by Staring Down the Tiger- Stories of Hmong American Women (retail) (epub)
Going to college, I was relentless. I continued to take community college courses both online as well as in person during the weekends and during summer and winter breaks. I had petitioned DeVry to allow me to pile on as many classes as I could take based on the prerequisites I had, sometimes as many as thirty-two credit units (or the equivalent of nine classes) in a semester. They begrudgingly allowed it, cautioning that I needed to maintain a certain GPA; otherwise, my privilege of taking so many classes would be revoked.
I made sure I passed all of my classes.
I took out student loans. I applied for scholarships and grants. My parents had dropped everything in Fresno to move to Fremont so that I could go to school without worrying about paying rent, but I used much of my student loans to help.
I took on part-time jobs, one working on campus as an administrative assistant in the registrar’s office; others were paid internships.
For two semesters I also was president of the Hmong Club, its first Hmong woman president. I made the club inclusive, and the intersection of Asian, White, Black, and Latino students in the club made it the most diverse organization on campus. We fundraised, held movie and game nights, and even had an honorary senior banquet to send off the graduating class of Hmong students, whether they were active members or not.
One of my fondest memories was having White, Black, and Hmong students perform a traditional Hmong dance out of appreciation of the Hmong culture. This included ensuring that the performers got suits custom made and tailored for taller, bigger bodies since they weren’t able to just borrow something from a cousin of mine.
It wasn’t the first time I fought for inclusion within stuffy rooms full of much older men who believed in the “good ol’ days,” surrounding themselves with a “boys club” of friends and family to prove their point—and it wouldn’t be the last time. Each time felt like a different world with different rules, all very difficult to navigate, all long uncontested.
Despite harsh criticism from distantly related uncles that I was a “poj laib” (bad girl) for my wildly colored hair and Americanized attitude toward assimilating and accepting assistance from non-Hmong people, I defied their crass comments and let them roll off me like water on feathers. I stayed focused on my goals.
I graduated from DeVry University within six trimesters, which is exactly two years, and walked across the stage to receive my bachelor of science in business administration at the age of seventeen in 2004: the youngest in the school’s entire seventy-plus-year history and the youngest in the Hmong society as I knew it.
But I didn’t want the pomp and circumstance. I just wanted to keep driving forward.
I had a few choices as to what to do next. I could either pursue a master’s degree or go straight into the workforce. I decided that I wanted to do both. I had gotten accepted to begin my master’s in information systems management from DeVry’s Keller Graduate School of Management and also accepted a job in the video game industry as a quality assurance tester and game designer. I had to wait more than a month before I could start working because I had to be eighteen to put in the number of hours expected in the industry.
I thought it would be a regular forty-hour workweek. I ended up working more than eighty hours a week for the six months I was there, in addition to taking four classes for my graduate school.
While the student loans and working part-time had helped to cover some living expenses, once I started working full-time I was finally able to offer my family a more comfortable life, as almost my entire paychecks went to paying rent, utilities, and food. I wanted to give back to the people who believed in me most—my family.
In my first three years in the video game industry, I jumped around to about six different companies, staying for between three to seven months. Because each studio goes through game development cycles, hopping from one company to another, only to return to the previous company the next year, was par for the course and what it takes to make it in the industry. But this instability made for a sour taste in my family’s mouth. Why couldn’t I stay at one company for fifteen years like my parents had? Was I so irresponsible?
Eventually the stress was too much, and my parents moved back to Fresno. By then I was living alone in San Francisco—The City! It was my dream. But sadness clouded my excitement, as single life reflected poorly on my family. I was a disobedient daughter for leaving home before getting married.
Another issue arose: I was also very young. Though I was now two years into my career, having put in the eighty-plus-hour weeks, showing my expertise at adaptability and understanding company needs, surely my request to be considered for an assistant lead role in an attempt at upward mobility wouldn’t fall on deaf ears. Yes, I was nineteen-almost-twenty by this point, but I had an undergraduate degree, was working on a master’s, and knew I showed promise that I could take on more responsibility. My boss shrugged me off. “Oh, you’re way too young for anyone to take you seriously. Can you imagine someone twice your age wanted to listen to you?”
That comment stung. It pierced my heart and wrenched tears from my eyes. Seeing this, my boss abruptly left—“Uh, I have another meeting I have to attend”—and left me in the conference room, sobbing.
I went to the human resources department to decry ageism. I had written up the incident, timestamped and expertly noted each word and reaction. I wanted to let the company know that I wouldn’t allow this setback to stop me from moving forward with my career goals. And where I thought I would be met with hesitation and dismissiveness, I was met with warmth and genuine concern.
My boss was reprimanded. The HR team who handled my case told me that my boss was sent for sensitivity training; they followed up with me to ensure that my boss didn’t retaliate against me. I felt that this group of women knew what discrimination in the workforce looked like. But the damage had already been done.
When I applied for an assistant lead position, my request for transfer was denied. I soon put in my two-week letter of resignation. As I was walking out the door, the division’s vice president pulled me aside for a quick coffee chat. She wanted to let me know that if I changed my mind, she would hire me for an administrative role under her. I thanked her and declined. My heart was in game development work.
