The Her Family Children.

This series includes eight children of Blia Kao Her. I first met Keng Her when he and one of my sons played drums together in the middle school band. Keng was  a Hmong American new to Walnut Grove. I met the rest of the family in time. As a teacher and advisor I got to know them over several years. I chose to present this family as one of the new families from Laos and then camps in Thailand. 

 

Their father, Blia Kao Her, was a soldier in the secret war that was fought in Vietnam. He died as a young man from cancer. 

 

These drawings were part of a show in 2010 called MANY PATHS ONE HOPE.  In the exhibit 40 of my drawings, photographs and etching, I compared their immigration 

experience to that of my great grandparents who traveled from Norway in the mid 1800's as told to me by my grandmother, a 4th generation Norwegian American who still wrote and read in Norwegian.

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In 2017, I made a handmade book that tells stories written or personal interviews  by each of the children who are now young adults. It is handprinted and bound in purple leather.

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