Meet the King of St. Paul’s HmongTown

Since 2005, St. Paul’s HmongTown Marketplace has become one of the best Asian markets in the United States. You wouldn’t believe what it took for Toua Xiong to build it.

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If you asked me to name the person who has most changed the Twin Cities in the last 10 years, my answer would be someone you’ve likely never heard of. Namely, Toua Xiong, the wiry, freckled incarnation of sheer willpower who’s behind HmongTown Marketplace, the market of 200 or 300 Hmong vendors that crouches behind the state capitol in St. Paul.

I say 200 or 300 because the market is bigger in the summer, when the farmers’ market expands to include outdoor stalls, and some 20,000 visitors stream through weekly. It’s smaller in winter, when the market contracts to merely fill the collection of squat outbuildings built over a century to form what was once Shaw/Stewart Lumber Co. I think most people look at HmongTown and imagine it was an inevitable occurrence. After all, some 100,000 Hmong people live in and around the Twin Cities, and a few years after the market opened, a copycat called Hmong Village popped up in the east. But I have been writing about Twin Cities food and culture for a long time, and I can tell you that, like any Thanksgiving table laden with treats, it didn’t just happen. It came about from work and a vision.

Over the years, Xiong has told me different details about HmongTown’s founding, and I’ve always wanted to gather them up and set them down. In honor of this, the season of Thanksgiving, when Native Americans shared their treasure trove of food with immigrants—and in defiance of recent politics, when immigrants have become so besieged—I visited Xiong at HmongTown. And that’s one of the first things I learned about the place: Xiong wants to be done calling it the HmongTown Marketplace. He wants it to be known as HmongTown—like Chinatown. Not just a bazaar but a community unto itself.

To find Xiong’s office, you make your way to one of the least trafficked corners of the market, back near the medicinal tea parlor and the insurance agency. There, beside one of the look-alike stalls stuffed to the brim with $3 rhinestone earrings and embroidered Hmong ceremonial toddler dresses, you make your way up a staircase lined with a threadbare carpet that’s the same dingy brown the lumberyard bosses picked out decades ago, presumably because it was the color of sawdust. 

At the top of the stairs lies Xiong’s attic office, which has an interior window overlooking the different stalls in the west building. When I find Xiong, he is alone. His pretty, raven-haired wife, Nou Vang, is not around making us tea, or giving me useful lessons in eating Hmong food. The absence of his family allows me to see for the first time how scant the keepsakes are up here. There’s a picture of his dad, standing rigid in his Army uniform, with that particular orange-tinted blue sky you see only in 1970s snapshots. There’s a picture of Xiong as a rocking 1970s teen, with a certain lean, pop-star glamour, gazing at the horizon above a polyester disco-splayed collar. There’s a letter from the governor, in recognition of Xiong’s efforts to incubate hundreds of Hmong businesses. And there’s an award from this magazine for creating the HmongTown food court, one of the most important destinations for authentic southeast Asian food in the country.

People often ask me about the most “authentic” Hmong dish I’d recommend from the food court. I have learned, through the experience of years, that this idea of authenticity reveals more about the questioner—authentic to whom? Hmong teens seek out pork belly cooked in a super-hot oven, so it’s crisp as State Fair bacon, and they pair it with red rice and a bubble tea. That’s authentic. Hmong grandmothers who aren’t feeling too well seek out boiled chicken and greens. That’s authentic. Hmong professional women in yoga pants and stilettos come in for half a dozen orders of larb to go, so they can serve the salads of ground meat and herbs to their friends who are coming over for an Emmy-watching party. It’s all authentic.

I’ve fallen in love with a particular mush of long-roasted pork and mustard greens that’s a bit like Southern collards and a bit like Mexican carnitas. It’s something I’d never have tried if Nou Vang hadn’t pointed it out to me. At home, beside the jungle, she said, it would have been cooked in a pit, like American Southern barbecue.

 The jungle is one of the things I’ve come to ask about. All the Hmong in Minnesota—the current generation or a previous one—have an exodus story. But those narratives don’t often leave the family. They’re both very long and full of minor points, mainly of interest to the family, such as the true origins of that one chipped lacquer box on the mantelpiece. Outside the family, who would even ask? Xiong’s story, which is epic, starts at the tail end of the Vietnam War.

Xiong’s father, like many of the Hmong, had fought for the United States. When the Americans left in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, he became a target of communist Lao soldiers and others allied with North Vietnam. Xiong’s mother needed to raise food for the family. So she tended plots near the edge of the jungle, where the danger was high.

Xiong hid with other children in the jungle, moving around in a pack. They used tree sap and slingshots to catch birds, and tried to limit any cooking smoke that would attract bombers. 

