I think gossip travels in every culture not just the Hmong culture. Also, I beg to differ about some who said everyone love gossip thats why they are reading the threads. Some of us me thinks the topic bares information and also to check if there is flaming in the topics that way we could get things under control before it gets out of hand ... but then we tend to respond because we found that a comment or post conflicted with our ideas lol.. but back to the topic.. Gossip is something that everyone does regardless of who you are and how "good" of a person you think yourself to be. Sometimes you do it unintentionally. I have some relatives who are hmong and they are actually pretty civilized and I almost never hear them gossip. Maybe because they are more Americanized rather than traditional. I notice that my cambodian relatives are heavy hitters when it comes to gossiping. Their favorite topic? Me! When I gain a little weight they would assume I'm pregnant! When I lose the weight they say I had an abortion! First of all I'm against abortion... and second of all even if I were pregnant there should be nothing wrong with it I'm a married woman; and I'm focused on school and have my head on straight. Gossip hurts everyone because if you think about it what if you were on the other side of the fence and being the person that they gossip about? You wouldn't like it much. I know I don't like it when I hear rumors and gossip about me when I don't even talk to my family members anymore because I don't like this type of environment.... my sisters and I get it the worst in the family because we are the only members of the family who graduate with honors, graduate in the top 5 people in school, got accepted to great colleges, what hurts me the most is because of our dedication to school people like to say that my father isn't our real father because we are too smart to be lao, thai, khmer that our real father has to be chinese or japanese .. that pisses me off to death because my dad's side of the family is actually the best side of the family they are really caring and we all love each other they are just as great with education as my sisters and I are.. my mom side of the family is the side that likes to drop out or get pregnant at 15 start having sex at 12 ... my mom is an exception which is why my father fell for her .. considering all her family members my mom actually almost finished college but decided it wasn't for her so she went to trade school instead..
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes when you gossip you don't always know where it's coming from. Like my sisters and I we hear rumors and gossip about us by people we never even heard of ... we would be in the lao store and we hear our names and our parents name pop up only to see the face of the person saying them is not familiar at all. Then it hurts our feelings because this is what we call family? People who would do this to us? So whether you know them or not if you talk about it with someone else they will go and tell someone else and there you have been part of a chain that caused people problems.
