“The Hmong had a purely oral culture, with no form of writing until the 1950s, when Christian missionaries developed one using the Roman alphabet.” But for Mai Neng Moua, “raised and educated in the United States, it is the permanence and durability of words fastened into sentences and placed on a page that make sense of her life, her family’s history and a culture at a crossroads. Mai is among the first generation of Hmong to write about the history and give voice to contemporary Hmong experiences.” And she’s collected Hmong stories for a book, the first-ever anthology of Hmong-American writing.”