Being a child of refugees is an identity that you wear so proudly. What were some of the factors that led to your family fleeing Southeast Asia and resettling in Sheboygan, Wisconsin? Did your parents ever talk to you about their refugee experiences?

These questions are so deep and important and I feel like I’m still constantly reflecting on them, even after all these years. Being born and raised in a predominantly white city in a predominantly white state, I felt the pressure of fitting in and so I never really considered digging into my family’s history because I was so caught up in trying to figure out where I belonged that I forgot that a big part of who I am is my own family and their story. So when I was younger, even though my parents were proactive about sharing snippets about their experiences fleeing Laos and finding refuge in Thailand, I took it for granted. 

Then when I went to college and had the freedom to choose the classes I wanted to take and learn more about whatever I wanted, I felt ready to dig into the history of my people. I remember going home to visit my parents during the holiday and asking my parents so many questions: What was it like for you growing up in Laos? What did you eat? What was the social culture? So it wasn’t until my young adulthood, when I was ready, that my parents finally opened up to me about their experiences, and when they themselves were ready to share this information. 

My parents were both born in Laos and after the Vietnam War, they crossed the Mekong River and found refuge in Thailand, living there for about 4-5 years. I remember them telling me stories about the camp, like how if you had to go to the bathroom late at night, you would have to walk across the camp in the dark, not knowing what or who you might run into. Most of my siblings were born in the hills in Laos, one of them was born in the refugee camp, and the last four of us were born here in the States, so I grew up in a very intergenerational household where everyone had their own unique experiences: I consider myself second generation, while the majority of my siblings were born in another country and raised in yet another, also known as 1.5 generation. We all have different relationships with Laos, Thailand, and the U.S., and our distinct experiences and perspectives are also gendered, which pushes us to open each other’s eyes to new points of view. Through storytelling, I have been able to connect deeper with my own immediate family members and learn more about the whole set of experiences that I thankfully didn’t have to go through (directly). 

As someone who was born and raised in Sheboygan and later went to college in nearby Madison, most of your formative years took place in Wisconsin. What was it like for you growing up Hmong American there?

For me, growing up Hmong American in Wisconsin was a little bit scary. Scary in the sense of just never feeling like you belonged. I started to notice it in grade school, or at least recognize that feeling of being othered, but I didn’t understand it. Even though Sheboygan is a predominantly white city, I didn’t notice I was an “other” until some of my classmates would treat me a certain way or say certain things that just didn’t feel right. Then you go to middle school and high school and start to understand why you are being othered. I tried to find my belongingness by going back to my Hmong community and trying to understand “Who am I now?” I went back to feel that comfort of “I’m just like you; you’re just like me. We’re okay. We’re totally normal.” That was my safe space, in that sense. And luckily, there’s a huge Hmong community in Sheboygan, and within that larger community, there are also smaller pockets based around your last name and who you’re connected to, your clan.

But, in terms of being Hmong American, the scariness really came from watching my parents try to make a living in a place that was never ours to begin with. My dad had always wanted to be a teacher, and I remember hearing about how when he was younger, my late grandfather would get angry at my dad for going to school because they needed him to help on the farm. But even after the war, my dad’s dream never came to fruition because he felt the pressure of raising a huge family in a foreign country. He gave up on education to enter the workforce as a blue collar worker at a company where he ultimately stayed for 10+ years. My mom was also a hustler; she took on so many different jobs and started so many businesses, a lot of which failed, but some were successful -- she’s still running one of them today.

So that was my experience as a Hmong American: you work really hard, you know that you’re othered and aren’t welcome in certain spaces, while in others you can slide through and go unnoticed. There were also some spaces that were really welcoming and safe, but those tended to be communities who understood who we are as Hmong people. For example, there were a lot of refugee families in Sheboygan, and there was a pocket of white community members who understood what was going on, and they were supportive. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with everyone.

