It’s hard to walk through Pike Place Market without marveling at the thousands of fresh flowers that are meticulously arranged.  

About 80% of the flower stands at Pike Place Market and farmers markets throughout the region are owned by Hmong farmers.  

Hmong culture is deeply rooted in growing food and flowers to nourish their bodies and spirit.  

Hmong refugees first came to Seattle in the early 1970s from Laos. (Jump to our Q&A to learn more about Hmong history!) Since 80-90% of Hmong people farmed back in Laos, it was natural for them to find work farming in the Seattle area.  

Initially, Hmong farmers primarily grew vegetables, but in the mid-80s, with the help of the Indochina Farm Project, they found a niche growing and selling flowers at local farmers’ markets and Pike Place Market.  

Today, there are around 80 Hmong farms in the region! Most of these farms are small organic farms, owned and fully operated by Hmong refugees and their families. They do everything from tilling the earth and planting seeds, to harvesting and transporting the delicate flowers, to arranging and selling gorgeous bouquets, to managing their business.  

We had the chance to have a Roadside Chat with Cynthia Yongvang who is the Executive Director of the Hmong Association of Washington and learn a little more about their work to ensure Hmong culture in Washington lives on.  

The Hmong originated in China among the Miao ethnic groups. About two million Hmong lived in the lowlands of Southern China and eventually migrated to the highlands of provinces such as Yunnan and Guizhou due to conflicts with the Chinese government. Over the next two centuries, the Hmong continued their struggle with the Chinese. In 1854 the Hmong fled to the highlands of Laos and Vietnam and settled there to raise their families where they maintained their own distinctive culture, including dress, oral literature and religion, valuing their autonomy and close-knit community above all.  

During the Vietnam War, the Hmong along with other ethnic groups enlisted to fight on the side of the Americans. After the war, the Hmong found themselves in the refugee camps of Thailand. 115, 670 Hmong refugees were resettled to 12 countries from 1975 to 1992 and because of their American military ties, more than 100,000 Hmong were sponsored by religious organizations like Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Service, and Church World Service to come to the US.   

Today, based on the last census in 2010, there are more than 260,000 Hmong in the US with Minnesota, California and Wisconsin being the states with the largest Hmong population. In Washington, there are only 2,404 Hmong people with the first wave of Hmong refugees arriving to Seattle in the late 1970s and a second wave came in the early 2000s.  

The Hmong Association of Washington (HAW) is a nonprofit, founded in 1983, that serves the Hmong community in Washington. Our mission is to preserve and promote the culture, advocate for the Hmong people, and promote education in the community. For the past 35 years, it was a volunteer run organization that hosted the Hmong New Year celebration that is held at the Seattle Center each November.  

I was elected the board president in 2019. As an organization, we did a community needs assessment and saw new ways we could serve our community. Then in 2020, I was hired as the first Executive Director to build HAW infrastructure and develop programs to best support our community during the pandemic.  

We started a HAW youth program and a leadership program for our young people ages 18-30. We also partnered with Khmu and Lao organizations to form the United Communities of Laos and plan to build a cultural center in the next few years to support our Hmong, Lao and Khmu communities, share our cultures, and to provide office space for the partner organizations.  

​Our Hmong culture has been passed on for thousands of years. We’ve migrated to different countries over the millennia, but our culture, dress, and oral stories have remained intact. In Washington today, our youth and young adults were born here in the US and most are fully assimilated into American culture. Some of them grew up on their parents’ farms, but many of them are pursuing careers in the corporate world. We fully support our young people in their career journeys and also want to help them remain connected to their history, culture and language so that they don’t lose their Hmong identity.  

​Because Pike Place Market and other farmers market closed for a few months in 2020 due to the pandemic, many of our Hmong farmers were left without a market outlet to sell their flowers. 

HAW supported these farmers by organizing neighborhood sales with the help of many volunteers from the community.  

We learned from this experience is that the Hmong farmers can benefit from having their own farm cooperative. This year we’re helping our Hmong farmers form a Hmong Farmer Cooperative with technical support from Northwest Agricultural Business Center. We hope that this Hmong Farmer cooperative can support the older generation of Hmong farmers but also the next generation of farmers since many of the older farmers would be retiring in the next few years.  

