August 2, 2020
On the morning of Friday, July 31, 2020, Jackie Cheung of Elk Grove Tribune, initiated a rampage across several social media platforms to conduct what appeared to be damage control for Bobbie Singh-Allen’s controversial bid for mayor in Elk Grove, CA. This was in direct response to an online flyer that began circulating throughout Facebook groups on or around July 28, 2020. Although its origins remain a mystery, the flyer was first seen on a Facebook page, Tigerchew – a self-proclaimed ‘news and media website that provides users with unique content and information.’
While the flyer has since been proven false and subsequently taken down, its assertion that Black Lives Matter was calling for Bobbie Singh-Allen’s resignation due to her discriminatory remarks about the Hmong community triggered Cheung into crisis containment mode as she frantically sought to squelch these rumors – rumors which no one actually believed to begin with.
Despite the fact that the Hmong community is still reeling from the harmful anti-Hmong sentiments expressed by Elk Grove city elected officials like Bobbie Singh-Allen and Jaclyn Moreno as indicated in an article published by the Elk Grove Citizen, and now echoed by some of their supporters, Cheung infiltrated a popular Facebook group among the Hmong community, Hmong Community Debate and Discussion, and threatened its 2.5K members with lawsuits while name dropping her lawyer to solidify the seriousness of her threats.
In response, members who were either previously apathetic or might not have necessarily been fully aware of the current racial tension and political climate in Elk Grove, criticized Cheung’s threats against the Hmong community as “offensive” and as another attempt to suppress the voices of the Hmong people. Cheung’s preemptive attacks on many Hmong individuals through the act of deleting dissenting comments and blocking them only managed to drive home this belief in the minds of those she sought to silence.
While the model minority myth has triumphed in obscuring the struggles of some ethnic groups within the Asian American communities, it is not a mystery to those of us within its system that the Hmong people are among some of the most impoverished of the various Asian American groups. The Hmong, who first arrived as refugees in America 45 years ago as a direct result of their efforts in fighting alongside the United States of America during the Vietnam War, continue to struggle with economic mobility today. Largely situated within underserved communities, the Hmong are a group afflicted with high rates of poverty and a lack of representation and resources.
Jackie Cheung, who isn’t exactly a stranger to the Hmong community and who often boasts her meager 3% Hmong heritage when it suits her, used this knowledge to exploit the vulnerability of the Hmong community in order to silence them. She failed. As a vocal and outlandish supporter of Bobbie Singh-Allen, Cheung could not make her disregard for the Hmong community anymore clear.
Despite their efforts to have conversations about the smearing of their culture perpetrated by Elk Grove elected officials, the Hmong community’s voices have mostly gone unheard. Their concerns – trivialized and dismissed as nothing more than a political ploy. Jackie Cheung and Bobbie Singh-Allen – haven’t you heard? There’s nothing political about racial injustice.