When we were in middle school and high school, my mom made a concerted effort to get us in touch with our roots and learn what it means to be a Hmong (cisgender) woman. She signed us up for Hmong dance classes, we met and became friends with other Hmong girls in the community, and it was another opportunity outside of the Hmong New Year to wear our traditional clothing and to speak Hmong. This was an intentional environment for us to preserve our culture and for us in the second generation, especially, to understand what it means to have our history, to have the honor of carrying it out. 

It really was college that helped anchor my cultural identity in the context of nation. It wasn’t until then that I was able to learn about Asian communities that weren’t just East Asian, and it was so validating of my existence when I saw my people in a textbook, on PowerPoint presentations. I handpicked a few classes that were actually recommendations from people in the Hmong community, but I also realized that most folks wouldn’t know about these classes unless they knew someone who had already taken them; the classes weren’t effectively marketed. I remember taking a Religious Studies class and how there was a section in the curriculum about Hmong people and Shamanism, and we got to read books like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. 

Were there moments in your life when you felt either ashamed or really proud to be Hmong?

There were so many moments in my life where I either felt ashamed or really proud to be Hmong. The feeling of shame started when I began going to school and being a part of these public spaces where not a lot of people understood what Hmong is and why I speak the language that I do and why I bring the type of dishes that I do. The funny thing (or not so funny actually) is that you remember that, even into your 20s and 30s, because it is seared into your memory. In preschool I remember starting to feel a little bit of shame but I didn’t really understand why -- I was just able to recognize the feeling. Then in elementary school, I was able to put specific experiences and memories to a feeling. Oh yeah, so I shouldn’t bring my mom's packed lunch anymore because now I understand that it bothers people who sit next to me. Okay, I shouldn’t bring papaya salad with tamarind and shrimp paste. It’s such a shame to think that and feel these things, but that was legit how I felt in grade school. On the flip side, one moment I felt proud of being Hmong came about when I started to make friends with other Hmong folks in grade school and we would do things like wear our Hmong clothes on the same day to celebrate Hmong New Year. It was so fun! “Is your mom dressing you up tomorrow?” “Yeah! My mom is! Is yours?” “Okay, great!” But even on that very day, I also remember how we all also felt feelings of shame as we walked down the hallways in our traditional clothing only to have our classmates make fun of us. It was such a weird space to be in, just navigating an environment that welcomes certain facets of you, but not all of you. 

High School and college were when I really started to feel so much pride because I understood more about my culture and my community. I was able to connect more strongly to the elders and learn through their stories how important it is to carry our culture going forward and to wear it proudly. This is who I am and I am not going to apologize for it, and you are either going to accept me for who I am or you’re not. I also had the privilege of getting a higher education; college was such an anchor for me because I was able to put facts behind my feelings, to put names to things.

A huge reason you became interested in nail art was because you were bullied in elementary school, often because you were different in multiple ways from the other students in your class. What are some of your earliest memories of nail art and how did it become a way for you to not only cope with but also empower yourself in an environment that constantly Othered you?

I stumbled across nail art by accident. My dad is a wonderful artist and he really was the one who inspired my interest in the arts. He taught me how to draw stick figures, he’s always drawing peacocks, and he is just overall a very creative person. Both my parents worked a number of blue collar jobs, and my mom in particular, she worked at many different factories through the years but also had side hustles, including one job as a Mary Kay consultant. I remember seeing my mom in her factory clothes every day but when it was the weekend, she would come out with these beautiful permed curls, looking just so amazing. This is my mom...what a model! I remember the red power suit, the lipstick, the hair -- all of this showed me the power of creative expression and how I could really explore my body as a canvas, as a way to further represent who I am. 

