Debra Kue draws on family heritage to represent Hmong culture in literature

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Debra Kue is a self-described bookworm. She was an avid reader since early childhood, diving into all sorts of stories. But as she got older, Kue realized she didn’t see herself in the books she was reading. Even stories about young Asian American girls weren’t representative of her experiences and her Hmong American community.

“I came to writing primarily through wanting to hear a voice that actually represented my experiences, which was pretty challenging to find,” Kue said. “I figured if I’m having all of these kinds of questions and searching for something to relate to, I think other people are as well.”

Kue, now a published author and doctoral candidate in English at Syracuse University, ties much of her work back to the experiences of Hmong Americans. Her research connects 19th century literature and transcendentalism with understanding the Hmong American experience.

When she set out to explore Hmong American identities with her doctoral research, Kue knew that many people in the United States didn’t know too much about the history of the Hmong relationship with America. When the U.S. withdrew from the Vietnam War, the communist regimes in that part of Southeast Asia “essentially decreed genocide” on the Hmong people due to their support and work with the U.S. military, Kue said.

The period is often called the Secret War, and resulted in a large refugee population of Hmong people — like Kue’s parents — in the United States, something that Hmong activists want to bring recognition to, Kue said.

“For writing, that research is just living,” Kue said. “My life is the research and the stories I hear from members of the community, whether it’s my parents or my aunts or uncles or cousins.”

It’s not just her academic work where she strives to understand her identity and community better. Kue began writing the poems as a college undergraduate at Grand Valley State University. The poetry started as a personal exploration of her identity as a first-generation Hmong American woman. Kue didn’t start entertaining the idea of publishing her work, though, until professors offered positive feedback and she began winning writing contests with her work.

Kue’s published collection of poems, “Mother Tongue,” was released in 2021 and is currently sold out. Since its publication, Kue said the response she’s received was both incredibly meaningful and unexpected. Readers have reached out to her through Facebook, Instagram and phone calls to tell her how they were able to connect with her writing. She’s visited classrooms where her poetry was assigned as class reading, and the book has even opened windows for her to talk with her parents and other family members about their experiences.

“For years and years, I sat with these poems and I was always very critical of my work as well,” Kue said. “I didn’t know that it could speak to other people, because I only saw it as speaking to myself.”

Her poetry has been taught at SU, as well. Natalie El-Eid, a fifth year doctoral candidate, began incorporating “Mother Tongue” into the Intro to Asian American Literature class she taught. While El-Eid was assembling her syllabus, she wanted to incorporate a variety of examples of Asian American media and forms like novels, poetry and film. So, she turned to Kue’s writing for the poetry unit so that her students could have a chance to interact with a writer.

Most of the media that students used during class came from creators they couldn’t talk to, but since Kue was doctoral candidate at SU, she came in to speak with the students about her work. For the final assignment in the class, students were asked to write about one of the works they had discussed during the semester. Many students, El-Eid said, chose to write about Kue’s poetry.

“It really speaks to the contemporary Asian American experience, particularly the Hmong experience, and Hmong literature is such an emerging thread within Asian American literature more broadly,” El-Eid said.

When El-Eid then took time off from teaching to pursue a fellowship, she passed her syllabus for the course down to the next instructor, Sue-jin Green, another SU graduate student in the English department. Green noticed that in her classes, Kue’s work was sometimes the first poetry students had really engaged with.

Green invited Kue to speak with her class about “Mother Tongue” for both semesters this academic year. Her students not only responded to the poetry, but particularly to being able to meet with Kue and ask her about her experiences working as a published writer.

“I think she is a brilliant writer,” Green said. “She writes with so much heart and passion and humor at times, and in a way that feels very relatable and heartfelt.”

Since publishing “Mother Tongue,” Kue has always valued the interaction she has had with readers. Seeing how others interpreted and valued her work helped her to see that, despite growing up with limited representation of herself and her experiences, she could create something that would resonate with others.

“When you put anything, any kind of work out there, it kind of morphs into something new with every interaction that comes to it,” Kue said. “Every person brings a unique and nuanced approach and interpretation, and I find that to be probably the most beautiful and amazing thing about creating anything, really, is to see how it can speak to other people.”