Right now, each of the farms operate independently. But, with the coop, they can share resources and marketing strategies. For example, some people will be able to focus on farming, and then others in the coop can focus on selling. The younger generations who are interested in continuing their family’s farm are extremely interested in finding ways to improve their businesses and to farm more efficiently.  

​Now that farmers markets are back, one of the best ways to support Hmong famers is to visit your local farmers market and purchase our flowers and vegetables! Know that your purchases at farmers markets, at Hmong-owned businesses and others, are supporting local farmers and small businesses. If people want to buy individual bouquets, they can also order flowers directly from a Hmong farmer.  

You could also host a flower drive to raise money for your school or other cause you are involved. To learn more about hosting a flower drive, you can contact the Hmong Association of Washington.  

Next time you purchase a bouquet of flowers from a farmers market in the area, know that there’s a good chance you’re supporting a Hmong-owned business, and that the person handing you the bouquet, was likely the person who grew the flowers! 

There are four main ingredients in Friendly Vang-Johnson’s upcoming CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) program: family, Hmong farmers, youth, and giving back to the community. Rooted in goodwill and mutual aid, Friendly Hmong Farms’ CSA is intergenerational and empowers youth and centers food justice while providing the Northwest’s Hmong farmers with a steady source of income. The boxes will be full to the brim with local staples as well as culturally relevant produce grown by Hmong farmers of the Puget Sound region. Signups began March 4 and boxes will be available throughout the greater Seattle area beginning the first week of April.
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Friendly Hmong Farms’ CSA program was born out of 2020’s bittersweet mutual aid efforts to support Hmong farmers whose guaranteed sources of income were challenged during the pandemic as farmers markets closed and saw dwindling sales. It was also inspired by Vang-Johnson’s personal desire to have family close by, to have an inclusive space for her children and other BIPOC youth, and to give back to a network of frontline workers and BIPOC people who have kept the world turning even during a life-threatening pandemic. 

Vang-Johnson had been trying to convince her mother, Xia Lor Vang, to move from Minnesota to Seattle for years. Every time her mother resisted, Vang-Johnson had an arsenal of rebuttals: “Mom,” she would say, “you are getting older, not younger. Minnesota is getting colder, not warmer.” Moreover, Vang-Johnson pointed out, it would be easier to coordinate caretaking for her mother if they lived together.

​But Xia Lor, who owns farmland in Minnesota, always had the same response: “I want to keep farming, that is important to me.” She kept saying no – until this past November during a visit to Seattle. 

Since last spring, Vang-Johnson had been heavily involved in coordinating mutual aid efforts for Hmong farmers who had been displaced from selling flowers and produce at farmers markets around the Puget Sound region. Throughout the experience of coordinating pick-up sites and volunteers, Vang-Johnson was inspired watching an organic network materialize. Through social media posts and word of mouth, a community was arranging itself, from the volunteers checking out orders to the loyal customers lining up to get weekly bouquets delivered from Hmong farms throughout the Puget Sound. 

Then, as the market season came to a close in November, Vang-Johnson was putting together thank you baskets for volunteers when Xia Lor inquired what the baskets were for. 

“I was explaining to my mom, there are a lot of people who have goodwill, they want to create community because they don’t have that sense of community anymore. They don’t know who their neighbors are, they don’t know where the food is coming from. They have seen and beheld these beautiful flowers for decades living in Seattle, but they never knew the story of Hmong people,” Vang-Johnson told her mother. “We have this network of people who are wanting to help.” 

When Vang-Johnson suggested that Xia Lor could keep farming in Seattle if they were able to purchase land, Xia Lor was finally sold on the idea of relocating. 

​Vang-Johnson had been forming a vision throughout the year to create a CSA program that would include produce and flowers from Hmong farmers throughout the region. Bringing her mother in — a farmer herself with a wealth of knowledge — would make it possible to turn the idea into a multi-faceted, community and food justice initiative. 

