Superhero Mom

Meet my superhero, the wonder of all wonder women, my beautiful mom – Phouthasinh Louangketh. Many of us honor our mothers as superheroes and indeed they are. Let me share with you the courageous act of my mother during a time of war, conflict, and years of uncertainty. My family of three – mom, my older brother, and I – embarked on a dangerous and uncertain journey that many of you have experienced in one way or another. My native country of Laos was overruled by the communist in 1975 resulting from the Vietnam era conflict. My father had been scheduled for execution, which rapidly led to his escape plan. Once of out Laos, he found a new family and did not return for us.

Life was hard, as you can imagine in any war-torn country, and particularly for a newly single mother who was pregnant with me during the time. Day after day, the fear of persecution became the pulsating raw reality on everyone’s mind. Mom’s courageous decision to escape from Laos took our small family of three on a 2-year long journey that began in the fall of 1979. After dinner with our extended family, the three of us left in the middle of the night without saying our goodbyes to the family. We secretly met up with escape guides to help us navigate the thick woods and jungles out of Laos. These were three men who were strangers to us and carried guns and knives.

Our journey by foot took us meandering through the thick jungles for days. Throughout our dangerous journey we blended in by pretending to work in the rice fields, climbed up trees to rest and avoid detection by the communist, and navigated the jungles taking paths where death and rotting corpse of those not so fortunate were present. Taking such paths somehow ensured our safety because why would anyone want to hide out with the dead and decay. Our journey by boat to Thailand took us across a hazardous stretch of the Mekong River at night where we manually rowed for several hours navigating the turbulent dangerous currents. Exhausted from our long journey, we must have passed out only to wake up realizing that we had slept on fresh grave mounds. Newly buried bodies swell and in shallow graves, it pushes the ground upward especially in hot climates. Once in Thailand, our journey by vehicle took us on an interesting path where we stashed inside a pile of rice bags and later poked at by pitch forks, sharp bamboo sticks and other sharp objects. We were fortunate that no one was injured or detected. My family’s journey continued on and into the refugee camps of Thailand and the Philippines and across the ocean by plane, and finally, to Boise, Idaho in October of 1981 where we were award U.S. citizenship in 1986. If many of you have ever watched the film, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (with Steve Martin and John Candy), we did it all except ours included a rickety wooden rowboat instead of a train.

While safe in the U.S., mom worked hard as a single parent balancing a fulltime job and raising two young kids on her own. She was the first Lao woman in Idaho to purchase her first home as a single parent so that my brother and I could have our own bedrooms as teenagers. As a child playing with my cheap version of a Barbie doll – Miss Flair – and using my stuffed moose animal as a Ken doll, the pain and struggles that mom endured was not obvious. Her immense love and sacrifices sheltered us from her reality. Mom’s struggles as a single refugee woman trying to navigate a new world, new language, and new culture made her stronger, more resilient, and independent. As an adult reflecting on my childhood, I have gained a deeper appreciation of her struggles that shaped her personal, maternal, and cultural journeys. Her journey of struggles, resilience, and renewal are lifelong tokens of love, sacrifice, and ultimately, inspiration.

Mom’s human journey story has inspired my path to developing an international themed diaspora museum, called the Idaho Museum of International Diaspora (IMID, pronounced ‘eye mid’) – a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation. Diaspora is defined as the displacement of people from their origin homelands (or homes). Realizing the great magnitude of diaspora and its significant impact, my desire for something profound and special that honors the courageous journeys of mom and all people – those who’ve suffered extreme hardships – evolved into the IMID, a museum that will feature the past and current lives of diaspora groups from around the world.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world wish to leave their homelands for multiple well-founded reasons. Their hope and struggles for a new life often parallel the motivations that influenced the early settlers – the European pilgrims – to leave their own homelands. Preserving the history of people affected by diaspora in the IMID is a critical step to provide a platform for education at all levels, healthy discourses on related topics, and events aimed to increase cultural diversity awareness and foster a culture of inclusiveness. Change with the times invites new challenges and signals the need for a new approach towards more openness, pragmatism, and community involvement.