I finally had my big break: the next company I went to was a video game start-up working on massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs. I had bosses who championed my growth. They took me under their wing and mentored me. I was able to go from lead quality assurance tester to project coordinator under marketing and public relations. I ran marketing communications, gave demos of the game, produced media assets, hosted press events. I was finally being recognized for the work I was capable of doing because I had people who believed in me.
And yet, I was plagued by another glaring issue. The industry was male dominated, and I was a (1) young, (2) female, (3) Asian minority. What some would call “A Triple Threat.” I had no place telling people much older than me what to do. Certainly a woman couldn’t understand the complexity of the technology that was being created to run the game. Was I even from the United States? I wouldn’t be able to understand our older, male, American target audience.
I was baffled.
I would sit in incredibly important strategic meetings and male engineers would look right through me as if I wasn’t even there. Or I was relegated to being the notetaker, fetching water and drinks from the break room, making photocopies or printouts of the design documents we were reviewing. The oppression of the industry towered over me, loomed over me, ready to topple my existence and suffocate me.
And then the company went bankrupt. This happened often. Or the company was purchased and everyone was let go.
Then you would have to reset at a totally new company. Maybe you’d see familiar faces of those you’d worked with from ghost game studios that disappeared like the vaporware technology they were trying to create. But it always happened the same way.
They would start with the fi
rst few rounds of layoffs. A mandatory “all-hands” meeting for half of the company. The other half was in a different mandatory all-hands meeting. Of course, the first half were the ones who were let go, usually with no severance. Maybe you could get your accrued vacation paid out to you. The second all-hands meeting would be reassurance that they were just trimming the fat and that this was the team they were going to move forward with. Except they miscalculated, and then they had to do a second round of layoffs. The setup was the same: two separate mandatory all hands for two different groups. And this process would continue until it was just the last few standing as the assets were liquidated, and the few remaining IT members would scrub hard drives of intellectual property before sending the hardware to consignment shops.
Discarded humans, discarded technology.
I became very good at recognizing this pattern and thought I would be able to avoid this scenario playing out for the people in my department.
By the time I was twenty-five, I was employed by a very well-off Chinese MMO company based out of Beijing. They had a US and a European office so they could expand their market reach. I had managed to work my way into running a department of fifteen individuals: a product manager, three project managers, five quality assurance testers, two front-end web developers, and five designers. We ran the gamut when it came to publishing the games and their various updates in the United States and Europe. We were visionaries when it came to the future of the company.
I remember distinctly when an executive from the Beijing office came to the United States to interview each team and explore how they worked with other Beijing counterparts. I was called out in a meeting that included both my peers and my boss: “Why should we have you in this position when you are duplicating work of someone in Beijing?”
For every question, I had a good, poignant answer. I was articulate. I was calm and decisive. And my boss was completely silent.
I knew he needed me to defend myself because had he shown any sort of loyalty to me, this executive could say that my boss was not someone who could make good hiring decisions and remove him from the equation. But if I was defending myself to an older, Asian male executive, the most they could do was fire me. My boss thought only of himself in that moment, and I felt betrayal for all the thankless work I did for the company.
Yet again, management made bad decisions, which ended up in the same pattern, and my entire team was ripped out from under me; I had no say in the matter. Behind closed doors, executives made decisions based on an arbitrary percentage generated by performance and individual employee contribution to the company with no feedback from anyone.
I put in my two-weeks’ notice. I couldn’t believe the cascading layoffs had happened again, this time under my watch—or so I thought. I beat myself up over the decision, lamenting how I could have tried harder, could have managed upward to my boss and other executives to have a bigger influence. But then I thought, “Why should I feel so guilty about something over which I really had no control?”
Finally, at the age of twenty-eight, I figured that with more than ten years of experience working from entry to running a global division, I could open up my own technology and media company. I named it Tiger Byte Studios, an homage to the Hmong word tsov tom (tigerbite)—reclaiming a curse uttered to us by parents.
Tsov tom is used as a way to bring us down, to denote how we are unintelligent. Only an unintelligent person would approach a tiger and get bit. While tigers are seen in the Hmong culture as dangerous deities, transforming into human forms to lure us away and to infiltrate our huts and family members, it makes sense that tsov tom can be culturally one of the worst things to say to someone.
However, tigers are also seen as powerful and majestic beasts who are protected and highly guarded as special endangered species.
I wanted to use the words as empowerment.
I currently employ a product manager, two software developers, a project manager, three 3-D artists, one 2-D artist, and two quality assurance testers.
We launched one game within the first year of founding the company, created a back-end platform that connects to our player base in real time, are currently working on other mobile video games, and offer other services to the Hmong community such as outreach and education.
Had it not been for more than thirteen years of continuous grinding, I know that I wouldn’t have been as experienced a business owner and leader in the industry as I am now. Without my trials of dealing with ageism, sexism, and poor management decisions, I could not begin to comprehend how to be a good mentor and leader.
Through my career I have tried to foster inclusion and diversity, because in the end, we should all strive to leave someone with more than when we found them. We need to be the change we want to see. For me, that meant seeking out other women from the industry via LinkedIn, industry meetups, and attending conferences.