​Hmong people first began migrating to the United States as refugees from Laos and Thailand in the late 1970s and early 1980s after the Vietnam War.  Many came to the United States through sponsorship and aid programs which helped the refugees relocate and settle across the country, with the majority settling in California and Minnesota. 

Vang-Johnson’s family rooted themselves in Minnesota where they became farmers. Like many other Hmong people, the family came from a legacy of farming and cultivating the land in the mountainous terrain of Laos. Vang-Johnson grew up working on her parents’ farm during the summers.  When her friends asked her what she was doing for summer vacation, she was always hesitant to tell them about the back-breaking work she took part in every day. 

​But farming was an impetus for Vang-Johnson to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in policy. Eventually she found herself in Washington, D.C. working for the United States government. About 16 years ago, she moved to Seattle. In Seattle, Vang-Johnson noticed that seeing Hmong farmers at local markets was more  of a novelty on the west coast compared to what she had seen in Minnesota, where a majority of famers who sold at local markets were Hmong. 

Hmong farmers in Washington have a unique story, said Cynthia Yongvang, Executive Director of the Hmong Association of Washington, one of the organizations responsible for the efforts to organize flower farmers last year. Hmong came to the Seattle area in two waves. The first wave came in the 1970s and ‘80s and were better able to find support to set up agricultural operations through the Indochinese Farm Project, which received funding from King County and Pike Place Market. Many of the flower sellers you may have seen during a casual stroll through the market pre-COVID are Hmong farmers. 

Yongvang says that back in Laos, Hmong farmers specialized in produce. The focus on flowers in the U.S. came out of the need to withstand a competitive marketplace. Hmong farmers used organic methods of growing produce and their yield could not match up to those of commercial U.S. farmers who use fertilizers and pesticides. It was hard to make an income. 

“They weren’t treating vegetables with chemicals, so it was harder to be competitive with farmers. Because of that Pike Place Market introduced them to flowers,” said Yongvang.  Flower farming became lucrative and cost effective for Hmong farmers. They used whatever flowers they could grow on their land to craft beautiful bouquets sold for affordable prices.

For the second wave of Hmong, who arrived in the ‘90s after the Indochinese Farm Project had already been established and absorbed into Pike Place Market, getting access to land and support to set up farming operations has been much more difficult. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, farmers who had been able to rely on Pike Place Market to sell their bouquets had nowhere to go and for those who were renting farmland, still trying to get established, the future looked bleak. That is when the mutual aid efforts began. Now, the Hmong Association of Washington has a website dedicated to online flower orders and pickup. In addition, the Association is creating a Hmong Flower Farmer co-op to support farmers with marketing, outreach, and infrastructure so their flowers can reach beyond the Puget Sound region, since interest to support the farmers has begun to pour in from across the country.

“As members of the co-op we can provide the quantities of flowers required [and] we can invest in the infrastructure. [The] cost will be lower than individual farmers investing in shipping outside of Washington State,” said Yongvang. 

Vang-Johnson’s CSA program is also a way to make sure that Hmong farmers’ mutual aid efforts have longevity and do not dry up post-pandemic. The Friendly Hmong Farms’ CSA will include the option to order flowers throughout the season from April – October, bolstering demand and stability for Hmong flower farmers who have a special place in the Puget Sound Area.

​Part of the work of Friendly Hmong Farms, and the farm’s CSA, will be to instill youth with an appreciation for where their food comes from and the ecology of the land. Vang-Johnson saw a need to educate youth on food and racial justice as she observed the way her son and his friends were helping out during weekly neighborhood pick-ups. The youth, in their early adolescent years, were excited and full of energy, often motivated by tips and pizza lunches. Vang-Johnson could see they wanted to be involved, but she was keen they understand the real reason behind their summer fun: an effort for social justice, to support Hmong farmers and the broader community during a time of crisis. 

“What is really interesting to me is to grow the next generation of farmers, community leaders, who are able to spot racism … to experience in a way that you are not a victim to it and it is not a theoretical concept, but that you have lived it, you’ve processed it, you’ve healed it to a point where now you can combat it and advocate against it,” she said. 

