Country Music Was the Soundtrack of My Hmong Upbringing

For a refugee family in St. Paul, Billy Ray Cyrus and Tanya Tucker provided a window to a different, more Americanized world

Kao Kalia Yang
GEN
Published in
6 min readSep 16, 2020

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Billy Ray Cyrus performing at Fan Fair in Nashville, TN in 1992. Photo: Laura Levine/Getty Images

When I think about country music, I think of a Hmong refugee family on the East Side of St. Paul, Minnesota, huddled in an old house with peeling paint and window…

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