Dial Up!

Even on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the radio lines were busy. Other people might send a card or go out for a family breakfast, but on Hmong radio shows, you waited your turn to speak into the ether, to tell strangers across the world about your parents. Some were living, some already dead, and others were still missing years after the war. No matter the specifics, almost every speaker cried, whether in longing, regret, or simply for the foreign feeling of saying out loud what a mother or father meant to them. But what could these strangers listening know about this grief, contained for so long and finally given a place to expand and breathe?

Callers joined in from across the US, France, Canada, and Australia, some using fake names to conceal themselves as they memorialized their parents to their people scattered by war. Even years later, Mee Vang remembers the crying. She tuned in from her St. Paul, Minnesota home. For many Hmong refugees who ended up in the United States, like Mee, the two holidays were yet another piece of American culture to adjust to. But on the radio shows, they became an unexpected opportunity to discover solidarity.

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The shows weren’t the traditional kinds you’d find by tuning to an AM or FM band; they were operated independently from media companies by ordinary Hmong citizens, aired live all-day, every day and were free to call into for as long as you’d like. They used free conference call software to do it, a network that is still in place to this day.

“We did not have a social opportunity to appreciate our mom and dad, and then they died,” Mee says. “Then this telephone conference became available.”

These were built by and for Hmong people, pulled together with whatever resources were available. Any hour of the day, a Hmong person somewhere in America could call in and hear a familiar language — and not just listen but respond.

Mee has been listening since those nascent years around 2009 when there were only two main shows. She tuned in again this year, but the Mother’s and Father’s Day programs sounded different. What will you do with your family this weekend? What did your children do for you? Most of the crying had stopped. It was a flash of an immigrant community’s transformation — people grieving less and celebrating more.

Hmong conference radio feels more intimate than AM / FM, all the more when you understand the work that goes into sustaining it. Callers are typically greeted with a recorded message welcoming them to the line in Hmong, punctuated by an automated English message saying how many callers are on the line.

Once you’re in, it’s easy to get lost in the aural sensation of hearing a language you don’t often encounter; as someone who doesn’t understand Hmong, it’s enveloping, almost nerve-wracking to listen in via phone, a communication mode we think of as private, two-way, and closed. For non-Hmong speakers, the only hints of each show’s topic come from the occasional English words sprinkled in: “B2 Bomber,” “Iran,” “recreational marijuana,” “California Assembly,” “CNN dot com.” Sometimes, one DJ will deliver what appears to be news for almost an hour uninterrupted. Other times, a few voices stack on top of one another — less of a cacophony, more of a discussion, not in chaos but in organic conversation. There’s occasional background noise, the shuffling of papers, clearing of throats, chuckles. Each hour is different, a testament to the coordination required of owners and DJs.

But most non-Hmong people — even experts who study media and communications — have no idea that this system exists.

When Lori Kido Lopez, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Asian American media, first moved to Wisconsin, she began researching Hmong media consumption and production. She first observed that though towns with larger Hmong populations might have a community newspaper or the rare community radio segment, it was difficult for Hmong people to find robust and consistent media about their community. She was missing what she would later find to be the most popular form of mass media for the Hmong.

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image:Annabelle Marcovici & Phyllis B. Dooney
[ed. This was a popular (and necessary) component of living in bush Alaska as well, where select airwaves were filled with birthday greetings, expressions of love, logistical arrangements (tell Ted to bring more fuel out to the cabin tomorrow), obituaries, hunting successes, weather reports, emergencies, and all of life's scope and general weirdness, every night, for anyone to hear.]