Saw Morrison knew he had to name his fourth and youngest child after his snowy, adopted new homeland, even as unfamiliar as it still was.
But “Minnesota”? Too long.
Morrison, part of an early wave of Karen immigrants who relocated from Thai refugee camps to St. Paul in 2004, celebrated his new surroundings with a compromise. Sota August Johnny is now 6 and, unlike his father, has grown up familiar with snow, the English language, American television and other daily intricacies of Minnesota living.
Morrison still puzzles over much of it. Big Macs leave him hungry for home cooking, even as his kids complain about some of the traditional dishes he whips up. Traditionally, the Karen, an ethnic minority from southern Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), have no surnames, forcing them to invent them on arrival in the U.S.
Back in Myanmar, teachers were called “teacher.” Children were modest and rarely talked back to adults. The violence that forced him from his homeland is a distant whisper to his kids.
After seven years in Minnesota, Morrison, the social services coordinator for the Karen Organization of Minnesota, said he sometimes feels 7 years old, discovering everything for the first time. These days, however, he has company.
The trickle of Karen (pronounced kah-REHN) that began arriving in 2000 has become a stream. An estimated 5,500 to 6,000 Karen now live in Minnesota, according to the Karen Organization of Minnesota, making the state home to more Karen than any other. Most are concentrated in a few neighborhoods of St. Paul, Roseville and Maplewood.
On Thursday evening, Morrison and the Karen organization celebrated the first decade or so of life in Minnesota with a milestone – the group’s first sit-down gala, a $50-per-ticket affair in a ballroom at Hamline University’s Klas Center.
The event was co-hosted by Hamline’s McVay Youth Partnership, which works with five Methodist and Presbyterian churches to offer tutoring and mentoring to middle school students at four sites in St. Paul and Maplewood. Two of the sites are largely attended by Karen students: the Arlington Hills United Methodist Church in Maplewood and the Wheelock Parkway United Methodist Church in St. Paul.
Jane Krentz had never heard of the Karen when she started the mentoring program in early 2005. Today, she said, she’s fallen in love with her young clients.
“We started to serve a few, and all of a sudden we had 22 (kids) on the first day of programming at Arlington Hills” in 2008, said Krentz, the McVay Youth Partnership director. “We thought we were going to serve one family, and the word spread, and they all registered. It was great.
“When we started, there were about three who could really speak English, and they interpreted for us,” she continued. “Now, they’re all chattering away. There’s…new refugees coming, so it’s a continuous process.”
Krentz has watched two of those early interpreters, sisters Dayliar Htoo, 19, and Zin Zin Htoo, 20, graduate from high school, enter college and come back as mentors. The sisters are the first two recipients of the McVay Scholarship, which helps them attend Hamline University, where they’re both in their second year of studies.
Today, they’re the first Karen students to enroll at Hamline and among the first to attend a four-year private university in Minnesota, making them pioneers of sorts for their peers and their ethnic group.
Zin Zin Htoo said she’s a bit of a role model to her friends. “You have to set your goals so you can go to college in the future.”
But it hasn’t been easy.
The sisters shared some of their experiences at the gala, talking about the importance of education despite struggles acclimating to American culture and learning English. They arrived in the U.S. in 2003, when they were 11 and 12, respectively.
“When I first came to the United States, it wasn’t what I thought it would be like,” Dayliar Htoo said in an interview. “In Thailand, I watched all these movies with big houses. I didn’t think I’d see trees, because in the movies I saw big cities.
“When I got here, I didn’t get to live in a big house, because we lived in an apartment,” she continued. “When I first saw snow, that was cool….I thought we could eat it. It was really pretty. And then the next day I saw it got dirty, and it was getting colder and colder, and I didn’t like it anymore.”
Minnesota, she said, is popular with the Karen because it is welcoming and has generous charities and social services helping with their transition. But kids are sometimes still bullied at school, and finding jobs is difficult for many because of language barriers.
“Sometimes people think I’m Cambodian or Hmong. Whenever I try to say I’m Karen, they’re like, ‘What’s Karen?’ It’s OK. We’re so new to this country,” she said. “When I talk to the Hmong people, they say, ‘Your story is just like ours, because we had to run…and you had to run away from the Burmese government.’ ”
Morrison and others said the running still hasn’t ended for the relatives and loved ones they’ve left behind.
The Karen are concentrated in a southern Myanmar state bordering Thailand. Since the late 1940s, their tense relationship with their country’s military government has led to six decades of violence, as well as forced labor and other reprisals to quash Karen independence movements or counter demands for a more representative federal state.
Elections last November saw Myanmar’s military-directed system converted to one nominally led by civilians. But critics said this was mere window dressing.
Hundreds of thousands of Karen have crossed the border into Thailand, where they are segregated into refugee camps.
“The camps in Thailand, you couldn’t go anywhere,” Morrison recalled. “You’d have a ration. It was a safe place, but you’d be born over there and die over there. People spent 20, 30 years.”
Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented efforts by the Thai government to pressure the Karen to leave the camps and return to Myanmar, where they likely face further reprisals.
Frederick Melo can be reached at 651-228-2172.
