'It allows us to be more non-linear': Literary project shares history of Lao Minnesotans
The organization SEALit Center put on an exhibit called Laomerica 50: Democracy and Diaspora, featuring books, art and artifacts, in the Minneapolis Central Library in 2024.
Courtesy of SEALit Center
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Fifty years ago Wednesday, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army and the U.S. war in Southeast Asia came to an end. In the aftermath, more than three million people to fled their homes in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Many eventually came to the United States and Minnesota. Now, a group of writers is using poetry and creative writing to document the stories of Lao refugees and their descendants over the last 50 years.
Bryan Thao Worra is leading this effort by the SEALit Center, a literary organization, and the Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota. They received one of 14 grants from the Minnesota Historical Society to recognize the state’s Southeast Asian diasporas. Worra is the Lao Minnesotan poet laureate and chair of the community board of the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans.
He joins MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about the project — and why poetry and prose are his chosen tools for working with history.
Editor’s note: this story was corrected to note the grant came from the Minnesota Historical Society, rather than the Minnesota History Center.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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Audio transcript
NINA MOINI: I'm Nina Moini. You're listening to Minnesota Now. 50 years ago today, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, and the US war in Southeast Asia came to an end. It led more than 3 million people to flee their homes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and many eventually came to the United States and Minnesota.
Now a group of writers is using poetry and creative writing to document the stories of Lao refugees and their descendants over the last 50 years. Bryan Thao Worra is leading the effort by the literary organization SEALit Center and the Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota. He's the Lao Minnesota Poet Laureate and Chair of the Community Board of the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans. He joins me now on the line. Thanks so much for being here, Bryan.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Thank you for having us. We're really happy to see you. I'm looking forward to what can share with you today.
NINA MOINI: Thank you so much. So your project, I understand, was one of 14 that received grants from the Minnesota History Center to honor the 50 years of Southeast Asians in Minnesota. Can you tell me a little bit about the books that will be published through this Grant?
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Wow, that's a tall order right from the start. We're so excited about this.
NINA MOINI: Let's dig in.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: I think for [INAUDIBLE] I mean, one of the things that helps many of our listeners to understand or appreciate the enormous significance of this project is that Minnesota has the third-largest Lao refugee population in the United States, in the aftermath of the US secret war that ended in 1973. But things didn't fully wind down until this year, 1975, in December. And so most of our community is located in California, Texas, Minnesota, and Washington State. And yet, in this time, fewer than 50 books have been written by our community, in our own words and on our own terms.
And so what we're looking at now, however, is that there are a number of significant anniversaries, such as this is the 50th anniversary of the SatJaDham Lao Literary Project, which has its roots in California and Minnesota, as this joint effort of the Lao refugee writers who were, 30 years ago in 1995, just young college students and the very first in their families who were starting to take a chance on saying, our stories matter. We don't see ourselves in the history books. We don't see ourselves taught in the classrooms. We don't see ourselves in the newspapers or movies like that.
And so they eventually were working with this new thing called the internet on their college, working off of things like the Usenet user groups, IRC, and just all of these things. And they just wanted to share their poetry, their short stories, occasionally a recipe, just all these memories. And they were just kind of having this almost punk rock, do-it-yourself approach to it all.
No one was really supporting them because, at the time, it was just kind of like, well, who are you? Shouldn't you just be focusing on your grades? Shouldn't you just be focusing on the practical things? How are you going to take care of family? How are you going to take care of your parents, your grandparents, all the other refugees around you, and so on? What does literature have to do with that?
And so many of them went on to help establish many of the nonprofit organizations we have around us today. And in that initial period, they were able to put out, on their own effort, five anthologies of these writers, for example. And it was a self-published project.
I mean, while we had wonderful institutions in Minnesota like Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press, and so on, the Southeast Asian refugees were still a very new commodity out there. And no one was certain. Would anyone buy a book written by a Southeast Asian refugee? Would anyone read a book by-- and then, in one case, one asked, do Southeast Asians even write literature? And we would just kind of taken aback by that and was like, well, yes, yes we do.