Vang-Johnson is currently in the process of crafting a 10-week curriculum that incorporates principles of food justice, sustainability, and racial justice to realize this mission. She plans to take youth to Lee’s Fresh Produce in Kent to pick strawberries; walk through the entrepreneurial aspects of labor, pricing, and selling that can better connect young people to their local food systems; and understand the work that goes behind the fully stocked grocery store shelves we all take for granted. She also wants her own children to know that this connection to the soil is in their blood. “I want my children growing up knowing agriculture is their roots. Agriculture is what sustained us for millennia.”

​The final key ingredient of Friendly Hmong Farm’s CSA is the symbiotic relationships of community, such as those between Hmong farmers and frontline workers, or other BIPOC community members who have stepped up throughout the pandemic and beyond. 

In her interview with the Emerald, Vang-Johnson starts to say that “community is about pulling together” but then stops short to point out how cliché this has come to sound despite its truth. “It is about seeing that your experience, your fate, is wrapped up with another’s,” she said instead. 

​When farmers first rolled up their vans to unload flowers and veggies for neighborhood pick-up last year, they didn’t realize that Vang-Johnson herself was Hmong. 

“They didn’t know what to make of that. They were like ‘Why would you help us? You aren’t our sister-in-law, why would you help us?’ I am not directly related to any of the Hmong who are here, so they don’t really know me,” Vang-Johnson explained. 

As a cultural community, Hmong people tend to keep a low profile and stick to themselves, said Yongvang of the Hmong Association of Washington. The mutual aid efforts, flower pick-ups, and CSA boxes were a surprise to farmers; they were in disbelief that there was a larger community that wanted to rally around them and support their livelihoods.

“They didn’t think that people would help,” said Yongvang. “So having everyone coming out and supporting them brought that kind of hope in them that at the end of the day… people will show up and help us through this pandemic together.”

In many ways, Vang-Johnson’s work last year was aimed at honoring people during the pandemic in any way possible. Whether raising money for Black Lives Matter or the Hmong Association’s Youth Program, or by giving frontline workers bouquets in appreciation for their service, the spirit of reciprocity is baked into the CSA’s model on all fronts. 

“Part of that is making sure the veggies we grow are culturally relevant,” said Vang-Johnson. 

For instance, in an open poll set up by the farm to help gauge interest in Friendly Hmong Farms’ CSA box, customers can choose from greens like Bok choy, Chinese mustard and Malabar spinach; from collard greens and turnip greens; Italian herbs; stable root veggies and salad greens; and bitter melon, among others. 

“We have the resources, the farmers have the knowledge, but we can’t grow it unless we have the customers. And we want to grow it because we want to give back to our BIPOC communities.” 
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Vang-Johnson is in the process of securing a couple acres of farmable land in Redmond, a process that is tedious and riddled with paperwork, but she hopes everything will pan out smoothly soon. She hopes to create a space where her mother can grow vegetables and where young BIPOC youth can come to learn about farming ecology and principles of racial justice, food justice, and the enduring reciprocity between people and the land. 

Asian American businesses are besieged by racism that leaves them open to attacks and by economic stereotypes that render them forgotten.

Roy Kim knew back in December that something had changed. The operating manager of Dong Il Jang, the 41-year-old restaurant in Los Angeles’s Koreatown neighborhood and one of the city’s longest-running Korean restaurants, was noticing declining clientele, beginning with their Chinese regulars.

The profits he’d expected the business to make during the Christmas rush never materialized, and the loss set the tenor for what was to come. As news of the coronavirus began to radiate out from China and dominate the news cycle, fear of its spread in the US followed.

Koreatown’s small businesses, like in other Asian enclaves across the country, began to feel the economic fallout at least a month before shutdown orders began in March, as associations between Asians and contagion began to foment. Alongside media outlets singling out Asians as the “face” of the coronavirus in early coverage, the use of racist terms like “China virus” has also grown, further linking the virus to anything and anyone with Chinese identity — and, by extension, anyone who can be mistaken for Chinese.

After the city closed dining rooms twice, first in March and again in July, Kim and his parents — who founded the restaurant in 1979 — made the decision to close the business for good in August. It joins a steadily growing list of longtime and celebrated Koreatown restaurants that have shuttered due to the pandemic.

