Local Hmong community celebrates New Year's Festival in El Dorado Park

The Hmong community celebrated their New Year’s holiday at El Dorado Park in Long Beach on Saturday, Dec. 12 and Sunday, Dec. 13 despite intermittent rains over the weekend.
The Hmong Association of Long Beach and the Arts Council for Long Beach sponsored the Hmong New Year’s Festival. The Hmong Association of Long Beach is a nonprofit organization that works to promote and preserve Hmong culture locally.
“The Hmong are an Asian ethnic group,” the Hmong Association of Long Beach’s website states, “from the mountainous region of China that slowly migrated south and settled into parts of Southeast Asia (Laos, Thailand and Vietnam) during the 18th and 19th century. After the Vietnam War in the 1970’s, many refugee families [sought] political asylum and fled to [settle] in the United States, France, Canada and Australia after being persecuted by the communist Pathet Lao government for helping the US and CIA in the Secret War. Many migrated to the United States with little possessions and just the clothes on their backs.”
Attendees were encouraged to come dressed in traditional Hmong clothing, and those who did were given free tickets for the festival’s raffle. Traditional Hmong clothing varies based on which tribe a person comes from.

“Typically white is for the Hmong White,” Mary Yang, a Hmong dancer at the festival told the Signal Tribune, “and then the patterned ones are for Hmong Green, and then the darker [colors], like black or gray or red skirts are Hmong Black, and then Hmong Stripe, they usually have stripes of patterns on their sleeves. So the clothes just kind of differentiate the different kinds of tribes.”
The festival included musical and dance performances by members and students of the Hmong Association of Long Beach, as well as traditional foods such as Hmong sausage, papaya salad and Khao Poon, a type of noodle soup from Southeast Asia.
Local Hmong children and teens meet weekly at the Hmong Association of Long Beach to practice traditional dances in preparation for this yearly festival. While these dances are typically performed to Hmong music, this year dancers combined both Hmong and contemporary American music into their performances.
Yang noted that she and her family had been attending the festival for the last 23 years and had seen it fluctuate in size over the years. Yang told the Signal Tribune that many people stayed home this year due to the rainy weather.
“It has gotten smaller, but in recent years it’s also gotten bigger compared to the previous years. So we are still getting more people to come out from different communities.”
In previous years, Hmong associations from Santa Ana, Sacramento, Fresno and San Diego have participated in the Long Beach Hmong New Year Festival.
Further cultural displays during the festival included Hmong music played on the queej–– a reed pipe used in Hmong music–– as well as a traditional ball-tossing game called pov pob.
The traditional instrument, the qeej, was played during the festival by members of the Hmong Association of Long Beach’s “Queej not Gangs” program, which works to pass on Hmong cultural practices to young people in the community. The queej instrument can take many years to master, so it is crucial that Hmong youth have access to classes early in life if the tradition is to be passed on. The current queej instructor of the association is Nao Lee Thao, according to its website.