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.She says in the Hmong traditional view, marriage links two families in a binding contract.In contrast, the marriage contract is viewed to be between legally recognized adults in144Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American RefugeesU.S.society, not between families.If a Hmong wife initiates a divorce without the support of her male relatives, Donnelly argues, it disrupts Hmong social structure, which consists of links between male-headed families.An issue I investigated is how family relationships are viewed after divorce.In the American legal system, the parental and spousal obligations continue through court-mediated financial and domestic contracts that affect child support, alimony, custody, domestic arrangements, etc.This fact alone creates a great deal of controversy in the Hmong community according to several older men I spoke with.They told me that men in the Hmong community experience great loss; they see their children, material resources, and their wife permanently taken from them.At the same time, U.S.law requires them to continue to provide child support and alimony.One older gentleman shared his observations:Most of the Hmong men I know they really love theirchildren.They don’t want to see their children go.Theydon’t want their children to go and have no father.And theyfelt too bad and they kill themselves.A lot of Hmong peoplekill themselves is because of that.You know, I pay a lot of money when we got married and weboth agree to get married, we love each other, but she doesn’twant to get married without any problem[s] and then the judgestill asking me to pay for the child support.And I have nofuture.Where are the six or seven children? All the money[goes] to pay for those kids.I could get married but who isgoing to want to get married to me? I pay a lot of money and[this] it doesn’t make sense to me.Shouldn’t the judge seewho caused the problem and should follow the evidence orwitnesses that say[s] he caused the problem? If the mancaused the problem, let him pay for child support.If the lady caused the problem, let her pay for child support.Make theother a little bit happier.So that might solve the problem.For our Hmong people it [this] doesn’t work for us.This is really not working.Based on my conversations with Hmong people thus far, I amconfident in saying that a no-fault divorce in Hmong society is reallyGender, The Family and Change145quite inconceivable.Someone is always to blame, and if the guilty party does not change his/her ways and a divorce commences, it is a major catastrophe involving not only the couple, but also two kin groups.Marriage and divorce must be understood according to specific cultural experiences, and this is where the challenge emerges for Hmong-American men and women today who must sort out multiple(and sometimes competing) cultural meanings.Loss of a spouse through death or divorce may be particularlydevastating for Hmong women and children because of the kinship structure and ideology.For example, I have talked with Hmongindividuals who consider themselves orphans because their father died and their mother remarried into another xeem.They called themselves orphans because the primary ties they had to a paternal kinship group were severed.Pejoratively, Hmong might say these are, “children in the grass,” signifying they are untended and have no roots.The man quoted above said the children in a divorce “have no father,” which is a common expression and signifies the perception that kin relationships are really terminated, even if American law says something to the contrary.If these children remain part of a kin group, their father’s brother for example takes them in or they become stepchildren through their mother’s next marriage, they may not expect to have the same kind of care they would receive from their biological parents.Children and their widowed or divorced mothers are isolated in Laos and in the United States.Lee (1999b) describes how a divorced or widowed woman in Laos can return to her consanguineous relatives, but must live separately because she no longer belongs to her parents’ lineage.Only people with the same ritual systems can inhabit the same house.After an American-style legal divorce, Hmong women and theirchildren may be socially and economically isolated.A woman in this situation belongs neither to her ex-husband’s family or her father’s household and may have to strike out on her own, garner support from sympathetic relatives, live with a boyfriend, or find other strategies to cope with the tough challenges faced by single parents [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.She says in the Hmong traditional view, marriage links two families in a binding contract.In contrast, the marriage contract is viewed to be between legally recognized adults in144Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American RefugeesU.S.society, not between families.If a Hmong wife initiates a divorce without the support of her male relatives, Donnelly argues, it disrupts Hmong social structure, which consists of links between male-headed families.An issue I investigated is how family relationships are viewed after divorce.In the American legal system, the parental and spousal obligations continue through court-mediated financial and domestic contracts that affect child support, alimony, custody, domestic arrangements, etc.This fact alone creates a great deal of controversy in the Hmong community according to several older men I spoke with.They told me that men in the Hmong community experience great loss; they see their children, material resources, and their wife permanently taken from them.At the same time, U.S.law requires them to continue to provide child support and alimony.One older gentleman shared his observations:Most of the Hmong men I know they really love theirchildren.They don’t want to see their children go.Theydon’t want their children to go and have no father.And theyfelt too bad and they kill themselves.A lot of Hmong peoplekill themselves is because of that.You know, I pay a lot of money when we got married and weboth agree to get married, we love each other, but she doesn’twant to get married without any problem[s] and then the judgestill asking me to pay for the child support.And I have nofuture.Where are the six or seven children? All the money[goes] to pay for those kids.I could get married but who isgoing to want to get married to me? I pay a lot of money and[this] it doesn’t make sense to me.Shouldn’t the judge seewho caused the problem and should follow the evidence orwitnesses that say[s] he caused the problem? If the mancaused the problem, let him pay for child support.If the lady caused the problem, let her pay for child support.Make theother a little bit happier.So that might solve the problem.For our Hmong people it [this] doesn’t work for us.This is really not working.Based on my conversations with Hmong people thus far, I amconfident in saying that a no-fault divorce in Hmong society is reallyGender, The Family and Change145quite inconceivable.Someone is always to blame, and if the guilty party does not change his/her ways and a divorce commences, it is a major catastrophe involving not only the couple, but also two kin groups.Marriage and divorce must be understood according to specific cultural experiences, and this is where the challenge emerges for Hmong-American men and women today who must sort out multiple(and sometimes competing) cultural meanings.Loss of a spouse through death or divorce may be particularlydevastating for Hmong women and children because of the kinship structure and ideology.For example, I have talked with Hmongindividuals who consider themselves orphans because their father died and their mother remarried into another xeem.They called themselves orphans because the primary ties they had to a paternal kinship group were severed.Pejoratively, Hmong might say these are, “children in the grass,” signifying they are untended and have no roots.The man quoted above said the children in a divorce “have no father,” which is a common expression and signifies the perception that kin relationships are really terminated, even if American law says something to the contrary.If these children remain part of a kin group, their father’s brother for example takes them in or they become stepchildren through their mother’s next marriage, they may not expect to have the same kind of care they would receive from their biological parents.Children and their widowed or divorced mothers are isolated in Laos and in the United States.Lee (1999b) describes how a divorced or widowed woman in Laos can return to her consanguineous relatives, but must live separately because she no longer belongs to her parents’ lineage.Only people with the same ritual systems can inhabit the same house.After an American-style legal divorce, Hmong women and theirchildren may be socially and economically isolated.A woman in this situation belongs neither to her ex-husband’s family or her father’s household and may have to strike out on her own, garner support from sympathetic relatives, live with a boyfriend, or find other strategies to cope with the tough challenges faced by single parents [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]