“I was the first Hmong student to attend Yale.”

My parents were farmers—that was the one skill that they had—and farming was a big part of our life. Our whole family, aunts and uncles and cousins, would travel in a pack, getting to the field in the morning before sunrise to pick cucumbers and corn. I can still smell the dew on the cucumber leaves. We would work until the sun went down. At night, after rainstorms, my family would go out into the fields and collect nightshade worms to sell to fishermen.

We were so poor, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I knew I was loved and that I would be taken care of. My parents didn’t speak any English but somehow, they got us into Catholic schools (we follow Hmong traditions, where we practice ancestor worship, but are also Catholic). We went to church, and I had white friends and black friends. That always felt normal. I felt very safe.

When I was in the fifth grade, we moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where my parents opened a Chinese restaurant. They continued to farm—they never owned land, just rented—in order to pay for our private school. In some Hmong families only the boys are educated, but in our family everyone was. My parents were progressive and they wanted us to get a good education so we would not have to rely on physical labor to make a living like they had.

In Hmong culture, food is both the form around which we build community and it’s the glue that cements the community. That’s the skillset many Hmong refugees, who came from rural Laos, came over with. And it’s not a one-person job. You need a community and you need a family. Which is why, I think in the beginning, it was very attractive for large Hmong families.

We’ve had an important impact on Minnesota’s food economy: Hmong farmers, when they started participating in local farmers’ markets in the mid-80s, increased the variety of what was offered—like purple potatoes, lemongrass, Chinese broccoli, and bok choy. They attracted more people—like Somali and Ethiopian migrants and refugees. The farmers’ markets became a microcosm of the Twin Cities, bringing in people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic classes, and that laid a foundation for the local food movement.

There’s a lot of pride in producing food and in having a family business, but it’s physically taxing and the profit margins are low. As a kid, I hated farming. We often fought in the summertime because we were all sleep-deprived and stressed from working two jobs: our day jobs, farming in the evenings, and then selling at farmers markets on weekends. There’s a constant tension between loving your parents and hating farming. I always sought out summer internships and summer-enrichment programs to avoid helping out.

So it’s a bit ironic that I work with farming now.

My parents pushed us all of us (I have six sisters and brothers) to study, and I went to Yale [University], where I studied political science and was the first Hmong student to attend the college. I always thought that once we went to college, we would pay our own way and my parents could stop farming. But they kept farming.