Louisa Schein

Louisa Schein found herself briefly and indirectly linked to Hollywood when Clint Eastwood’s movie about the Hmong people in Detroit, Gran Torino, was released in 2008. She was acquainted with one of the Hmong actors, Doua Moua, who plays a young gangster in the movie, and began publishing newspaper articles on the Hmong actors’ experiences. The rest of America may have discovered the Hmong through the movie, but Schein had been involved with them for three decades.  

“I started working with Hmong Americans in Providence when I was an undergraduate (at Brown University),” Schein said. “I was teaching English and helping women market their handicrafts, and worked on a documentary film about their initial resettlement. In the course of that work, I became interested in their origins.” 

The Hmong (called Miao in China) are rural ethnic minorities from Southeast Asia. During the War in Vietnam, many of them fought with the United States and its allies against the forces of communism in Vietnam and Laos, and when they ended up on the losing side, many went into diaspora in the United States, Australia, and Europe. They’ve had a difficult, sometimes invisible, life in exile, and while Eastwood’s movie offers a glimpse of that life, Schein has spent her career digging down to its roots. 

Upon graduation from Brown, Schein got a fellowship that allowed her to travel to France and to China to understand the Hmong in exile and in their Asian homelands. She was hosted by the Chinese Nationalities Institute, where she was the first western scholar to conduct research since the normalization of relations with the United States. Mao Zedong was dead, the Great Cultural Revolution was over, and China, under Deng Xiaoping, was just opening up. Schein was one of a handful of scholars who pioneered the study of minorities in China in the early 1980s. “At that time Hmong Americans often didn’t have the resources, so they were not traveling to Asia themselves.  I felt compelled to make the trip myself to bring the China part of the Hmong/Miao world into visibility.” 

The Chinese experience was eye-opening for Schein. The Hmong/Miao were 8 million strong in China, spread over parts of seven provinces. The contrast between their lives and the lives of the refugees she had met in Providence was striking. The research led to a Ph.d. dissertation on the Miao, and eventually to a book, Minority Rules: the Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2000). 

By 2000, China had opened further, and Hmong in diaspora had become more established. They were beginning to make journeys back to China, Vietnam and Laos – and they brought video cameras with them. 

“They were making videos, and they weren’t just travelogues, but documentaries, features, martial arts films,” Schein said. “And there was a huge market in the United States for these grass-roots videos. Some were semiprofessional. Dozens of Hmong video production companies sprang up in this country. That’s really unusual, and it was almost completely undocumented.” 

Schein set herself the task of studying this use of modern media in the aid of cultural expression, preservation and production. She collected hundreds of videos, creating one of the most complete archives of Hmong grassroots media in the world. Not only did she publish articles in learned and professional journals about Hmong media, but she has co-produced documentaries herself. With Hmong film maker Va Megn-Thoj, she is working on Shamans, Herbs and MDs, which deals with Hmong health and healing. And her co-production with director Peter O’Neill, Hmong Immigrants a Generation Later, now in post-production, is a sequel updating the people whose stories she and O’Neill told in their 1981 documentary, The Best Place to Live, about Hmong resettlement in the United States. 

Schein is currently writing her second book, Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora. She continues to follow Gran Torino and is publishing critical works on race, violence and masculinity in the film.