At the same time, I was trying to figure out who I was. At home, I felt safe and was able to express myself, but once I stepped outside of the house, it was a different story. I didn’t understand why that was, but I knew that there were certain boundaries that I had to abide by. Also, coming from a big family, I had to fight to spend time with my parents because they were always working. I haven’t told my parents this yet but I used to lie and tell my mom I was sick just so I could stay home and be with her. I have a feeling she knew but she rarely called me out on it. It was during the days I skipped school that I got to see my mom going through her daily routine before going to work at the factory, which included getting everything ready for the weekend, sorting and figuring out which makeup products she was going to sell. That was an opportunity for me to explore all these makeup tools, and of course, sets of nail polish. I remember rummaging through her stuff in the bathroom and finding these bottles of polish, and when I asked my mom if I could play with them, she said yes, as long as I didn’t break anything. All I knew was that I wanted dots on my nails and maybe to paint a poodle -- I had no idea what nail art even was yet -- and so I took some of my mom’s bobby pins, went back to my room, dipped the pins in the polish, and just played around with designs. The next day when I went back to school, my friends would ask me first if I was feeling better (whoops), and then commented on my cool nails. When they found out I did them myself, they asked me to do their nails. Nail art was not only a way for me to express myself, but also to help my classmates express themselves. 

So both my parents played a huge role in influencing my journey in nail art: my dad who is inherently artistic and encouraged my love for the arts, and my mom who gave me the space and the tools to explore my creativity.

Nail art was and is also a way for you to deal with depression. Was there ever a conversation with your family around mental health? 

Honestly, we’re still in conversation. It’s not that depression didn’t exist before it was spoken about, but I feel that finally naming it got people to start realizing that it’s okay and it’s something to be addressed. I started to talk to my parents about my depression when I was in middle school and they responded by saying things like, “Why are you feeling sad? Why are you feeling angry? It’s just life. Deal with it.” But now that my parents are older and they get to see me as an adult, they understand now that my depression wasn’t just a phase I went through as a child. Now I can say, “Mom, Dad. My feelings are valid and I need help,” and we sit down and really talk about it. I think outsourcing help for mental health is still a very new and foreign concept for my family. Also, the resources that are available for mental health, especially in Sheboygan, WI, are still very white, which can be problematic. Not having someone who looks like you or is from your cultural background can create such a disconnect in how you receive the type of support that you need. Even here in a big city like Boston, my roommate just told me about an Excel sheet with a list of POC therapists circulating around town. This is such an awesome resource but it’s sad because it’s not fully accessible, it’s only available if you know the right people who pass it on to you. Understanding this broader context when it comes to my parents helps us see why they still feel scared talking about mental health, especially when we get to the inevitable point in the conversation where we talk about resources and realizing that there aren’t many available that would make one feel safe enough to be vulnerable. I remember how my parents at times would consult a shaman to ask if there was anything in the spirit world affecting me, and they would perform spiritual rituals as a way to help me. I think it is important to remember that the way communities and individuals interpret mental health is very much woven into cultural contexts. I think my family is doing a great job of recognizing mental health, but we have yet to cross the bridge of figuring out what resources we can fully leverage.

In a recent study conducted by the Human Rights Campaign and the University of Connecticut where they spoke to 1,200 young people across the country, they “found that only 19 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander LGBTQ youth said they could ‘definitely’ be themselves at home.” What was it like coming out to your family, especially given the often pervasive anti-LGBTQ views and rhetoric found in the Southeast Asian community?

To be fully transparent, I’m still coming out to all of my family, and it is very interesting to share this experience because I’m currently still going through it. I feel like there are so many of us and so many personalities; there are different approaches to coming out. I’ve come out to a pocket of them, including my immediate family like some of my sisters, both of my brothers, and my mom, all in the past year and a half. The first person I actually came out to was my sister Kimi when we both were in college. We had signed up for an Asian American Studies class together and she gave this presentation on a cisgender Asian American woman from Minnesota who is pansexual. It was the first time that I had ever heard of the word pansexual and when my sister was sharing the definition, I remember thinking, Oh wait. That sounds like me. This presentation was what inspired me to come out to my sister. After class I asked my sister to grab bulgogi at this Korean restaurant in Madison and was just sweating so hard because I was so nervous; I realized that now my younger sister was going to see me in this different light. I kept asking questions about her presentation and slowly Kimi began connecting the dots. When I told her I was pansexual, she pretended like she was surprised and began recommending that I check out some resources such as Shades of Yellow (SoY). The fact that my first experience coming out to a family was positive, it set a precedent for me going forward, giving me more confidence in myself and my sexuality and the courage to come out to others. 

