Artist Statement
“The Unknown Known, The Hmong People” is about three stories of how each family immigrated from Laos/Thailand to America. In this book, you will see and read about the struggles these families endured, such as leaving everything in their homeland and coming to America to start over and relearn things and learn another new language. You will feel waves of emotions as you read their stories, and throughout each page, you will see illustrations from each family story. You will see more data about where the Hmong mainly immigrated and why. Everything in this book will be designed using Adobe Illustrator and Procreate. Creating and writing this book has been very important to me because not only am I Hmong, I get to represent the Hmong community and share our stories so others can understand our story and learn a little about who we are. I used to be so ashamed of being Hmong because I’ve dealt with a lot of bullies growing up where not many people knew what Hmong was and would say things like, Go back to your country so I would lie or hide who I was but as I got older, I am embracing who I am and am very proud to be Hmong and to represent a Hmong student at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
