Southern Fried Asian: H’Abigail Mlo

December 23, 2020 Southern Fried Asian

Just in time for the holidays, here’s the final Southern Fried Asian of season five to close out 2020! Joining the podcast is H’Abigail Mlo, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina and one of the founders of Voices of the Highlands, a digital storytelling project featuring Montagnard/Montagnard-American voices on identity, culture, and everyday life.

H’Abigail describes what it’s like to graduate college during a pandemic (1:00) before describing the origins of the Voices of the Highlands project (4:00). They then discuss political organizing around the election and counting the Montagnard community in the Census (8:45) and dig in to the history of the Montagnard diaspora in Greensboro, NC (12:00), including the phenomenon of conservatism among many Southeast Asian communities (17:30). They turn the discussion back to Voices of the Highlands and the work of centering Montagnard voices in AAPI spaces (22:30). Finally, H’Abigail talks about reclaiming and redefining a Southern identity (32:00) and shares a food memory of her grandmother’s eggplant curry (36:30)

Subscribe to the Southern Fried Asian podcast on iTunes, Google Play, NPR One, Spotify, and Stitcher Radio! Support Hard NOC Media on Patreon and GoFundMe. Buy merch on TeePublic!