Most of the stories that I’ve heard from peers are after-the-fact and inspired me so much, and hopefully by sharing what it’s like for me as I am currently in the process of coming out will further inspire someone as well. 

Even though my mom knows, I think she has yet to fully understand what it means to be queer. I was dating someone who is trans non-binary and I was trying to tell my mom about this new person I was dating and excited about. I can speak Hmong but my vocabulary is pretty limited, which becomes what we call Hmonglish. I’m speaking in Hmonglish and she’s responding in Hmong, and I’m trying to find these words (which we don’t have the vocabulary for) to talk about the person I was dating at the time. She asked, “Oh, who is he?” The word “nws” in Hmong means they and isn’t gendered so I responded using the nws pronoun: “They are from here,” “They” this and that. I don’t know how she knew, but parents know best, so she noticed how careful I was with my word choices and began asking deeper questions. For instance, she commented on how I had never said that the other person was handsome and followed up by asking, “Who is this girl?” I responded that the person I was dating was not a girl, and you could see her continuing to try and piece it all together. My heart was pounding. Oh shit. This is real. This is happening. I did not plan on coming out to her, especially over the phone, but it happened. 

“Who is this girl?”
“This person is not a girl.”
“Is this person a boy?” 
“No.”
“Is this person trans?”
“Yes.” 

I had no idea that my mom even knew what trans was, but she got quiet. My heart began racing. She’s going to flip out. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was just so scared. This was her only question she had: “So, then how are you going to have babies?” That’s all she cared about -- grandchildren! 

My dad is a whole different story. He will probably be the last person that I come out to, but I’m sure he’ll find out through someone else in the family. He is someone who is serious most of the time and proudly upholds cultural traditions, so I think with him, it will be more white-gloves. The reason I haven’t come out to my dad and a couple of my other siblings yet is because there is so much fear around how our relationships would change: not only how they see me, but also how I see them. I remember getting into a heated argument with one of my siblings about someone I was seeing who is nonbinary and whose pronouns were neither he or she. My sister was not accepting of their pronouns and that made me upset. I felt angry because of the disrespect, but this was my sister, so I tried to be delicate in approaching her and calling her out, but she still blew up, saying she didn’t get it. I didn’t expect her to understand, but I just wanted her to be respectful of the person I was seeing. So while my sister was accepting of me, I came to realize she wasn’t accepting of all of me. 

The coming out process is still so fresh to me but even within this year and a half, it’s been such a relief to be able to share with some of my family members who I am seeing and who I am interested in. I don’t have to hide an important part of my identity and my life. And it’s true, folks in older generations tend to have different expectations, and so in my huge family, there’s an intricacy and delicateness of having to be able to navigate different generations. It’s wild now to be able to text one of my older siblings a photo of a girl I was digging and us talking about how amazing she is -- it blows my mind because before I could only share these things if I was in a relationship with a cisgender man. 

I’ve been in Boston for three years, but it wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that I was able to fully come out and feel like I could be myself. So as I was and am coming out, the resources I relied on came from my community here in Boston. There wasn’t a particular organization I turned to, but rather my friends here who are mostly QTPOC folks and part of different organizations who helped me navigate these conversations and understand my self worth. Learning from them and the resources they used really helped me. Everything is still new to me so if any of you have any resources to share, please let me know! 

When you were in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you started a “pro-self-esteem” movement where you created space for women from your campus to come together and have these open and honest conversations about beauty and beauty standards over nail polish sessions. Can you share with us your journey going from someone who struggled to see herself as beautiful to someone who learned to redefine beauty on their own terms?

In high school, I was able to more clearly recognize the boundaries and limitations of who I was in public versus private spaces; I felt really depressed about it. A lot of that fed into my ideas of self worth, self love, understanding of myself, and yes, beauty. I remember feeling empty and angry because I wasn’t able to really piece together my experiences of feeling uncomfortable or left out: from grade school when I had to learn that there are spaces I can and cannot be a part of, to middle school where racism became very clear, and to high school when I had to surrender because you are just trying to get by. 