Asian-owned and Asian American small businesses, like Kim’s, have been uniquely impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. But the prevailing “model minority” myth, which characterizes this group by its economic success and assimilation, makes their struggles easy to dismiss and further cements their invisibility.

One bright spot of closing the restaurant, Kim says, was the community response. A longtime patron raised $8,050 on GoFundMe to provide a little extra financial support to the restaurant’s 23 employees — some of whom, Kim says, had been with the restaurant for more than 20 years.

“I’ve seen various communities come together to help out local businesses successfully and thought, why can’t we do that for our beloved Dong Il Jang?” wrote Jessica Yu, who organized the fundraiser.

Asian American communities have long relied on mutual aid to ensure their own survival, and then as now, communities around these small businesses are mobilizing to support them. The question this time is, will it be enough?

Although the economic impact of the pandemic has been keenly observed, we are only now beginning to examine its longer-term consequences and disaggregating the data to observe its disproportionate impact on certain communities, including Asian Americans.

A UCLA study published in July indicates that as the virus began to progress in the US, the Asian American unemployment rate increased faster than that of white Americans, surging from around 3 percent in February — one of the lowest unemployment rates of any racial group — to a whopping 15 percent in May of this year. (By comparison, the unemployment rate for white people went from about 3 percent in February to 12 percent in May, according to the study.)

Myriad factors can help account for this spike — what University of Massachusetts Boston economist Marlene Kim referred to as a “perfect storm” — including the geographic concentration of Asian populations in some of the hardest-hit states, racial discrimination tying the virus to Chinese identity, and the overrepresentation of ethnically Asian workers in service-facing industries. But little attention has been given.

The most stubborn misconception about this population is that its members can be uniformly measured at all. A population of 20 million strong, representing more than 50 distinct ethnic groups, Asian Americans have some of the widest variances in corporate success, education, and income. Within ethnic groups under the Asian American umbrella, the income inequality is dramatic; for example, Indians have one of the highest median household incomes ($100,000), whereas Burmese households have one of the lowest ($36,000).

Even then, the diversity of Asian Americans is lazily painted in broad strokes as the “model minority.” When it comes to small businesses, the myth translates as the immigrant entrepreneur who pursued the American dream of prosperity and went from “rags to riches.” Consequently, the assumption that Asian Americans are highly educated, high-income earners serves to disadvantage them in times of crisis: It’s presumed that Asian Americans aren’t marginalized, which dismisses the possibility they would ever need aid.

“It is imperative that we disentangle the narratives among [these] different groups,” says Susanna Park, a PhD candidate in global health at Oregon State University and a researcher at the AAPI Covid-19 Project, a collective study that examines how the pandemic is shaping the lives of Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. “We are incredibly diverse, and our economic struggles are far from the monolithic narrative that we are all ‘well off.’”

Self-employment and small businesses have long been prominent in the Asian American economic landscape. Most Asian- and Asian American-owned small businesses are understood as small, family-run companies, predominantly in service-oriented industries such as restaurants, nail salons, laundromats, convenience and liquor stores, taxicabs, and motels — enterprises wherein Asian groups either found an opportunity to accumulate wealth or were forced into when historic discrimination drove them out of other professions.

Second-generation Asian Americans have since diversified that portfolio into more professional fields like tech and finance, businesses in which owners could shed their ethnic distinctiveness and enter the mainstream economy. But for more traditional small businesses, being faceless — and therefore unidentifiable as Asian — is not an option.

“Small businesses frequently rely on being physically public facing and thus are more exposed to certain types of risks,” says Vivian Shaw, the lead researcher and co-principal investigator for the AAPI Covid-19 Project. “[They] can’t simultaneously opt out of exposure if they want to continue making money.”

In certain situations, that exposure endangers them. Since the pandemic has been racialized, some Asian Americans have found themselves further exposed to both infection and abuse.

Well before shelter-in-place orders began in March, community members in Oakland’s Chinatown were canceling Chinese New Year festivities and wearing face masks, making them more visible targets. Carl Chan, president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, told Vox about several instances of abuse early in the year involving seniors in his community, including one incident in which an elderly woman was punched in the face.