And so those are the types of books that we're going to be putting out. We have one collection already in the pipeline, which is-- we're very excited about it. She's the granddaughter of the Hmong general Vang Pao and also the granddaughter of Touby Lyfoung, who was the first Hmong governor of a Lao province, for example, and many other historical roles before the war as well. And she herself went on to become a very prominent community activist, a lawyer, and just draws on all of these questions about what her roots meant to her while she was growing up in France and then moving to Minnesota, and what she learned from the Minnesota writers out here.
NINA MOINI: So that's one example of some of the amazing works that are going to be featured. And I'm curious to know what makes poetry and creative writing in particular a good vehicle for sharing a history of a people in this way.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: It's a great question. We got asked that question ourselves many times, and one of the challenges was that, in normal situations, when you have prose and particularly regular histories, everyone expects it to be very linear, very chronological-- 1975, 1976--
NINA MOINI: Timeline.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: --1977. So the challenge is that many of the refugees who came here also went through some terribly traumatic experiences, retaliation for their role in assisting the United States, for example, punishment for being part of old government, all sorts of these issues out there. And because of the secret nature of the war, which it really depends on when you want to say it started for a community-- was it at the end of 1954 with the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, for example? Is it 1959, when war was formally declared? Was it when the CIA starts coming in?
And in that process, a lot of the records got lost, a lot of these details all blended into one another. Many of the cultures which come in-- Laos isn't monolithic. You're talking about ethnic Lao, [INAUDIBLE] I mean, there's over 160 ethnic groups that are believed to have been involved in that conflict, for example. And we've only studied here a lot of our stories.
But for poetry, it allows us to be a little bit more nonlinear that it'll [AUDIO OUT] our community to engage with if they do remember, that they don't feel quite the same pressure, as it were, to provide a full accounting, to have every gap filled in. It's like if you remember 1984, then talk to me about what you remember from 1984. You remember when you went into the camp in 1976 or '77, then you can talk to me about that. If you just want to focus on a different point-- and we can jump around a little bit more.
NINA MOINI: Sure. So it gives more of a vehicle for creativity. And I'm curious to know the timeline of the project, when it'll be completed, and then what are you hoping that people will take away from these few books and the project as a whole?
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Well, we're hoping, just because there were a couple of bumps and gaps here, trying to figure out if all the offers were fully ready to have their books done. But everyone has turned out to be these wild perfectionists. But we're hoping to have our first books out the door hopefully by the beginning of summer here, so July and August is what we're looking forward to.
And we already know that we have a couple of exhibits lined up the first part of 2026, which we found has been particularly helpful for us for books and to get them into the community in that our approach has been that going into the bookstores, going into the libraries, going into the usual spaces where you think you're going to find books just hasn't been effective, that we instead have taken to exhibitions.
We just finished a pilot project of central library last year, for example, in which we displayed over 150 community objects reflecting 100 years of Southeast Asian history, then including our first 50 years in Minnesota, our first survey of the [INAUDIBLE]. They could examine it. They could read the poems if they wanted to. They could linger on things, or they could just say, no, no, no, it's too much. And they just moved on to the next piece out [INAUDIBLE].
The challenge was that when they didn't see themselves in those bookstores, they didn't know that they wanted to ask for these things. And so we decided that we needed to meet the community where it was. We needed to give them a space to bring people back. And it doesn't have quite the same panache, as it were. If you say, oh yeah, come to me all the way out to this bookstore and see this one tiny book on a bookshelf, it's just-- no, no, no. And so just come see this book. You can take a free copy. And at the same time, you can see all these other images, all these other films that are associated with it. So that's a big thing for it.
But I think one of the other things that we were talking about, about our sense of this is how do we open it up for the community as they see the work that we're putting forward? Oh, I have a freedom to add my voice to this, too, because that's been so important to us as we design this project is to show the demonstration of how we made the transition from a 700-year-old monarchy to democracy, that instead of things coming down from a hierarchy, top down, and this is the version of the truth and the only version of the truth, this is the--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
BRYAN THAO WORRA: --as we pivot. And as we make that pivot-- and America is turning 250 years old next year, so it's a very important conversation on democracy.