But in college, though I was still exhausted, I also felt re-energized because I could totally reinvent myself in a way that I had always envisioned myself to be. College campuses are marketed as an environment of opportunity with all the clubs, people to meet, and countless ways to discover yourself, and I truly took advantage of all these things when I went to UW-Madison. There is something so magical and powerful about being in an environment where your educator is encouraging vulnerability, when your classmates start to speak up and you realize that it’s okay to be human, that your anger and sadness and happiness is valid. I recognized that I had been feeling certain ways about certain things, such as why I didn’t feel beautiful; no matter how often your friends and family tell you you are beautiful, you don’t feel it, and I wanted to know what it would mean to understand it for myself. And when I started opening up to friends I made on campus, I found out that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. We would have these girls’ nights where I invited some friends over to my tiny campus apartment to get to know each other, share what makes us feel beautiful, and create this environment where we felt safe and divine. We were able to have these deep conversations about things like where do we find our self-worth in this brand new environment, what makes us feel beautiful now that we’re becoming young adults, who do we want to be? And on top of food and drink, we also asked that everyone bring their favorite nail polish. Going back to my memory of me rummaging through my mom’s nail polish collection, I thought it would be a nice way to build community: you bring a polish to swap, I’ll supply the nail art tools. Over time it was this organic growth of people, structure, intentionality, and opportunities to express oneself into the safe space. Pro-self-esteem was a term that was coined through these gatherings - supporting the growth of your own and each other’s self-esteem.

During my senior year in college, I injured myself by tearing my meniscus in three places. With my parents always working and trying to shelter us from outside influences, they also didn’t want us to get involved in extracurricular activities, especially ones that cost money. I would forge my parents’ signatures on all my permission slips because I was not going to miss out an opportunity to hang out with all my friends outside of the classroom, and I did the same for all the sports and activities I wanted to do like wrestling and flag football. I flew under the radar for a long time, at least until high school when I had to be gone for a weekend for a competition or I needed money for the hotel. Through it all however, I gained this mentality where whenever I got hurt, I would never tell my parents because I didn’t want them to worry. The downfall of this is that when I had serious injuries, like when I injured my knee on a toe touch in dance practice but didn’t do anything about it, only to go to my wrestling practice and gym class and make everything worse. I remember sitting in the nurse’s office and them asking if they wanted me to call my parents. I responded, “No, I’m fine. I’ll just call them later. But I feel fine!” even though my knee was clearly swollen. Then fast forward to my last semester in college. That’s how long I ignored these health symptoms because then I would have to unveil the truth after all these years. My parents freaked out when I told them about my injury, but I had to tell them the truth. My mom said she knew because I did invite her to one wrestling match before, but no one had ever told my dad. 

But knee surgery meant that I had to stay on the couch for the whole summer -- I could not go anywhere. Here I was again, feeling so depressed, lonely, hopeless. It was even harder when I had to watch all my friends graduate without me because I couldn’t take my exams. It was a horrible semester for me. So with my ass on the couch, an ice pack machine, and a laptop, I decided to keep adding to my beauty blog and trying my best to stay engaged and inspired. One day I saw an ad for the Sally Hansen’s I Heart Nail Art competition. Because I was a beauty blogger at the time, I received the opportunity from an agency to participate: they would send me a box of nail art tools from Sally Hansen, and in return I had to submit something to the competition. I remember standing on my crutches as I opened the box, thinking to myself that this was a chance for me to redeem myself and to feel some sense of self-worth again. I spent hours painting my nails, something I did in college but didn’t have the time to really focus on it until this moment. I was so nervous because this was the first nail art competition that I had heard of that was open to not only nail art professionals but to everyone, whether you were a licensed nail tech or not. My younger sister Kimi kept encouraging me, and I even had her take my nail art photos to submit. I literally submitted it on the last day of the campaign, and a few weeks later, I received an email from Sally Hansen and the campaign agency telling me that I was one of the 4 winners from the pool of over 16,000 entries. The winners were flown out for a 3-day trip to New York where we also got to check out the Sally Hansen Headquarters. This experience was so incredible because it validated my nail art skills and my ability to throw my name in the hat. 

