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To honor 50 years of Hmong refugee resettlement and immigration to Minnesota, MPR News featured Hmong Minnesotans in a variety of careers throughout the month of May as part of our “ChangeMakers” series. This series highlights Minnesotans from diverse and often underrepresented backgrounds who are making an impact.
We identified people with a diversity of experiences to talk about their lives and how they’ve shaped Minnesota’s culture through literature, food, art, policymaking, agriculture and more.
MPR News is committed to the mission of informing, including and inspiring all those who find our content. Our goal is to work every day toward improving our journalism and service to the public. We have taken care to use language preferred by the individuals we interviewed.
Learn more about all 11 community members below. Click on each name to see their full profile.
Marc Heu
Marc Heu is a St. Paul-based pastry chef and the owner of Marc Heu Patisserie Paris. Born a French citizen, Heu’s journey to living in Minnesota is different from other families. He said a part of embracing himself was to embrace the fact that he wanted to be a pastry chef. He set off on the path to pursue this dream after meeting his wife, Gaosong, who is a Hmong Minnesotan.
Heu studied patisserie in France and lived in New York before moving back to Minnesota to open his patisserie, which opened in 2019.
Kao Kalia Yang
Born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand, Kao Kaila Yang was 6 years old when she arrived in St. Paul with her parents and older sister.
When she published her memoir “The Latehomecomer” in 2008 — a work she referred to as a love letter to her grandmother — it was the first memoir by a Hmong American to be nationally distributed. The book has since been named an NEA Big Read.
Kao Thao
Kao Thao has always connected with the outdoors. As a young boy growing up in Laos, he said he vividly remembers a family garden filled with vegetables. Thao also recalled fleeing his birthplace when he was six or seven with his parents and seven siblings to go to refugee camps in Thailand.
Thao is a full-time park naturalist for the Department of Natural Resources and is based at Fort Snelling State Park. He offers nature education programs at the park on a variety of subjects: fishing, birding and canoeing.
Katie Ka Vang
Playwright Katie Ka Vang has made Minnesota her artistic home. She’s collaborated with Theater Mu, Pangea World Theater and Mixed Blood Theatre. Her 2023 musical “Again” is believed to be the first professionally produced musical by a Hmong American playwright.
Vang’s plays often deal with people at a moment of major change — often in the wake of personal or familial tragedy, often with a cast of Southeast Asian characters.
Pao Houa Her
Pao Houa Her is a Blaine-based artist and photography faculty at the University of Minnesota. She is internationally recognized for imagery of the Hmong diaspora, which is rooted in her experience of being born in Laos and fleeing, as a baby, with her family.
There is currently an exhibition of Her’s work at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin called “The Imaginative Landscape.” Her lightbox photography can also be seen at HmongTown Marketplace in St. Paul.
Bee Chang
Bee Chang grew up on St. Paul’s east side. Her parents and two older siblings arrived in Minnesota in 1990 from a refugee camp in Thailand. She had a training position with the Minnesota Aurora FC, the pre-professional women’s soccer team, but had to step down due to repeated concussions.
She is pursuing a degree in exercise science at Anoka-Hennepin Technical College and was recently announced as the new assistant coach for the Aurora 2, the developmental team.
Nelsie Yang
Nelsie Yang was just 24 years old in 2019 when she won a seat on the St. Paul City Council representing St. Paul’s east side — becoming the youngest woman and first-ever Hmong woman on the council.
Five years later, Yang is in her second term on the council.
Chenue Her
In 2021, Chenue Her made history by becoming the first Hmong male news anchor in the U.S. when he joined “Good Morning Iowa” in Des Moines. In 2024, Her made a homecoming to Minnesota when he joined the anchor desk at FOX 9.
He currently sits behind the desk for FOX 9 Morning News and is still the only male Hmong news anchor in the country.
Terry Yang
For 18 years, Terry Yang ran the Bubai Foods grocery in Walnut Grove with his brother. The grocery store provided both Asian and American food items for both the Hmong community and the town as a whole.
Now retired, Yang spends his time helping to teach, spread and preserve Hmong traditions and cultural practices for the next generation. He also hopes to work with others and create a book documenting cultural traditions as an instructional guide for practices like marriages or funeral rites.
Cy Thao
Painter and politician Cy Thao was born in Laos in 1972. After the United States military left Vietnam, his family lived in a Thai refugee camp for five years, then immigrated to Minnesota in 1980. He was among the first generation of Hmong people to grow up in the state.
For eight years, Thao served St. Paul as a lawmaker in the Minnesota House of Representatives. His election in 2002 made him the second Hmong American lawmaker to serve in a state legislature anywhere in the country.
Friendly Vang-Johnson
Friendly Vang-Johnson grew up in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, commuting to a piece of land in the suburbs where she helped tend the family’s vegetables and waking up early to help interpret at farmers markets. She wasn’t planning to follow her parents into farming and instead had a two-decade career in government auditing. But that changed when she was living in Seattle during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With markets closed, Hmong flower farmers were struggling to find customers. Vang-Johnson started a delivery program that eventually became Friendly Hmong Farms, a wider effort to support farmers in Washington and Minnesota.
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