![]() ![]() The jungle is one of the things I’ve come to ask about. At home, beside the jungle, she said, it would have been cooked in a pit, like American Southern barbecue. It’s something I’d never have tried if Nou Vang hadn’t pointed it out to me. 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. 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. Hmong grandmothers who aren’t feeling too well seek out boiled chicken and greens. 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. People often ask me about the most “authentic” Hmong dish I’d recommend from the food court. ![]() ![]() 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. There’s a letter from the governor, in recognition of Xiong’s efforts to incubate hundreds of Hmong businesses. 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 picture of his dad, standing rigid in his Army uniform, with that particular orange-tinted blue sky you see only in 1970s snapshots. The absence of his family allows me to see for the first time how scant the keepsakes are up here. His pretty, raven-haired wife, Nou Vang, is not around making us tea, or giving me useful lessons in eating Hmong food. 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.Īt the top of the stairs lies Xiong’s attic office, which has an interior window overlooking the different stalls in the west building. 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. Not just a bazaar but a community unto itself. He wants it to be known as HmongTown-like Chinatown. And that’s one of the first things I learned about the place: Xiong wants to be done calling it the HmongTown Marketplace. 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. 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. 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. 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. I think most people look at HmongTown and imagine it was an inevitable occurrence. 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 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. 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. 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. With some 300 vendors and stalls, Toua Xiong’s market has become a peerless business incubator in the community. ![]()
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