Mee Moua in the Age of Obama

Two weeks after Barack Obama’s election in November, Mee Moua, who represents District 67 in the Minnesota Senate, was asked to what extent she believed his victory encouraged other people of color—such as herself—to run for office or for higher office. “Actually, it was kind of the reverse,” she replied, suggesting it was her experience that made her bullish about Obama’s chances. “I felt that if a Mee Moua could get elected on the East Side of St. Paul, then absolutely a Barack Obama could get elected President of the United States.”

Moua was elected, for the first time, in January 2002, in a special election to fill the vacancy created when the incumbent, Randy Kelly, was elected St. Paul mayor succeeding Norm Coleman, who was running for Paul Wellstone’s U.S. Senate seat in that fall’s election. Moua was not expected to win. She was thirty-two years old, competing against a more seasoned Republican and candidates from the Independence and Green parties in the city’s historically conservative, working-class eastern precincts. What’s more, though Moua was encouraged and supported by Wellstone himself, she had never run for significant office and her campaign manager was her equally callow cousin, who has since confessed to learning what little she knew about politics at the time by watching The West Wing on TV. And did we mention that Moua was a second-generation Hmong–American woman reaching for electoral heights no Hmong–American woman or man had achieved anywhere in America?

Moua was not, of course, the last unlikely name and face to be elected to important office in hitherto mostly lily-white Minnesota. Cy Thao, another Hmong American, was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in November 2002, also from St. Paul, and has been re-elected three times. Keith Ellison, a Muslim African American from Minneapolis, was elected to Congress in 2006 and easily re-elected in 2008. But such candidates, as well as a handful of persons of color elected to urban school boards and city councils, have been exceptions in our part of the world, even as our population grows increasingly diverse. Now, in the wake of Obama’s “transformative” election, the question is no longer whether a black man can be elected President, but what impact race still plays at lower levels of the electoral system. If, as the saying goes, all politics is local, can, for the sake of discussion, a Hmong–American woman be elected governor of Minnesota?

Mee Moua would seem to provide an obvious test case. Only seven years after that special election, Moua is a fixture at the legislature, heavily involved in issues ranging from district concerns such as funding for the Phalen corridor to large, bread-and-butter questions regarding education, housing, health care, crime, veterans’ affairs, and mass transit. As chair of the senate’s judiciary committee, she is also one of the body’s acknowledged powerbrokers, known among her colleagues as a “bridge builder” on a wide range of topics who, despite her partisan bona fides (a “friendly but fierce progressive,” the Pioneer Press once called her), is more pragmatic than ideological.

Not yet forty, Moua is a member of the Democratic National Committee and a leader among the new generation of DFLers, with growing influence well beyond her bailiwick. As such, she is one of a dozen-plus bright, ambitious, young or youngish elected officials or wannabes expected to have a future in the Age of Obama. But few if any of this cohort have a more interesting or inspiring personal history—or have had to negotiate a trickier career path or maintain a more delicate balance, operating in a crucible that has strengthened both her skill set and resolve for wider campaigns.

“I really don’t sit around and think about it,” she says when asked about the future, “but there are a lot of opportunities out there.” And, in this transformed environment, a practical and pragmatic politician such as herself would be a fool, she adds, to foreclose on any of them.

Photo by Joe Treleven

Mee Moua is a petite, physically unimposing, and, by her own assessment, “pretty ordinary-looking” woman. When she pays one of her frequent visits to elementary schools in her district, she is pleased to be told, as she often is, that “you look just like my mom.”

One on one with an inquiring adult, Moua comes across serenely comfortable in her role and supremely confident in her ability to perform it effectively. Though she spoke little English until she was eleven, she speaks today with no trace of an accent, and, unless you know an auctioneer, you probably don’t know anyone who speaks with greater velocity. Once she gets going, an hour interview easily morphs into a two-hour discussion, and it may require several polite interruptions by an aide before she’s willing to move on to her next meeting. She has trouble sitting still when she talks. She is especially animated when she launches, unprompted, into a passionate monologue about the glories and responsibilities of the democratic process. Like many refugees from desperate and dangerous parts of the world, she is a fervent believer in the American way.

Larry Jacobs, a political science professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, says of Moua’s background, “This is an American story. An old story, but a great story.”

Born in Laos, Moua came to America with her parents when she was nine, part of the diaspora that uprooted Hmong from the Laotian highlands following the United States’ departure from Indochina in the mid-1970s and scattered them around the world. Moua’s family spent three years in a Thai refugee camp before eventually settling in St. Paul, which would soon be home to the largest single concentration of Hmong refugees in America. (The 2000 census counted 43,000 Hmong in Minnesota, most of them in St. Paul and the northern suburbs. Unofficial estimates have placed the current number as high as 70,000.) Intelligent and driven, she became the first member of her family to speak English fluently, excelled in school, and, initially with a career in medicine in mind, earned a scholarship to Brown University in Rhode Island, where she graduated in 1992. She went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Texas and a juris doctorate from the University of Minnesota’s law school. Later, as a young lawyer with Leonard, Street and Deinard in the Twin Cities, she worked on the successful St. Paul school board campaign of an uncle, Neal Thao, and became familiar with the legislative sausage grinder as a lobbyist for Hmong–owned businesses. In 1998, she married Yee Chang, a St. Olaf grad and businessman, and with Chang bought a house on the East Side and started a family. They have three children.

Running for Kelly’s state senate seat was a test of her faith in the system. Few outside the local Hmong community—where, owing to her Ivy League diploma and law degree, she was a rising star—gave her much chance of winning. Ethnic considerations aside, says her cousin and confidant Pakou Hang, who may have been only half joking when she made that West Wing remark, “we were both novices.” But, knocking on doors, working her family and clan connections for funding, and building an expansive base of first-time voters, Moua captured a clear majority out of the four-person field. The first Hmong anywhere to be elected to a state post, she was an instant celebrity at the Capitol as well as an inspiration in Hmong enclaves around the world.

“I don’t come from powerful or wealthy people,” she says. Her father served as a medic with an American aid organization in Laos; now sixty-one, he works in the shipping and receiving department of a manufacturing company in Brooklyn Park. Her mother was employed by a local food processor before retiring early with physical disabilities. “But on my father’s side,” Moua continues, “I happen to be the second-oldest grandchild and second-oldest niece, and on my mother’s side, the first born. That gave me an edge, but also the responsibility to lead a straight life and be a good role model, because it wasn’t just my three siblings looking at me, it was all those cousins on both sides of the family. I have uncles who were college-educated, and they paved the way for me, the first niece. Then it was my turn to show my siblings and cousins the way.”

Thirty years after taking root here, the Twin Cities’ Hmong community bristles with lawyers, physicians, educators, and entrepreneurs of both sexes. But stereotypes of a backward, static, and rigidly patriarchal society persist among white Minnesotans, a point of view that overlooks the many individual examples to the contrary and widespread evidence of the clear-eyed pragmatism that has allowed Hmong culture to survive centuries of struggle and deracination.

“If I wanted to do something,” Moua says, “I’ve never felt I had to hesitate because of cultural constraints. Plus, it always served my family’s—and my community’s—purpose for me to be assertive and aspirational. In each extended Hmong family, there are one or two people who serve as the ultimate resource. I may be a lawyer, but I’ve helped people muddle through medical and financial problems, providing advice and counsel and helping them think through their issues.” That has required maturity, judgment, and the development of interpersonal skills that, she says, “have proved very helpful professionally.” In Moua’s case, “professionally” means politically. The attributes she needed to help her kin adjust to American life have contributed to her growth as a resourceful policymaker and campaigner.