NINA MOINI: Absolutely. And I think it's great. Yeah, all Minnesotans can definitely relate. And I'm so glad that you are taking the time to put these stories out there in people's own words, and that they're going to live on. And that's a beautiful thing. Bryan, thank you so much for coming by to Minnesota Now and sharing your work with us. I really appreciate it.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Thank you.
NINA MOINI: Thank you. Take care. That was Bryan Thao Worra, a poet, writer, and activist who chairs the Community Board of the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans.
Now a group of writers is using poetry and creative writing to document the stories of Lao refugees and their descendants over the last 50 years. Bryan Thao Worra is leading the effort by the literary organization SEALit Center and the Lao Assistance Center of Minnesota. He's the Lao Minnesota Poet Laureate and Chair of the Community Board of the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans. He joins me now on the line. Thanks so much for being here, Bryan.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Thank you for having us. We're really happy to see you. I'm looking forward to what can share with you today.
NINA MOINI: Thank you so much. So your project, I understand, was one of 14 that received grants from the Minnesota History Center to honor the 50 years of Southeast Asians in Minnesota. Can you tell me a little bit about the books that will be published through this Grant?
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Wow, that's a tall order right from the start. We're so excited about this.
NINA MOINI: Let's dig in.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: I think for [INAUDIBLE] I mean, one of the things that helps many of our listeners to understand or appreciate the enormous significance of this project is that Minnesota has the third-largest Lao refugee population in the United States, in the aftermath of the US secret war that ended in 1973. But things didn't fully wind down until this year, 1975, in December. And so most of our community is located in California, Texas, Minnesota, and Washington State. And yet, in this time, fewer than 50 books have been written by our community, in our own words and on our own terms.
And so what we're looking at now, however, is that there are a number of significant anniversaries, such as this is the 50th anniversary of the SatJaDham Lao Literary Project, which has its roots in California and Minnesota, as this joint effort of the Lao refugee writers who were, 30 years ago in 1995, just young college students and the very first in their families who were starting to take a chance on saying, our stories matter. We don't see ourselves in the history books. We don't see ourselves taught in the classrooms. We don't see ourselves in the newspapers or movies like that.
And so they eventually were working with this new thing called the internet on their college, working off of things like the Usenet user groups, IRC, and just all of these things. And they just wanted to share their poetry, their short stories, occasionally a recipe, just all these memories. And they were just kind of having this almost punk rock, do-it-yourself approach to it all.
No one was really supporting them because, at the time, it was just kind of like, well, who are you? Shouldn't you just be focusing on your grades? Shouldn't you just be focusing on the practical things? How are you going to take care of family? How are you going to take care of your parents, your grandparents, all the other refugees around you, and so on? What does literature have to do with that?
And so many of them went on to help establish many of the nonprofit organizations we have around us today. And in that initial period, they were able to put out, on their own effort, five anthologies of these writers, for example. And it was a self-published project.
I mean, while we had wonderful institutions in Minnesota like Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press, and so on, the Southeast Asian refugees were still a very new commodity out there. And no one was certain. Would anyone buy a book written by a Southeast Asian refugee? Would anyone read a book by-- and then, in one case, one asked, do Southeast Asians even write literature? And we would just kind of taken aback by that and was like, well, yes, yes we do.
And so those are the types of books that we're going to be putting out. We have one collection already in the pipeline, which is-- we're very excited about it. She's the granddaughter of the Hmong general Vang Pao and also the granddaughter of Touby Lyfoung, who was the first Hmong governor of a Lao province, for example, and many other historical roles before the war as well. And she herself went on to become a very prominent community activist, a lawyer, and just draws on all of these questions about what her roots meant to her while she was growing up in France and then moving to Minnesota, and what she learned from the Minnesota writers out here.