Concurrent with such attacks was the retreat of business as shoppers and restaurant-goers began avoiding Chinatown, a phenomenon experienced in sibling Chinatowns across the nation as well as in other Asian ethnic enclaves.

In California, approximately 80 percent of the state’s 11,000 nail salons are owned and operated by Vietnamese Americans, with a workforce predominantly made up of low-income, female Vietnamese immigrants and refugees. Many of these salons also observed a drop in business before shelter-in-place orders forced the entire industry to a standstill.

Dung Nguyen, outreach and program coordinator for the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, a grassroots advocacy organization, told Vox that in addition to the economic fallout, some of the collaborative’s members reported being asked by customers whether they were Chinese or had Covid-19.

The suspicion was further validated when California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the first case of community spread in California was at a nail salon. These businesses were already considered “dirty,” a stigma that has become culturally synonymous with “Asianness” at various points in history, explains Shaw. In light of the pandemic and compounded by xenophobic fears, nail salon owners and workers were starved of income for months.

Even when salons were able to reopen over the summer, some business owners reported feeling like they needed to tread carefully. In Orange County, California, home to Little Saigon — which hosts one of the largest populations of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam — anti-mask movements abounded, and customers often came in without masks despite clear signage on salon doors. Still, says Nguyen, “In order to avoid confrontation, they would just let them in.”

The fear of provoking an attack has also left Asian American small-business owners, as well as their staffs, powerless to enforce the rules, leaving them vulnerable to infection themselves.

“I’ve heard horror stories,” says Johnny Lee, co-owner of the Koreatown Pizza Company in Los Angeles. “Luckily, we haven’t had any of that, but I think it’s because we purposefully dodge those by looking like we were okay with it. It sucks because you’re putting us in danger, you’re putting our staff in danger, but we need your business.”

Kim was also tired of seeing maskless customers, not only at Dong Il Jang but also in other restaurants. “Our employees are more important than anything,” he says. “I didn’t want them to get sick. And it’s not just our employees that might get sick: What if they take it to their mother, father, or grandparents?” Many Asian Americans live in multigenerational households, for both cultural and economic reasons, presenting a challenge in containing the virus should a family member bring it home.

Although reports of anti-Asian violence and assaults have made national headlines, less explored are the covert ways in which racial discrimination affects Asian American populations, barring them from access to aid and sidelining them to the fringes.

For some small-business owners who come from communities that have been historically disenfranchised, distrust puts up barriers to financial support from the government. To Koreatown’s east, Little Tokyo — one of three remaining historic Japantowns left in the nation and, at more than 130 years old, LA’s second-oldest neighborhood — has weathered Japanese American incarceration, phases of redevelopment and displacement, economic depression following the 1992 uprisings, and waves of gentrification. It’s home to more than 400 businesses, many of which are legacy institutions or family-run businesses that are 20-plus years old.

“They don’t trust government,” Kristin Fukushima, managing director of the Little Tokyo Community Council, says of walking some of the neighborhood’s older business owners through applying for stimulus programs like the Paycheck Protection Program. “So it’s convincing people that this isn’t a bad or scary thing, and that they should just go for it.”

Although nail salon owners were not shy about applying for government assistance, says Nguyen, some found the process too complicated and many weren’t qualified when they applied. “Some folks felt lied to,” says Nguyen.

According to a California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative survey, three in four nail salon owners had applied for financial assistance through grants or loans, but some did not qualify because they had misclassified workers as independent contractors instead of as employees. A third of those who did not apply expressed confusion as to where to get information, and another third expressed concerns about interest rates.

For other Asian American business owners, proving their “need” was the main barrier.

The tiny population of Hmong flower farmers in Washington state, whose businesses have kept them segregated from the mainstream economy over the last 40 years, was rendered practically invisible to financial assistance when the pandemic hit.

Many Hmong people — an ethnic group whose homelands are spread across southern China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar — came to the US in the ’70s and ’80s as refugees during the Vietnam War. The sparse 2,400 who ended up in Washington’s Puget Sound area were integrated into floriculture as part of a program to encourage refugee enterprise.