You are the Founder and CEO of Faceted Beauty, a company that specializes in limited edition, custom-fit, nail art press-ons. Can you tell us more about the origin story of Faceted Beauty, as well as your experience being a Hmong American female entrepreneur?

My parents, and my community at large, are hustlers, doing everything from selling vegetables or clothes to running restaurants or grocery stores. For me, it wasn’t until around 2010 that you began to see a huge rise in the number of young entrepreneurs, many of whom define entrepreneurship as being a unicorn, being part of a start-up, having the means to fly on a jet -- it has been so interesting to see how entrepreneurship has been repackaged for this day and age. In terms of Hmong entrepreneurs, it is so humbling and inspiring to see the number of young Hmong folks selling their art and goods and providing services, hustling in a way that just isn’t celebrated on a Forbes magazine cover. 

As a queer Hmong American, just the fact that I am able to create something is such an honor and a privilege, and to be able to share it with people, it’s heavy; it’s emotional because in the context of my family, I’m doing something that they could only have dreamed of, and I’m carrying the legacy and intentionality of wanting to build something that has a lasting impact not only on my family, but also on the communities I’m a part of and the communities around me. To be able to say this is so daring because we’ve been taught to not be a burden or not to rock the boat, and so this work is emotional to me but it also serves as my ammunition to keep pushing forward, understanding that I am navigating grounds that haven’t been touched before in my family or my community at large. There are so many entrepreneurs in the Hmong community, but in terms of ones who have started companies with the intention of becoming start-ups, I don’t know too many. So I’m trying to start that network.

Tying in the pro-self-esteem movement, the Sally Hansen nail art competition, my cultural and sexual identity -- they all bleed into this nexus of Faceted Beauty. Faceted Beauty is a beauty tech start-up where we believe that beauty goes beyond a one-size-fits-all and that stems from my own lived experience of being a master of none and a jack of all trades. I had to learn how to navigate different spaces and put on different faces depending on the environments I was in, but it never changed who I was -- just showed different facets of myself. Pro-self-esteem really helped me understand that thankfully I am not the only person who does this, but it’s important to remember that it’s still you.  

Beauty ads today don’t fully embrace people or communities. I see a lot of people who fit a certain criteria, maybe height, weight, skin color, age, and more. Faceted Beauty goes beyond that. Truly, beauty is for all ages, all body types, all pronouns, all sexualities. We embrace this through our mission and values and also our products, limited-edition custom-fit press on nails that are delivered right to you. We are direct-to-consumer, and we are diving into subscription-based. Since our products are limited-edition, they are sets of intentionally curated nail art that are on-trend. For the first nail capsule release, there were 15 nail art styles curated by me. For the next capsules going forward, our goal and hope is to invite reputable nail artists to curate these capsules so that customers can be part of this experience and also be able to support the larger nail art community. To get started with Faceted Beauty, all you have to do is “capture your nail DNA,” which means to measure your nails, and submit this information through our online form on the website. After this you can shop the collections and we’ll custom fit your nails just for you. 

Ever since I started Faceted Beauty, I have been constantly finding ways to reach out and to continue building this support system, and one of the things I’m looking into is who are all the Hmong folks in the nail care industry and what is their story, how are they surviving, what are the things they are doing to combat any fear and self-doubt. When I watched the documentary Nailed It by the awesome Adele Pham, I did notice that there were similarities between the Vietnamese and Hmong American nail industry experience: the high number of community members in the industry; the opportunities they provided folks (especially women). I remember when I told my parents I wanted to start my own nail salon, they were supportive because they felt it was a safe and familiar career choice. To be able to learn about the history and context behind nail salons in the U.S. helped me understand how my community and myself fit into the larger legacy of nail care and nail art. 

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