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
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 panes frosted with ice in cold January. I think of my mother and my father and their work as assemblers in the old factories. I think of the snippets of songs they came home with for me and my siblings to translate, our efforts to make sense of our lives in the songs of the white men and women on the radio.
The scent of freshly steamed jasmine rice and the light of the sun wakes me up in the morning. My mother is in the kitchen. From where I’m sleeping on the mattress, in the living room, I can’t see her but I can hear her singing at the sink.
“My achy breaky heart, please don’t tell my heart. I don’t think it’ll understand.”
She repeats herself, pausing in between each word. She’s not following the melody made popular by Billy Ray Cyrus when “Achy Breaky Heart” topped the charts. She has slowed the song down, made everything softer. In her mouth, the words sound Hmong, the soft rise and fall of the tones…
