When Robert D. Ray was governor of Iowa, one of his most amazing humanitarian accomplishments was to invite Southeast Asian refugees — “boat people,” as they were known — to settle in Iowa. Unheard of!
Sponsored by churches, communities, and families sprinkled across the state, the first wave of Tai Dam arrived in October 1975 — nearly 50 years ago. Ray’s success and that of the immigrants are an Iowa story that will be retold for decades.
This entire newsletter is devoted to the amazing story of five Southeast Asian immigrant communities who have woven themselves into the fabric of Des Moines during the last half century. All communities will participate in CelebrAsian Friday and Saturday in the Western Gateway Park.
Des Moines police Sgt. Doua Lor, a fixture in the Hmong community, provided all the contacts for this newsletter. In 2003, Sgt. Lor organized the City’s first Asian Outreach Office and served until recently as lead officer. The Asian Outreach Program now includes 14 officers proficient in nine languages.
TAI DAM
The surname “Baccam” is embedded in the Tai Dam community. And Tom Baccam, one of its leaders, acknowledges that most Baccams are related. “Lots of cousins,” Tom told me.
Indeed, when we walked outside the Tai Village event center in northwest Des Moines for a quick photo session with six members of the Sao Tai Dam of Iowa dancers, Sullivanh Cavanh, the group’s keyboard player, told me, “They are all my cousins.”
The community, which Tom estimates at 5,000–7,000, is a close-knit ethnic group, tracing its heritage to China and later to the mountainous regions of Laos. Iowa is home to the largest Tai Dam population outside Asia.
With pride, Tom recounts the story of 265 Tai Dam refugees who arrived in Iowa in October 1975 — nearly 50 years ago — marking the first Southeast Asian group to settle in the state. Within months, Iowa’s Tai Dam community surged to 2,600. Tom told me his community includes Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, and animists, a belief system that all objects have a life, soul, or spirit.
Denison, in southwest Iowa, was the first home for Tom, his grandparents, parents, and five siblings. Shortly, they moved to Marshalltown, where Tom graduated from high school in 1979. He later attended Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) and Grand View College (which became a university in 2008) before graduating from the University of Iowa.
Tom became a U.S. citizen in 1984 and clearly remembers his first time voting. “I was very happy to make my voice heard,” he told me.
He said he worked for many political campaigns “to get votes from my people. Most of the candidates I supported prevailed. I remember walking for Jack Bishop in a Polk County supervisor election to collect 17 ballots from my people. He won by only 15 votes!”
Tom was a tutor for the Des Moines Public Schools and Grand View University. At Employee and Family Resources, he assisted numerous families with their paperwork.
In 2003, Tom was among the Tai Dam leadership who spearheaded the community’s purchase of bordering Beaver Creek and now known as the Tai Village, north of Douglas Avenue and west of ML King Jr. Parkway. Every Labor Day weekend, the community hosts the Tai Village Festival, attracting swarms of Southeast Asian descendants and appreciative Americans of all backgrounds to its 84 acres. The community is exploring opportunities to expand its event center to host community events.
By the way: Don Khongmaly, a member of the Lao community, told me that before he moved to Des Moines, he had never been aware of the existence of the Tai Dam in Laos. The Laotian government officially recognizes 49 ethnic groups, including the Tai Dam.
By the way #2: The young women shown above are the third generation of local Tai Dam dancers. The Tai Dam are also known as the Black Tai for the traditional black skirts worn by females. The dresses were custom-made locally for the dancers. For their skirts, the girls choose their own exquisitely detailed embroidered flowers. The green silk belts are known as say el. Each dancer wears a say soy (silver chain) at the waist and ornate silver buttons on the colorful blouses.
CAMBODIANS
“I enjoy helping people,” Sanaye Chung told me about her 36-year career with the state of Iowa.
Sanaye’s job as an income maintenance worker in Health and Human Services puts her on the front line of helping Central Iowa immigrants determine their eligibility for assistance, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Family Investment Program (FIP). “The policy changes all the time,” she told me, “but I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world.”
Sanaye has seen a bit of the world, beginning with her early years in Thailand. She was 5 when her mother died. During a visit with a grandmother in Kouk Mon, Cambodia, her family was stranded when the radical communist Khmer Rouge took control of the country. The Khmer Rouge separated boys, girls, and parents.
Sanaye and her sister, then 10 and 11 years old, recall carrying water up the mountain to gardens and working all day in rice fields. But with the help of her new stepmother’s brother, the family devised a plan in February 1979 to escape the Khmer Rouge brutality and return to Thailand.
It was a dangerous trek of three days and two nights over mountain trails to temporary safety in Thailand. At times, Sanaye, then 12, carried her 2-year-old brother and hushed his cries. A bribe to soldiers — her stepmother’s gold necklace — provided safe passage.
Before the family arrived in Iowa, through the generosity of Lutheran Services in Iowa (LSI), they survived months at the Ban Mae Surin camp in Thailand and another six months in a refugee camp in the Philippines.