If you had told fifteen-year-old Renee that she would grow to become the type of person who received inquiries from prospective mentees, requests to be a special guest speaker at conference plenary panels, or proposals to lead workshops on video game career development, she probably would have been speechless and humbled to think that such opportunities could be available. With each opportunity, I remind myself that the sweat from the hard work of breaking worlds will help to create the path for others to follow.
Renee Ya grew up in Fresno, California. An accomplished creative type, she has published photography pieces in the Smithsonian’s “On This Day” web series, contributed poetry and prose to several web magazines, and is the secretary of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She spends her days vanquishing evil spirits in the name of the moon in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she’s not saving the world, she’s a product manager in the video game industry by trade and mother to the next feisty generation of women warriors. Learn more at reneeya.com or follow her on Twitter @dnldreams.
Impossible Dream
Gaosong V. Heu
In the spring of 2017, Gaosong Vang Heu’s parents decided it was time to throw Gaosong a graduation party. Despite being two years out of school, Gaosong spent several nights tossing and turning, spending every minute up until the party trying to capture her journey as a Hmong American woman in higher education and in the arts. Gaosong V. Heu gave a speech and performance on June 24, 2017, at White Dragon Hall in Maple-wood, Minnesota, in celebration of the college graduations of her and her brother, Dr. Fue Vang.
Ntawm no, kuv lub npe hus uas Nkauj Ntxhoo Vaj Hawj.
(My name is Gaosong Vang Heu.)
Ua ntej, kuv xav ua tsaug rau tag nrog kuv tsev neeg, cov tub ntxhais khiav dej num thiab ib tsoom phooj ywg sawv daws.
(Before I begin, I want to give thanks to everyone in my family, anyone who helped put this party together, and all of my friends.)
Yog tsis muaj nej tag nrog koom siab koom ntsws los txhawb peb lub rooj ua koob tsheej no, kuv thiab kuv tus nus yeej tsis muaj siab los hais lus raus saum lub sam thiaj hnub no.
(If you all did not come together as one to help support this celebration, my brother and I would not have the courage to come to this stage and speak today.)
Tshwj xeeb tshaj plaws, kuv xav hais ua tsaug rau kuv tus Txiv Mas Hawj, thiab kuv Niam Pog Txiv Yawg Txawj Liag Hawj.
(Most importantly, I want to say thank you to my husband, Marc Heu, and my father- and mother-in-law, Vincent and Elizabeth Heu.)
Nkawv tuaj tsis tau hnub no vim nkawv nyob rau French Guiana.
(They couldn’t be here today because they live in French Guiana.)
Tiamsis, txawm neb nyob kev dev los, lub siab nyob ze.
(However, even though they are far, our hearts are near.)
Yog tsis muaj neb hlub thiab txhawb kuv txoj kev kawm ntawv, kuv yeej kawm ntawv tsis tau, thiab kuv yeej kawm tsis tiav.
(If I did not have your love and support in my educational career, I would not have been able to go to school and graduate.)
Neb xa nyiaj rau wb siv, neb coj
kuv thiab Mas mus ua sis rau Fab Kis Teb los, kuv xav hais ua tsaug rau neb txoj kev hlub, thiab kev qhuab qhiab kom kuv thiab Mas mus ua neeg zoo.
(You both sent us money to live, you took Marc and myself to vacation in France. I want to say thank you for your love, and for the ways in which you both continue to teach and inspire us to be better human beings.)
Tsis tas lis ntawv, kuv xav hais ua tsaug rau kuv niam thiab kuv txiv Nom Yeeb Vaj thiab Paj Hawj Vaj.
(Moreover, I want to give thanks to my parents, Nao Ying Vang and Pang Her Vang.)
Txij thaum kuv yog ib tug mi nyuam ntxhais, neb yeej hlub thiab txhawb kuv lub zog.
(Ever since I was a little girl, you loved me and supported my efforts.)
Neb txoj kev hlub thiab tu kuv yug loj hlob, ua ib tug ntxhais muaj txuj ci, txawj ntse, thiab paub los hlub kuv tsev neeg thiab haiv neeg Hmoob.
(Your love and care have nurtured me to adulthood and allowed me to become a woman with talents, with smarts, who knows how to love my family and my Hmong people.)
Yeej tsis muaj lus coj los piav kom nqig siab kuv txoj kev hlub rau neb.
(There are no words to describe how much I love you both.)
Kuv thov kom kuv rov qab yug los ua neb leej ntxhais rau lub neej yav tom ntej.
(I pray that I can be reborn as your daughter once again, in the next life.)
Txuas ntxiv no mus, kuv yuav hais lus Mekas los piav txog kuv lub hom phiaj mus kawm ntawv.
(Furthermore, I will explain in English my inspirations for pursuing higher education.)
The number-one question I am always asked since graduating school is, “What do you do with a theater arts degree?” and I always smile because being a theater artist or artist in general, in this day and age, is difficult. I perform many different jobs and play many different roles because artists are often undervalued, underpaid, and discouraged, often told to “get a real job.” But even more difficult than this is being a Hmong female artist.
