First of its kind audiobook created for Hmong who don't read their native language

NINA MOINI: If you live in the Twin Cities, you probably seen some text, maybe at the library or on a government document, translated into common languages in the state, like Spanish, Somali, or Hmong. But what you may not know is that many Hmong elders do not read or write their native language. It's a language with a really strong oral tradition.

Well, a new audiobook out this month aims to meet Hmong listeners where they're at. It's one of the few English books translated into Hmong and recorded in Hmong. And the book is about a Hmong immigrant.

It's called The Hungry Season-- A Journey of War, Love, and Survival. Its author is Lisa Hamilton. Welcome, Lisa.

LISA HAMILTON: Hi. Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: Oh, thanks for being here. And Bee Vang-Moua is the director of the Hmong language program at the University of Minnesota. And she translated the book. Thank you for joining us, professor.

BEE VANG-MOUA: Hi. Hello. [NON-ENGLISH]

NINA MOINI: Well, let's start with you, Lisa. So tell me a little bit about this book. You followed a woman named Ia Moua. Tell me about her life.

LISA HAMILTON: Ia Moua was born in Laos just as the American sponsored war there really heated up and never cooled down until long after, in fact, the Americans left and communities like hers were ripped apart, displaced, and, ultimately, many of them were displaced out of the country into refugee camps and then, ultimately, to the United States. Ia's family ended up in Fresno, California, and that's where I had met her. The book tells the story of her life, really, from birth through wartime, through the refugee camps, and into the very new and different life that she made for herself in Fresno, California.

NINA MOINI: Lisa, why did you want to write this book?

LISA HAMILTON: Well, I actually started out writing a book about rice. I'm traditionally an agricultural journalist. I tell the stories of farmers in the United States. And, as I was looking for stories to tell about rice, my path crossed Ia's.

And pretty much from the moment that I met her, the book became about her. Her life is compelling. Her person is compelling. She, right from the first day I met her, told me, I have some stories to tell. And as soon as she started telling them to me, I felt that the world should hear them. And so I became the medium for that.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Sometimes as a writer, you see a story that just has a sparkle around it, and you just know that you want to be a part of telling it. So tell me about the decision to turn this into an audio book in Hmong.

LISA HAMILTON: Well, as you mentioned, a large portion of the Hmong elder community doesn't speak or read English. Ia is among them. The reporting that I did for the book, which took place over five years, 300-plus hours of interviews, it was all conducted through a professional interpreter, because I do not speak Hmong. Ia does not speak English. And so that's a whole separate interview.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely.

LISA HAMILTON: But what happened when I was nearing completion of the book, we started to think about, how is Ia going to read the book? And through long conversations with the interpreter, Ia, and me, we realized that, really, the only way for her to truly read this book as it was written would be to translate it into Hmong and record it as an audiobook.

And I promised Ia that I would do that. Now, at the time when I promised her that, I didn't realize that this had, essentially, never been done before. There's, to my knowledge, only one other full length work of literature that has been translated from English to Hmong, and that is the Bible. And so, really, what Bee and I, as her partner, ended up doing was really uncharted territory.

NINA MOINI: Well, Bee, that is where you come in. So tell me why it's important for you to have a book that is not only translated into Hmong, but available in audiobook form?

BEE VANG-MOUA: Yeah. When the call out for the translation came through, I actually took time to think about it to see if this was something I had the time to do, because, as Lisa mentioned, translating a full length book or novel that's already been published from English to Hmong has not really been done before, aside from the Bible, which we had talked about. So I thought about that.

But, as I teach Hmong and I work, because Hmong is a very diverse group of people as well, my background is also in ethnic studies and diversity, inclusivity. And I've always done work around, how do we give language access to folks who cannot access the information?

So even as we translate many, many materials into Hmong in the community, whether it's for Department of Health or anything else, elders very often cannot access that material still because they can't read Hmong. So, of course, when Lisa talked about having the audio book, I just jumped at that. And I loved the whole process. And I loved the whole idea and how much thought Lisa has put into making sure that Ia is also able to share in on the story. And there are also multiple characters within the stories, too, that will also be able to enjoy the audiobook. So I'm really excited about that.

NINA MOINI: Well, yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hear a bit about what this audiobook sounds like. Let's listen.

