M.D.—Against All Odds

Former refugee camp resident and mother of two, this UC Davis medical student will soon become one of the country’s few female Hmong physicians.

By Hilary Costa

At 27, Sa Vang is worlds away from the Thai refugee camp where she spent the first three years of her life. Today, the third-year UC Davis medical student and mother of two is only one year away from joining the handful of female Hmong physicians in the United States.

Needless to say, her path toward a career in medicine has been anything but smooth.

Married and pregnant at 16, Vang faced “the sea of all the things that everybody said my destiny would be.”

That narrow destiny for Hmong females, she says, is to marry young and take care of their families.

“You cannot be a Hmong girl and grow up in our culture without being aware of the fact that you are second class to your brothers or the men in your family,” she says. “I’ve always felt that.”

So she fought against it, determined to create a different destiny for herself.

Instead of dropping out of high school, Vang continued with her education, graduating as the valedictorian of her senior class. She spent three years as an undergraduate at Humboldt State University before graduating with honors from California State University, Sacramento. Her dream of studying medicine became a reality when she enrolled in UC Davis’ medical school in 2000.

Though she excelled in academics from an early age, Vang was never encouraged by her family to pursue an advanced degree. Quite the opposite, she was chastised by her parents, who believed an education would make her want to leave her husband.

“Fortunately, I have a really good husband who has supported me and has helped me throughout,” she says. “And I really wanted to show my family, especially my mom and my dad, that I can do whatever I put my mind to.”

Making her pursuit of a medical degree even more difficult was the widespread distrust of Western medicine among the Hmong, who adhere instead to traditional shamanism practiced by their spiritual healers.

Vang credits much of her success to her participation as a teenager in the Hmong Thao Academic Association, a nonprofit group in her hometown of Stockton that teaches Hmong children to value education, as well as the traditions of their culture. One of the group’s main goals is to keep Hmong youth away from gang activity.

“It is so easy for them to be influenced by their peers,” she says. “Providing safe activities, such as learning how to sing a traditional song, learning how to do a traditional dance, learning traditional rituals and ceremonies and things like that, will keep them off the streets.”

Today Vang volunteers for the association, helping recently to organize a fund-raising basketball tournament for later on this year. The group needs all the financial help it can get as it tries to expand its services for the next wave of Hmong immigrants coming to the Central Valley from Thailand. The majority of the 1,500 refugees who are expected to settle in California are relatives of veterans contracted by the CIA to fight against Vietnamese communists in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s.

For her own part, Vang plans to use her medical skills to offer care, particularly family planning services, to members of the Hmong community.

“It’s very important to me to be able to provide women’s healthcare to the women in my community, who have always been modest about their bodies and afraid to take part in some of the preventive services that we recommend,” she says. Vang hopes her example will serve to encourage other Hmong women to pursue their goals and show their parents that pursuing an education will not erase their appreciation for their traditional culture.

“There are always going to be obstacles in the way,” she says. “You just always have to believe in yourself. It sounds like things you’ve heard a million times—but you hear them because they’re true.”