around my mom on the farm, I decided that if I can’t grow it, at least I can learn how to identify and catalogue traditional Hmong plants and herbs. Especially with my dad gone, I feel like I need to do this. If I don’t, someday when my mom is no longer here, I won’t have access to any of this information.
1. The Hmong are an ethnic group from the mountain regions of China, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. They became targets of persecution and mistreatment for aiding the United States in Laos during the war. After escaping to Thailand, the Hmong began immigrating to the United States in 1979. More than 100,000 Hmong settled in urban areas of California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina.
For a brief history of the Hmong people and their communities in Arkansas see the entry in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hmong-4792/.
The 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival received Federal support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.