But for the same reasons Hmong farmers have thrived as small-business owners in this industry, they are now acutely vulnerable during the Covid-19 crisis.

Cynthia Yongvang, executive director of the Hmong Association of Washington (HAW), says the farmers’ lifelines were severed when the state’s stay-at-home orders went into effect in March, at which point Gov. Jay Inslee had not yet designated floriculture as an essential business. Although HAW tried to help the farmers apply for grants and loans, the criteria presented hurdles: For example, those who needed funds to pay rent did not qualify because rent is not considered a business-related expense. Many of the farmers also employed family members, so there was no payroll. And for those who operate in cash, it was nearly impossible to prove a loss of income.

What’s more, says Yongvang, many of the older farmers aren’t fluent in English, relying on their young children to translate complicated business procedures that they themselves don’t have the fluency in Hmong to explain. HAW had to step in to mitigate frustration with the process.

Navigating a process that doesn’t accommodate their unique needs also sows resentment. According to the McKinsey report “Covid-19 and advancing Asian American recovery,” in-language resources for small businesses are few — none of the four financial-relief services offered by the Small Business Administration provide any Asian-language translations on their websites.

“Communities who have limited English-speaking skills are largely left out of a lot of the resources or are usually the last to know — or know too late — about support services or of assistance,” says Chanida Phaengdara Potter, founder and executive director of the SEAD Project, a Minneapolis-based community organization for the Southeast Asian diaspora.

The past has prepared some communities for the current crisis. “For as long as Little Tokyo has been around, there’s been a huge concern about how the community will continue and what it takes to do so,” says Fukushima.

The community already had programs in place to support small businesses, and the Little Tokyo Service Center launched its Small Business Relief Fund on GoFundMe in August. It recently released its first round of $2,000 small-business grants to 25 businesses, beginning with legacy institutions. It’s a nominal stipend, says Fukushima, but it reminds small businesses that they are a valued foundational pillar of the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce launched the Chinatown Recovery and Resiliency Fund, which raised a total of $42,000 to maintain street cleaning, promote businesses, further racial education, and reimburse 14 small businesses that suffered damage in the lootings that took place in Chinatown in May and June.

The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative has also launched a community care fund that provided $250 in emergency aid to manicurists across the state. To date, the collaborative has raised nearly $154,000 to support more than 625 manicurists. The amount fundraised was enough to provide assistance to everyone who applied.

But not all organizations were set up to weather the financial challenges of a pandemic. HAW, which was already operating on a shoestring budget, has been volunteer-run for years. The organization has no office space, website, or phone.

Still, the organization managed to raise $15,500 on GoFundMe and established a new neighborhood sales channel to help the farmers sell bouquets while the farmers markets remained closed. “We’re a community where we support each other,” says Yongvang. “A lot of these farmers wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for the community coming together.”

Where funds were unavailable, community members have also mobilized to provide services. The SEAD Project relies heavily on digital organizing and mobilizing to reach people in the community’s younger generations, who are digitally savvy and can act as intermediaries between their elders and their peers. The organization’s focus right now is to reach undocumented and low-income individuals who, due to their status, slip through the cracks of aid.

“The beautiful thing about seeing mutual aid happen and unfold is it’s all community led and run. There are no barriers, there’s no red tape, and there’s no bureaucracy,” says Phaengdara Potter. “People are getting resourced for basic needs like food, housing, and hygiene.”

Even the seemingly positive narrative of Asian American resilience and overcoming adversity often serves to distance Asian Americans from public assistance. Still, many business owners and advocates Vox has spoken to say their communities are resilient as a matter of survival.

“It’s in our DNA,” says Phaengdara Potter. “But it doesn’t mean that we’re not struggling. The absence of resources is the reason why we’re so resilient.”

Ethnic communities (especially Asian American communities), which have been isolated by language, culture, or invisibility from mainstream public life and economy, have learned to rely on one another, particularly in times of hardship. Many come from groups whose histories are dotted with migration, war, pandemics, and imperialism.

