The second-graders in Mee Kong’s classroom had not finished their breakfast yet, but they were ready to get to work.
Their assignment: to create a book about their mom’s side of the family. One child sketched her siblings on virtual pages on her tablet. Another pulled up an old photo of her family celebrating Christmas.
“How many of your brothers and sisters go to school here?” the principal, May Lee Xiong, asked her.
“Four,” the girl said, pointing to herself as a baby and three older children. Several others graduated from the elementary school, now called Txuj Ci HMong Language and Culture Lower Campus; they now attend the middle-school program at the upper campus.
Xiong explained that the assignment served an important linguistic purpose for the Hmong dual-immersion class. In the Hmong language, relational words for the mother’s side of the family are different from words for the father’s side of the family. For example, grandmother is two different words depending on which parent’s mother she is.