Detail of a map by Carto-Graphics, 1995.

It is difficult to overstate the culture shock experienced by Hmong resettling in the United States. Packing horrible memories of war and flight, they left behind squalid refugee camps to begin new lives in a highly industrialized, technologically driven consumer society. They faced significant linguistic, educational, economic, cultural and racial barriers which created confusing, emharrassing, and even frightening situations in their daily lives. Most had never lived in a house with plumbing or electricity and had little familiarity with common household appliances. Automobiles, telephones, televisions, and computers-icons of modern American life-had remained on the periphery of their experience. With a world view which valued, first and foremost, the welfare of the family and group, Hmong refugees attempted to cultivate the lands of the "rugged individual."

They came in waves beginning in the fall of 1975, cresting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and slowing to a trickle in the 1990s. The migration's long time span required multiple services to assist refugees at various stages of the resettlement experience. In 1995, many Hmong Americans who have obtained training and employment are again self-sufficent. They often have children educated entirely in American schools, children who have little or no memories of Laos. At the same time, other Hmong adults have only recently made the journey to America. Many had spent years in Thai refugee camps, the only home their children had known prior to resettlement. They are just beginning the slow and difficult transition to American life, a journey affecting men and women, elders and children in strikingly different ways.