Sanaye and her family arrived in Iowa on August 23, 1980 — a joyous date burned into a 13-year-old’s memory. The family lived briefly in Mechanicsville, east of Cedar Rapids, and Grinnell before she graduated from Oskaloosa High School in 1986. She earned an associate degree at DMACC and later a Bachelor of Arts from William Penn University.
In 1988, Sanaye began her career at the Iowa Refugee Center, which was then part of the Iowa Department of Human Services. Sanaye told me she continues to draw inspiration from her mentor, caseworker Try Tuon, when she started her career.
Sanaye has a long involvement with the Iowa Cambodian Buddhist Society, which shares space with the Watt Iowaram Temple on 19th Street. She recently stepped down as president and handed over leadership to Emily Frimml, a first-generation American of Cambodian descent who serves as a human resources coordinator at Dotdash Meredith. Sanaye estimates that 250 Cambodian families and 2,000 Cambodians live in the Des Moines area.
She beamed when I mentioned that the City’s four other Southeast Asian communities struggle with a handoff to the next generation. “All our board members are in their 30s and 40s,” Emily told me. “We are first-generation Americans. I grew up in Grinnell, where the United Methodist Church sponsored our family. I went to the Buddhist temple on Saturday and to church on Sunday!”
By the way: As we wrapped up our conversation, Emily, Sanaye, and Eang Muom Op, the Angkor Wat monk, discussed plans for an upcoming 100-day ceremony at the temple to honor the successful passing of an individual’s spirit into the new afterlife.
VIETNAMESE
Jennifer Shedd, a bilingual family liaison for Des Moines Public Schools, has supported the Vietnamese community since 1989. Her first job was tutoring Vietnamese students in math, social studies, and English.
Today, she assists families attempting to navigate Medicaid, Medicare, resources for rent assistance, public transit, adult English literacy, and family relationships. She shares an office at Hoover High School with liaison staff who are fluent in Spanish; Swahili; Karenni and Karen, which are spoken in Myanmar; as well as Dari and Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan.
Her parents had their business — sewing mosquito netting — and family possessions stripped when the communists overran their native Saigon, which became Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, with the fall of South Vietnam. The parents paid 10 bars of gold, worth approximately $5,000 in 1979, for Jennifer and a younger sister, Leslie, to escape Vietnam on a Mekong River fishing boat.
The girls were 17 and 15 at the time. Then, they spent eight months at the Cherating refugee camp on one of the Malaysian islands, where the Vietnamese refugee population peaked at 10,000.
The sisters arrived in Des Moines in 1979, sponsored by LSI as unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs). A Grand View College math professor and his wife fostered the girls until Jennifer and Leslie aged out after graduating from North High School in 1981.
Subsequently, on their own, the sisters set up a sparse attic apartment in a home near Grand View. Jennifer worked at a Park Fair alterations shop and did weekend housekeeping shifts at the Savery Hotel while attending Grand View. A bicycle was her only transportation. She graduated in 1986 with a degree in business.
Soon after she graduated, LSI hired her as a social worker for the foster-care program. She joined Des Moines Public Schools in 1989.
When I stopped by the Vietnamese American Community Center on a Saturday morning, Jennifer, part of a crew of five Vietnamese women and one young Anglo (married to a Vietnamese woman), was busy prepping for the Vietnamese food booth at this year’s CelebrAsian Festival, scheduled for May 23–24 in the City’s Western Gateway Park. Kim Nguyen bustled in and out of the conversation while supervising the food prep outside. Kim was a URM from Saigon — ransom for herself and two siblings to come was 10 gold bars — and became part of a Cedar Rapids family connected with LSI. She graduated from Mount Mercy College (now University) with a degree in teaching in 1991 before moving to Des Moines that same year. She is a former president of the Vietnamese American Community Center. She, too, found a job in the Des Moines Public Schools.
Jennifer was president of the Vietnamese Center in 2011, when they scraped together $85,000, including several no-interest loans from members, to purchase their building at 2600 Euclid Avenue.
I also met current Vietnamese Center President Vinh Nguyen (unrelated to Kim), who has served five terms in that capacity, beginning with the community’s initial formation in early 2000. One of the “boat people,” Vinh was rescued and sent to the notorious Songkhla refugee camp in Thailand. He was the ninth and youngest boy of 10 children; his parents paid a ransom of three bars of gold for their youngest son to escape. Vinh, who arrived in Des Moines in late 1982 as a 21-year-old, estimates that today’s local Vietnamese community numbers 5,000–7,000.
Vinh was Jennifer’s supervisor for several years when he served as the English Language Learning (ELL) supervisor for Des Moines Schools. He admitted that since retiring, “I spend most of my time in this community center. Honestly, all I want to do is build our community.” He also works as an LSI education program manager.
“We do a lot of community projects,” he says. “We have meals and activities monthly here at the center for seniors. Arts and dance for children. We sponsored many coat and clothing drives for newly arrived refugees and donated personal care products to the YMCA Supportive Housing residents. Last year, we provided three home-cooked meals for the YMCA residents.
“We are the only ethnic community participating in PrideFest in the last two years and are proud of it.”
Getting the second generation of Vietnamese Americans involved in the community is challenging. To help with language skills, Vinh told me, he started the program Learning Vietnamese with Vinh. “Vietnamese is a tonal language; it’s not easy to master!” he says. “We have language classes for children and adults.” Some adults are non-Vietnamese married to Vietnamese.