“At the end of the day, we’re a community that comes from war-torn countries,” says Yongvang, speaking to her confidence in Hmong flower farmers’ ability to lean on one another to outlast the pandemic.

Of course, the future for these and many other small businesses remains uncomfortably uncertain, but for Kim’s part, he’s using this time to take a much-needed break. “I don’t even know what tomorrow is gonna bring, let alone six months from now,” he says. “But that’s for everybody. Once Covid has dissipated a bit, my family will sit down and talk about where we go from here.”
At the very least, whatever his family decides is the next step, they know their community stands at the ready to support them.

Need some more brightness after all these smoke-hazed days? Beautiful flowers like that can help – but they don’t just magically appear at local markets. They are grown on small farms. And like so many, those farmers have been hard-hit in these times. So they’re having a flower fundraiser, with online orders through tomorrow, and a Saturday pickup spot in White Center. Explains Cynthia Yongvang of the Hmong Association of Washington, who emailed to let us know abut this: “Our fundraiser would benefit both the Hmong flower farmers who are struggling financially during this pandemic and also our 4 very small communities (Mien, Hmong, Khmu, and Lao) in the Puget Sound area by providing rental-assistance relief to families in need so that they won’t be displaced during this time.” The order form is here, and it explains, “This weekend, based on the farmers’ selection of flowers, the mix bouquets will include sunflowers, dahlias, lilies, phlox, statice , snapdragons, gladiolus and greenery for $25, with $10 of every bouquet going to our rental assistance program.” Orders will be accepted until 3 pm tomorrow (Thursday, September 17th), with pickup options (also listed on the order form) including 9 am-noon Saturday in White Center.

​With fewer markets and fewer shoppers, the Hmong farmers behind the iconic flower bouquets are hurting - but thanks to a woman in Lake City, there's a way to help.

SEATTLE — On a beautiful sunny day in August, the flower fields of Chao Chang Gardens are bursting with color. The vibrant blooms are what make up many of the bouquets that entice farmers market goers around King County.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year, the markets are much quieter... and emptier. Unfortunately, this has taken a huge toll on the flower farmers, many of which are Hmong.

Vang Lee is married to a Hmong farmer and says revenue is down 60% as compared to last year. An estimated 80-90 farming families are struggling to sell the flowers they work so hard to grow. 

He added, "95% of the farmers who are down in Pike Place [Market] selling these beautiful flowers are Hmong. Not many people in Seattle know that."

Friendly Vang-Johnson isn't a farmer and freely admits to knowing little about flowers. But she is Hmong -- and was quick to step up to help when she saw that her community was in need.

The Hmong Association of Washington called out for volunteers to buy several bouquets to sell to their friends and family. Friendly didn't think twice to raise her hand. 

"And then, hundreds upon hundreds of people were emailing me texting me messaging me about a pickup, [saying] 'Okay I'll take two bouquets.'"

Within a few months, the front yard of her Lake City home has effectively become a farm stand, just a short drive away from the city. 

The concept is simple: farmers bring flowers & produce to her house, neighbors stop by to peruse the bouquets, and volunteers arrive to take them to different neighborhoods where buyers can pick them up on specific days.

Every single penny made goes directly back to farmers like Vang Lee.

While Friendly isn't fluent in Hmong, and some farmers aren't fluent in English, they make it work. She estimates they've sold close to $400,000 worth of bouquets.

"It's been a wild ride."

The bouquets that don't get purchased? They're donated.

"Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of flowers, but we've given to Children's Hospital, UW Medical Center, Harborview."

As breathtaking as it is, flower farming is hard work -- and not many people recognize the hard work that goes into creating thousands and thousands of bouquets a year to bring bursts of color into people's homes.

Friendly hopes her own hard work can help the people that bring us this joy.

"We're all part of a community and I want to make sure that they stay afloat. Because, you know, it would be a real shame, if this part of Seattle disappeared," Friendly explained. "That's what we're doing. We're trying to spread the love, as best we can."

You can place a bouquet order by filling out this form. 

Get in touch with Friendly: friendly@friendlyhmongflowers.com