NINA MOINI: So that's one example of some of the amazing works that are going to be featured. And I'm curious to know what makes poetry and creative writing in particular a good vehicle for sharing a history of a people in this way.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: It's a great question. We got asked that question ourselves many times, and one of the challenges was that, in normal situations, when you have prose and particularly regular histories, everyone expects it to be very linear, very chronological-- 1975, 1976--
NINA MOINI: Timeline.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: --1977. So the challenge is that many of the refugees who came here also went through some terribly traumatic experiences, retaliation for their role in assisting the United States, for example, punishment for being part of old government, all sorts of these issues out there. And because of the secret nature of the war, which it really depends on when you want to say it started for a community-- was it at the end of 1954 with the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, for example? Is it 1959, when war was formally declared? Was it when the CIA starts coming in?
And in that process, a lot of the records got lost, a lot of these details all blended into one another. Many of the cultures which come in-- Laos isn't monolithic. You're talking about ethnic Lao, [INAUDIBLE] I mean, there's over 160 ethnic groups that are believed to have been involved in that conflict, for example. And we've only studied here a lot of our stories.
But for poetry, it allows us to be a little bit more nonlinear that it'll [AUDIO OUT] our community to engage with if they do remember, that they don't feel quite the same pressure, as it were, to provide a full accounting, to have every gap filled in. It's like if you remember 1984, then talk to me about what you remember from 1984. You remember when you went into the camp in 1976 or '77, then you can talk to me about that. If you just want to focus on a different point-- and we can jump around a little bit more.
NINA MOINI: Sure. So it gives more of a vehicle for creativity. And I'm curious to know the timeline of the project, when it'll be completed, and then what are you hoping that people will take away from these few books and the project as a whole?
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Well, we're hoping, just because there were a couple of bumps and gaps here, trying to figure out if all the offers were fully ready to have their books done. But everyone has turned out to be these wild perfectionists. But we're hoping to have our first books out the door hopefully by the beginning of summer here, so July and August is what we're looking forward to.
And we already know that we have a couple of exhibits lined up the first part of 2026, which we found has been particularly helpful for us for books and to get them into the community in that our approach has been that going into the bookstores, going into the libraries, going into the usual spaces where you think you're going to find books just hasn't been effective, that we instead have taken to exhibitions.
We just finished a pilot project of central library last year, for example, in which we displayed over 150 community objects reflecting 100 years of Southeast Asian history, then including our first 50 years in Minnesota, our first survey of the [INAUDIBLE]. They could examine it. They could read the poems if they wanted to. They could linger on things, or they could just say, no, no, no, it's too much. And they just moved on to the next piece out [INAUDIBLE].
The challenge was that when they didn't see themselves in those bookstores, they didn't know that they wanted to ask for these things. And so we decided that we needed to meet the community where it was. We needed to give them a space to bring people back. And it doesn't have quite the same panache, as it were. If you say, oh yeah, come to me all the way out to this bookstore and see this one tiny book on a bookshelf, it's just-- no, no, no. And so just come see this book. You can take a free copy. And at the same time, you can see all these other images, all these other films that are associated with it. So that's a big thing for it.
But I think one of the other things that we were talking about, about our sense of this is how do we open it up for the community as they see the work that we're putting forward? Oh, I have a freedom to add my voice to this, too, because that's been so important to us as we design this project is to show the demonstration of how we made the transition from a 700-year-old monarchy to democracy, that instead of things coming down from a hierarchy, top down, and this is the version of the truth and the only version of the truth, this is the--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
BRYAN THAO WORRA: --as we pivot. And as we make that pivot-- and America is turning 250 years old next year, so it's a very important conversation on democracy.
NINA MOINI: Absolutely. And I think it's great. Yeah, all Minnesotans can definitely relate. And I'm so glad that you are taking the time to put these stories out there in people's own words, and that they're going to live on. And that's a beautiful thing. Bryan, thank you so much for coming by to Minnesota Now and sharing your work with us. I really appreciate it.
BRYAN THAO WORRA: Thank you.
NINA MOINI: Thank you. Take care. That was Bryan Thao Worra, a poet, writer, and activist who chairs the Community Board of the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans.
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