...In 1979, one of my brothers from America sent us 40 inner tube tires and told us to head for Thailand. He had people waiting at the Thai border to help us. The communists were getting suspicious of the disappearing number of Hmong in the village. Since my husband was a leader in the village, we had to get out of there before they came looking for my husband.

​In November, we started the journey to the Thai border. Just one day into the trip, the communists caught up to us and killed both our Laotian guides and one whole Hmong family. We had to change our destination.

We turned back around and came upon a mountainous region of Laos. I’d never seen so many corpses in my life. It was a death zone. There were corpses of women, men, children, and even infants who were still suckling on their dead mother’s breasts. Some had been there so long only skeletons remained. It was a sad, dark, quiet walk, which seemed to take an eternity...

My family loved me, but they did not know what to do to save me. None of them stepped up to the plate, not even my brothers. They were so afraid.

“It’s better to have just one person sick,” said my mom. “If you donate a kidney, you’ll have two people who are sick.

You only need one kidney to live, but they thought they could die if they donated a kidney. I wondered why, if they could, they would not do something in order to save someone they loved. People have asked why I did not ask my family to give me a kidney. I guess I was afraid they would say “No!” to my face. I knew they would say “No!” Besides, I felt like I shouldn’t have had to ask. If they wanted to do it then I didn’t need to beg. They could see what needed to be done to save my life. If they loved me then they would just do it. Everyone knew I was sick, but not one person stepped up to the plate. I felt like they all left me to die.

It could have been that they did not understand the process of a transplant. But, first, I think they did not even believe that I was sick. For the Hmong, if nothing is bleeding or there is no open wound, they could say, “She was well and going to school. How could she be like this now? The doctors did this and this, that’s why she’s sick.” Physically, I looked all right, but they were not in my body. They did not feel the cramping of my leg muscles or how dead tired I was. They were not there when I was short of breath and could not breathe. I believed they thought I was not sick.

When I started at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, the teacher education program was very competitive. During my first semester, my advisor told me, “Education is a very demanding field right now. We have people backlogged for student teaching placement that have not been placed. My recommendation to you is to try something else, to go into some other area of study and come back later to get your master’s in education. I think education is going to be too demanding for you.” She didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. Yet she felt compelled to give me this advice.