Sib Ntsib Dua

Hello, I am Gena Vang and my senior show is called Sib Ntsib Dua which means ‘meet again’ in Hmong. It is equivalent to saying goodbye but in Hmong there is no way to say goodbye. I created three large screen prints of old photos of my mother and her family when they first immigrated to America. As well as tufting 3 rugs to spell out the title. 

The intention behind Sib Ntsib Dua is about finding yourself again.

Asia was home to Hmong people for so long but due to the Vietnam War it caused them to flee half way across the world to gain their freedom once again. Hmong people being lost throughout history created this dystopian feeling of not knowing where we belong. And now that a huge population of Hmong people have come to America the traditions and beliefs have changed and it feels like we are straying away from what the ancestors wanted. But with Sib Ntsib Dua I wanted to highlight those emotions while also realizing that change in traditions and beliefs cannot strip us of our identity. Because regardless of how many times we have been killed off, or being historically erased, Hmong people are resilient. Just because we are historically lost does not mean we are lost in the time to come. 

While making this work I didn’t know where to begin. There was so much to unpack and to think about. I wanted to do something that I have personally experienced and I didn’t want to hold these emotions in a negative light but wanted to give them a light. So I took a class on how the Vietnam War affected Southeast Asians and for the first time in my educational career there was a class talking about me? My people? My people who have been erased from history. It helped to know what happened to my people, and also helped hearing other people’s stories. From there I sent out a survey to other Hmong-American’s to see if they felt the same way. I got a lot of similar responses as well as responses that differed from mine. And from there I created this. I experimented a lot with color and sizing because I wanted it to still resemble the Hmong people so I picked colors you would see in traditional hmong clothes. And with the rugs I created, I combined the english alphabet with laotian script to put a further emphasis on the estrangement. 

After making this I felt a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. For so long I bottled emotions about not feeling like I belonged and now that I am very publicly voicing it, it feels scary but also relieving. Knowing that people who took my survey voiced their thoughts about this was eye-opening and reassuring. I know that I am not alone in my emotions, that they are valid and I feel like this helped me process it and to stop questioning myself.