At this point, Xiong’s family numbered five boys, all told. The oldest had just started college, in Thailand. The baby stayed at his mother’s side. And the three middle boys hid with other children in the jungle. Xiong remembers keeping special white rocks in his pocket that sparked when you struck them together. His father sent him off with a message: “You shut your mouth. You don’t say we have American guns. You don’t say anything.”

Xiong and the other kids foraged for fruit, moving around in a pack. At night they erected a sort of shelter, with a tarp stretched over the ground and sticks holding up banana leaves to craft a makeshift cover. A half-moon trench, dug at the perimeter, diverted the rainwater. The kids would use tree sap and slingshots to catch birds, strike a fire with those white stones, and try to limit any cooking smoke that would attract bombers. Often, moving from place to place, they’d find the strafed corpses of their fellow Hmong.

“We were chased for four years, everywhere in the jungle, with maybe 100 families, running and running,” Xiong says. He’s 51 years old now, and when he talks about his childhood, he seems to get caught between rote recitation of a story he’s told a thousand times and completely fresh horror. For example, one time, when his father had rejoined the kids in the jungle, Xiong remembers the Lao soldiers coming, and shouting at them, “If you don’t come with us to the city, we’re going to shoot you.” Xiong’s dad instructed the children to get low and run, while he drew the fire to himself, shouting back at the communists, of all things, “We don’t like your system!”

Years passed. When two of Xiong’s older brothers turned 14 and 15, the family sent them west, to walk from the Laotian jungles to Thailand. The Hmong were not unfamiliar with war, and they expected the peace would return eventually. They waited and waited. But when Xiong turned 12 and his brother 5, his parents gave up on returning to their former life. And they, too, began to walk hundreds of miles toward the border. Sometimes Xiong could carry his tired little brother. His mother carried the pots and pans. His father carried the rice.

When they reached the wide, rushing Mekong River, they bought three tire inner tubes for the family of four. That’s all the black marketers on the shore had left. Xiong’s mom couldn’t swim. They sat her in one truck inner tube, and loaded the pots and pans in her lap. His father, the rice, and his brother took the second tube. Xiong took the third. He was the lead swimmer. They held hands. Xiong started kicking.

He remembers starting after dark, maybe around nine o’clock. Fighting the current, hand in hand, sweating, drinking river water, wrists and legs failing, they made it to the opposite shore before first light. Xiong recounts the strange sounds he heard then, which he’d never encountered in all his years in the jungle.

He recreates it now, in his lumberyard office aerie, his sinewy hands tense on the table, as if he’d just unclenched them after the swim that finally saved his family: “Beep beep beep”—a car noise. To Xiong, “it was the American sound.”

•••••

So began seven years encircled by barbed wire, in a refugee camp. An hour of language instruction in the morning, then killing time, walking in circles all day.

One of the American church aid workers gave the kids a Yamaha acoustic guitar, and the teenagers would sit on what they called “the mountain”—really a grassy rise—and try to strum along to American pop songs. At the conference table Xiong sings a few bars of that 1967 hit, “San Francisco”: If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Xiong tells me he’s surprised that I don’t read those lyrics as a song of freedom and promise. It was what inspired him to invent his own tunes.

“I’d sing my sadness,” he says. “How come we are born to be Hmong people? We don’t have a school. We don’t have a country.”

The music got him through a lot. It also may have been what drew the attention of his fellow refugee, Nou Vang. “We were kids dating kids, kids marrying kids,” Xiong says. “There was nothing else to do. Every day you take your girlfriend around the camp. What else could you do to kill the time? There was no good schools, no life.” 

When he was 16, and Vang was 14 (or maybe 13, he says), the couple married. Now they couldn’t be separated by resettlement, a constant source of worry. A year later, Vang gave birth to their first child. Xiong, Vang, and their two kids got off the plane in St. Paul on May 28, 1986, to join the older brothers. They’d gotten here first, and bought a duplex in Frogtown, so the family would have a home. The photos of that day show Xiong wearing what he calls his “Thai-style rocker shirt,” holding his Yamaha guitar.

He was so young, still 17, that he could have enrolled in high school. Instead, Xiong decided to attend community college for business administration, then accounting. “I sat there with my Hmong dictionary in one hand, my English dictionary in the other,” he says. “I didn’t know any of these words: syllabus? Marketing? Attorney?” He meant to be the first Hmong  CPA, but it turned out he didn’t understand the requirements, and after graduating, it took an entire year to land an accounting job. And that job only paid $9 an hour.

Desperate for a way out, he took a seminar on distressed properties, which soon landed him a portfolio of rentals. These required as much money to maintain as they were taking in. That $9-an-hour job was the only thing keeping the whole family in rice: his wife, his children, his parents.

