Staring Down the Tiger

[nannah]

This is a fantastic anthology of works about Hmong female leaders in America, the women reclaiming the insult tsov tom or “tigerbite”, traditionally meaning a child who’s stupid enough to approach a tiger and get bitten. In these works, women show that they’re brave enough to stare down the tiger.

Content warnings:
- domestic abuse
- sexism
- substance addiction
- suicide mention
- infanticide
- racism
- genocide

Representation:
- everyone in these works is Hmong

Staring Down the Tiger is a collection of thirty-three short stories, poems, essays, and song lyrics in five parts: A Woman’s Journey, Ua Siab Ntev (Be Patient), Grand(Mothers) We Love, Moving Through Cultures, and Breaking Barriers. The works are diverse, showing different kinds of strong women and different perspectives. The ones that stood out to me the most were The Grandmothers We Love by Boonmee Yang, The Back of the Line by Dee Kong, and The Reasons We Stand by Boonmee Yang--but every poem and story was excellent and beautifully written.

This was an excellent and poignant look into Hmong culture. Before reading this, my knowledge of what I now know as the Secret War could have stretched to a sentence at most. This book covers that and more through the effects it had on Hmong women. It has stories about grandmothers and mothers escaping Laos after the Secret War, it has stories about mothers raising children in the US while trying to deal with the trauma of the war, and it has stories of girls trying to fit into the US culture while not initially understanding their mothers’ (and their own) culture.

In the preface it’s mentioned that this is the second publication that Hnub Tshiab (Hmong Women Achieving Together) has created, but Goodreads doesn’t have anything linked here, so I’ll have to look around. I'd love to read more.