By the way: When Vinh Nguyen was a DMPS supervisor, he supervised nearly 90 ELL teachers and 48 bilingual family liaisons.
LAOTIAN
Don Khongmaly’s uncle, Thene Khomgmaly, who had served in the U.S. Army, sponsored Don’s parents and five children for their 1978 journey from Laos to the Midwest.
His family’s first stop was Independence, Missouri, where Don graduated from William Chrisman High School as one of only a handful of Asians in his class. He painfully recalls being called a “chink.”
The family moved to Des Moines in 1990. “We came from nothing,” Don recalls. But he says he immediately felt the enormous difference between Independence and Des Moines: the wraparound support of the Laotian community, which, Don estimated, numbers 5,000–6,000.
“My parents worked custodial jobs at Iowa Methodist for their whole lives,” Don related. “We hunted and fished to put food on our table. In our community, it’s not unusual for three generations to live in the same house. We help each other out in any way we can.”
Don graduated from Iowa State in 1994 and received his MBA from Drake in 1998. After 13 years in transportation logistics, he opened his own American Family Insurance agency in 2006.
“What’s interesting about the insurance business,” Don told me, “is that certain communities are underserved. That’s my focus.
“Some policyholders don’t speak English well and will bring in translators. Many times, the translator is their young children or family members. But I tell them, ‘Be patient. We’ll talk slowly.’ And that’s how you build loyalty.”
Along the way, Don mentored his Hmong brother-in-law, Dub Vang, in the insurance business. Now, Dub has his own American Family agency, in Urbandale.
Watlao Buddhavath, the Laotian Buddhist temple at 1804 East Park Avenue, is the center of this community’s life. The Laotian community supports two monks.
“Our community is based around the temple,” Don said. “We celebrate life and death. Our two monks also offer blessings for a child or a new house.”
At the Lao temple, Don introduced me to Vongyasack Manivanh, vice president of the temple, and Nouane Sylaloun, president. While we talked, a steady stream of young girls arrived to rehearse traditional Laotian dances for the temple’s three-day celebration (June 20-22).
As for Don, he acknowledges he’s pretty much Americanized. “I grew up in the Kansas City area,” he reminded. “Of course, I love barbecue! And country music.
“Today, I hunt and fish for a hobby. Our oldest son is named Hunter. We named our younger son Fisher!
“My dad and I go bowhunting for deer nearly every weekend in the fall. Hunting is a great way to spend time with friends and family, as it helps us find our peace and tranquility in nature.”
By the way: Don told me about the Buddhist tradition of blessing a new home: “First, the house is cleaned. After a monk sets up a small shrine, he will offer chants to promote good luck and spirits. And of course, ward off evil spirits.”
HMONG
On May 14, I met with Wangmeng Lee and his younger brother, Lee Khoua C. Sayaxang, at the Hmong Cultural Center and farm outside Prairie City. The day holds special meaning for Wangmeng, a former colonel in the Laotian army.
Fifty years ago to the day, Wangmeng boarded one of the last C-130 transport planes evacuating Hmong military leaders and U.S. troops from the storied Long Tieng military base in mountainous Laos. Laotian military leaders instructed the Hmong and Americans to board the plane or face certain death from the Viet Cong, who would gain control of the top-secret facility within hours.
Although Wangmeng escaped, it was two painful years before he reunited with his wife and 10 children in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand. In 1978, Wangmeng and his family joined his younger brother, Lee Khoua C. Sayaxang, and 15 family members who had settled in the Des Moines area. The local Hmong community, estimated at 500 members, is the smallest of the five Southeast Asian communities.
Lee Khoua was among some of the early Hmong refugees who arrived in the U.S. After living briefly in Sidney, Nebraska, he moved to Des Moines in 1977. By 1987, he had earned his teaching degree from Drake University. He recalls that one of his classmates and early friends was Vinh Nguyen, from the Vietnamese community. Like Vinh, he spent 31 years as an English Language Learner (ELL) teacher with the Des Moines school system, retiring in 2011.
Wangmeng worked for Catholic Social Services, providing refugee services during his Des Moines career.
With the assistance of Bishop Maurice Dingman and Sister Pat Shearer, the Hmong community in 1984 bought a farm in Jasper County. That acreage became the Hmong Cultural Center, which includes a sturdy and spacious events building.
And just as important, in the eyes of the brothers, the farmland provides the Hmong community a place to garden and grow vegetables. “We lost our land,” Wangmeng told me, “and we lost our country. But we now have land here.”
Lee Khoua and his wife, Mao, have operated Mao’s Egg Rolls for 32 years at the Downtown Farmers’ Market at the corner of Court Avenue and Fourth Street. Daughters-in-law and other relatives pitch in for Saturday morning egg rolls and other Southeast Asian specialties.
By the way: Sgt. Lor told me of Hu Plig, a fascinating Hmong blessing to celebrate the arrival of a newborn. On the third day after birth, the family “calls in the spirits” for the infant’s good health and to bless the parents.