The only privacy Xiong and Vang could find was in their car. They’d put their infant in a car seat, buckle him in the back, and circle the Cities and talk. The question Xiong kept coming back to, he says today, was the same one the couple had debated as teens in the refugee camp: Why could the Hmong claim no country, no land, no place to call their own? Visiting his wife’s family in California, Xiong found himself riveted by the various Chinatowns. How was it that the Chinese had China, and all these extra Chinatowns too?

Then the worst day of his life arrived: He was getting laid off. Xiong remembers the experience as pure terror. It was almost worse than the jungles with the bullets, because at least there you could run. Now, in America, running with all these babies and dependents? That was no option. He recounts his last day at his job: “I went to the bathroom. I closed the lights. I said, God, help me. Give me a direction. Suddenly my mind said, call your friend.”

His friend, it turns out, was having the worst day of his life, too. He had just learned his wife was leaving him. Get me $5,000 cash today, sign a contract for a total of $150,000, and I’ll sell you my grocery store, said his friend. Xiong took a cash advance against every credit card he could get his hands on, and stopped at OfficeMax to buy a blank template for a contract. Xiong and Vang opened the store for business the very next morning, and, on that first day, took in gross receipts of $18.

Still, Xiong recalls that event as his first step on his road to retail. Some nine years later, with the city looking to redevelop the market he bought that fateful day, Xiong signed a contract for deed to buy up an abandoned lumberyard a little north of the capitol, off Como Avenue. Originally, he thought he could paint lines on the ground and rent stalls: instant market! But then he learned about obstacles like retail codes and fire sprinklers, and what followed was a Tom Clancy–like financial high-stakes tale that nearly ended up with Xiong losing everything. Instead, he succeeded in opening HmongTown.

Enduring so many trials has given Xiong a unique take on the parenting of his five children—one that I, who parent like a typical, middle-class American, can’t entirely process. You see, when three of his children turned ages 9, 10, and 11, Xiong became worried that they’d grown too soft, lolling around and watching television. “They think they’re American, but their hair is black and their eyes are brown,” he says. “They are Hmong.” So he told them they were all going on a vacation to Thailand.

“I lied to them,” he explains. “I said, We go to Thailand to have fun. They had one-way tickets. I found an international school. I found a Hmong person to keep house. I left them there for a year. I want them to be motivated. I got motivated when I lived in the jungle. They need to feed themselves. They need to heal themselves when they get sick. There’s no TV, no air conditioning. When they came back a year later, they were good kids.”

•••••

Up in the offices, Xiong suddenly fell quiet. He’d covered all the important points of his family’s saga. But it turns out Xiong was actually ready to pivot to the topic he really wanted me to put in the magazine. He’d like to see Hmong senior housing connected to HmongTown. He’s taking the first step himself, converting some space at HmongTown into a senior daycare facility. But Xiong has concluded that expanding the service to something as big as senior housing will require municipal support, and a regulatory and management structure that dwarfs everything he’s already created.

Hmong elders need this, he explains, moving into salesman mode. Don’t I understand the unique cultural needs of people like his mother, whose lives have wrenched them from jungle to refugee camp to St. Paul?

Actually, with everything he’s told me, I really do, I tell him.

Satisfied, he leaps up to show me the architectural sketches piled on a desk. Xiong is currently working with an architect to create a pagoda-like archway at the entrance, like many American Chinatowns have. But different, naturally, because Hmong architecture is not Chinese architecture. He’s also building an onsite Hmong cultural center for the display of art and artifacts, the performance of music, the teaching of Hmong crafts, and the playing of Hmong games, such as Tuj Lub, which you play with grapefruit-sized tops.

The transactional part of our conversation come and gone, Xiong relaxes. I’ve finally connected the dots on a story I’ve been hearing bits and pieces of for years, and he communicated the importance of municipal support for Hmong senior care. He takes out a few more mementos for me to consider. The American flag, furnished by congress, which Xiong feels his dad, who passed away in 2014, would be especially proud of. Letters from important politicians.

Not bad for a guy who came to this country with little more than willpower and an acoustic Yamaha guitar, huh? Speaking of that guitar, Xiong got onstage with it, to sing for the first annual HmongTown Festival. This is an outdoor community celebration in June, on the HmongTown grounds, with music, dancing, awards, bands, and vendors selling treats. He sang one of his own songs for the crowd.

“The sadness is always burning in me,” Xiong says. “We don’t have a country. We were chased, and chased. I had no reason to be chased into the jungle at 7. I made no mistake. The camps were a prison. I am as capable as any person, but I never had a chance.” So he sang a song he wrote about people without a homeland, in the place he made for them in a new world.

Xiong told me I could probably find the performance on YouTube, but in fact I could not. What I did find, a few minutes later, going over my notes in my car, was that my parking spot afforded a perfect view of Xiong and Vang leaving the office, having wrapped up their workday. They ran to their car, holding hands, laughing, their heads dipped together like love-struck teens who had promised each other a hideaway, and then made it.