Sieqv/dorn - An AFAB Family Legacy

“Oix zuqc beu longx-longx nyei,” (you have to wrap it really well) Maa tells me - otherwise, all of the silver will tarnish. Maa began making this suangx-buix just 5-6 years after she left Laos and came to the US as a refugee from the United State’s Secret War in Laos. “I saved up all the money I could, working at factories, cleaning houses… and I bought each piece of silver, one by one, to sew onto the suangx-buix.”

The handmade suangx-buix is a common heirloom that mothers pass on to their daughters/AFAB children when they come of marrying age.  For generations, Iu Mien women have been essential to culture keeping through traditional arts and handicrafts like embroidery. In the US, traditional & cultural gender roles made Iu Mien women and AFAB responsible for learning how to navigate the languages, systems, and culture(s) of the US; thus, their work has been crucial in shaping contemporary and diasporic Iu Mien culture. 

I grew up in a family of mostly women/AFAB. My older sibling and I were raised by our single mother, our great grandmother, and our grandparents during our early childhood. My grandmother - witty & outspoken, assertive, self-sufficient & independent - would be considered an unconventional woman in our culture. While these qualities - traditionally associated with maleness and masculinity - would deem her as an uncouth, unladylike, and undesirable woman in Mien standards, she relied on them to keep herself and her family safe during wartime and to help them escape and survive their journey from the refugee camps to the US.

My mother, my grandparent’s only and adopted child, grew up in the Bay Area during the era of the War on Drugs. At the age of 15, she became a single parent, filling the role of both father & mother to two young children, and son & daughter to my grandparents. Though my mother’s and grandmother’s disposition within the gray areas of traditional Mien gender roles isn’t a unique experience for Iu Mien AFAB, their necessity to transcend gender norms because of their life circumstances was foundational in my upbringing and how I understood my own gender. Two out of three of my mother’s AFAB children are genderqueer, which cannot be a coincidence.