BEE VANG-MOUA: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

NINA MOINI: Bee, tell me what we just heard, and maybe a bit more about what work on this book looked like.

BEE VANG-MOUA: Yeah. So I love this part. Well, OK, I love many parts. It's talking about the grandmother rice, and how it came to be, and how important it is. And yet, it's been given by this person to this person to this person. And there's a part in there that we didn't get to hear yet, but how it brings the farmer home, right?

And so that part really was also the first part of this book that I was introduced to. And I absolutely fell in love with it right away. It continues to be one of my favorite parts.

NINA MOINI: Is there a difference between how this book was translated from English to Hmong on the page versus Hmong in the spoken form?

BEE VANG-MOUA: Yes. So Hmong, we practice generations of oral traditions. And so the Romanized phonetic alphabet that we use to write into spell Hmong words today was only created in the early-1950s. And so very few people can read and write it well.

And then especially the elders are not able to understand it or to read it well. But they have a very complex and beautiful way of speaking, telling stories. And so, very often, because Hmong is also tonal with seven tones, very often where commas are, where pauses need to be cannot be dictated into the written form.

And so as I was translating, I had to really process and think about where the pauses might be or how to say certain things that Lisa had written into her book, in such a beautiful way, but there were times when I had to think about, OK, I love the way Lisa wrote this in English, but how would we convey this exact same message in Hmong?

And when I was done with translating it, when we started to record the audiobook, there were certain times when myself and Li-- Li Li, who was the engineer behind the audio recording-- we were like, hmm, that doesn't sound right. It looks good on paper, but I think we have to reword that and convey the message a little differently.

NINA MOINI: Oh, that's so interesting. And then were there particular words in English that don't translate well, so you had to come up with a poetic translation?

BEE VANG-MOUA: Yeah. There was one that I loved talking to Lisa about about the marshmallow, because we don't have the word for "marshmallow." And so I had to convey the closest emotion, and smell, and flavors around a marshmallow. And so I said it was like toasted honey, right?

NINA MOINI: Oh.

BEE VANG-MOUA: And then there were other words-- I think one more, Lisa, I don't think I've mentioned this one to you, but Li and I laughed when we got to this one-- penguin. So we don't have a word for penguin.

NINA MOINI: Sure.

BEE VANG-MOUA: And so I had to phonetically write out "penguin." And we had so much fun. I had a lot of fun translating it. And Li and I had a great time recording this together.

NINA MOINI: I love that. Go ahead, Lisa.

LISA HAMILTON: I was just going to say, I think what's really inspiring about the way that Bee approached her translation and then also the recording is that, and this sort of additional layer of translation that she did in the recording, is that her objective there was not just to find the closest relative to that word in the other language. It was to convey the message.

So the marshmallow refers to the smell of rice that Ia has grown. I think we maybe failed to mention that she's a rice farmer in Fresno, growing Hmong rice in Fresno-- itself quite a feat.

But there is a moment when she is roasting the rice in this particular traditional way that produces this incredible smell that, in fact, the point of the paragraph is that no one can quite put the smell into words. And one of the ways that it's described is smelling like toasted marshmallows. Of course, there aren't marshmallows in traditional Hmong cuisine.

NINA MOINI: Right.

LISA HAMILTON: But what Bee did was not figure out how to say "marshmallow," but figure out how to convey the essence of the words and the deeper meaning about that rice. And that's what's so exciting to me about what Bee has done here-- not take my English words and make them Hmong, but really make this story anew in Hmong.

NINA MOINI: Well, final question-- has Ia been able to listen to the audiobook? And what was her reaction?

LISA HAMILTON: Well, not yet because Bee and Li were so fastidious about their work in recording that it took a lot longer than we expected. So we're still working on the production.

Li is hard at work editing and doing quality control. But the plan is for the audiobook to be released next month. And it will be released for free online so that anyone, young or old, Hmong or otherwise, can listen to it, have access to this really profound thing that Bee has created.

NINA MOINI: Well, congratulations. Thank you for telling me about your work. And thanks for talking with me today.

LISA HAMILTON: Thanks.

BEE VANG-MOUA: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: That was Lisa Hamilton and Bee Vang-Moua talking about the book The Hungry Season-- A Journey of War, Love, and Survival.