Story Cloths: The Hmong, the Mien, and the Making of an Asian American Art: George J.Leonard

One of the strangest stories of the Vietnamese War has led to one of the most moving-and unusual-art forms to come out ofAsian America.

I stumbled across this art in 1988, the way many professors and students have. Twice a year my university holds a "Crafts Faire": across the main lawn, San Francisco's would-be potters, candle dippers, tie dye twisters, and T-shirt hawkers erect a jumble of ramshackle booths. There, among the shlock and "junque," two Asian women sat quietly inside a booth festooned with small tapestries. The work was already famous among American needleworkers, had acquired an extensive bibliography, and had even been, four years before I saw it, the subject of a museum show at University of California, Davis's C.N. Gorham Museum.