St. Paul couple turns substance abuse struggles into nonprofit serving Hmong community

Xianna Mouayang and Yeng Moua had one rule for their wedding – no alcohol. 

Celebrating with alcohol is an integral part of traditional Hmong weddings. Family members pressured them to include alcohol, but they refused to oblige. As a result, Mouayang said, her extended relatives decided not to attend. 

The couple first met while they were in the early stages of substance abuse recovery, and their rule was designed to keep them on their recovery journey. 

“Our recovery is more important to us than anything,” Moua said, “because we know that the day that we start drinking, it will always go back and lead us to maybe using meth again.”

Mouayang, Moua and Moua’s older sister, Mai Moua, who is also in recovery, established Koom Recovery in the Twin Cities last year to focus on substance abuse recovery in the Hmong community. 

Koom Recovery provides educational resources and peer support, and promotes erasing stigma in the Hmong community about substance use disorder. The nonprofit will host educational workshops and weekly support groups, and will connect community members with recovery resources. It does not provide medical care or health assessments. 

“Koom” is the Hmong word for “join.”

“Along the journey, we realized the lack of resources and the lack of support groups that are culturally specific,” Mouayang said, “it helped us want to strive more to get all of that in one place.”

Koom Recovery, Minnesota Alliance for Recovery Community Organizations, 3HMONGTV and Recovery Cafe Frogtown are hosting a town hall this Thursday about substance use disorder in the Hmong and Asian communities. Organizers hope to gather community input that will help them craft solutions, raise awareness among policy makers and combat stigma. 

The event is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. January 16, at Recovery Cafe Frogtown, 499 Charles Ave., St. Paul. 

“Some people, they always say that, ‘Oh, this is American, so it’s an American issue,’ but it’s not,” Yeng Moua said of substance abuse. “It’s a culturally-specific issue, because, as we know it, methamphetamine is a big issue in the Hmong and Karen community.” 

There is very little data available about the impact of substance abuse in specific ethnic communities. 

Data on substance use in Southeast Asian communities is often lumped into one broad category instead of being broken down by specific ethnic groups, said Hua Xiong-Her, clinical manager of adult services at the Wilder Foundation in St. Paul.

The depth of the problems are also often underplayed or underreported in many communities due to stigma and shame, she said. 

Xiong-Her said she has seen more young adults and youth struggling with substance abuse in Southeast Asian communities. Karen boys in middle school and high school are especially pressured by gangs to sell or use drugs, she said. Most of the Southeast Asian clients she sees at Wilder’s treatment programs are men. 

Despite the lack of ethnic-specific data, Xiong-Her said, the Wilder Foundation saw a need to provide culturally-specific recovery services for Southeast Asian communities based on its experience with clients seeking mental health services who also struggled with substance abuse. 

Xiong-Her leads the foundation’s culturally-specific outpatient substance abuse treatment for Southeast Asian clients. Several of the program’s specialists speak Southeast Asian languages and understand cultural nuances.

However, she said, Southeast Asian clients still face barriers to accessing higher levels of treatment, such as sober living facilities. Clients who speak limited to no English are especially impacted. 

The toll of substance use disorder 

From a young age, Yeng Moua, 39, was exposed to alcohol and gang activity growing up on St. Paul’s East Side. 

Moua immigrated from Thailand to the United States with his family when he was five, and settled in St. Paul. His parents weren’t fluent in English, and worked long hours to provide for their family, so Moua often hung out with other children after school. He grew close to older children who introduced him to gang life. 

Moua said he was a gang member and drinking alcohol by the time he was 12. 

“I felt like I was protected by them, because I was young, and they were a little bit older,” Moua said of the gang. “That ultimately led to more drinking, the gang activity, fighting, stealing cars, and marijuana use – I was living a double life from the age of 12 to 18.” 

His drug use worsened after his father died when he was 18. As he struggled to cope with the loss, Moua started using meth and dropped out of high school his senior year. 

“Meth changed my whole life,” Moua said. 

At that point, he said, he felt like there were only two paths for him: steal or sell drugs to support his substance abuse. He sold drugs for nearly two decades in between several years he spent in prison.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t know how many families I destroyed at that time,” Moua said, “because I was selling drugs to anybody, everybody just to get money just to get by. I didn’t think about the consequences or the lives I was destroying at that time.” 

He was arrested at age 23 when a police officer found a pound of meth in his car, leading to a seven-year stint in prison. He went back to selling drugs after he was released, which led to another arrest and another three years and four months in prison. 

His mother and stepfather died in 2020, pushing him deeper into drug use. He didn’t know how to find help. Then Moua received a phone call that changed his life — he had a son. He knew right away that he wanted to stop using and selling drugs.

But the good news coincided with another setback for Moua — he was sent back to jail for violating his probation. This time, Moua had a different outlook on life — he asked to be placed into a substance abuse treatment program. 

A turning point 

Moua spent a year at Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge, graduated from the Christian-based recovery program and started working at a manufacturing job. 

The biggest obstacle in the program, Moua said, was “religious warfare” between his cultural and spiritual connection to Hmong shamanism and his conversion to Christinaity. It was also challenging to live with about 50 other men, he added. 

Meanwhile, Mouayang had just relapsed after eight years of sobriety. A friend introduced her to Moua, who helped her combat drug use. 

“I couldn’t find that willingness or that will to just go back into recovery, because of what I went through prior to that, and he was basically the light for me to get back into recovery,” Mouayang said. 

Mouayang has been sober for two years. 

Moua quit his unfulfilling manufacturing job and decided to pursue his new passion helping others in recovery. He applied through AmeriCorps and was hired as a recovery navigator for about a year at Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge. 

Mouayang, Moua and Moua’s sister said they struggled in recovery because there’s a lack of resources catering to the needs of Hmong clients. 

Mouayang, who was used to being surrounded by Hmong people, said she often felt out of her comfort zone in support groups where she rarely saw others like herself. She also didn’t have family support when she struggled with substance use. 

“They [family] should support you… to get better,” she said.

Koom Recovery hopes to offer support groups starting in February for Hmong community members, and also wants to offer translated materials with information about substance use disorder and financial resources for people seeking help.

Koom Recovery’s founders also want to use insights from this week’s town hall to motivate policymakers to increase funding for culturally-specific substance abuse resources. 

“This town hall is to make that rain, to voice all of that, so that we can find different ways to focus on the Hmong and Karen Asian communities on how we can get better and how we can help heal the way that they understand it and the way that we are all raised,” Mouayang said. 

Moua, who has been in recovery since 2021, returned to St. Paul’s East Side, where he lives with Mouayang and their two sons, one from a previous relationship. Moua is working to become a pastor, and is the director of special projects at Lighthouse Beginnings, a faith-based peer recovery organization. 

“I have this new, you can say, divine purpose in my life, that I want to give back to the Hmong community, because I know that there is a need,” Moua said. “If we [had] a resource hub… maybe, maybe I would have never been through all of these struggles for such a long time.” 

Correction: The story has been updated to clarify that one of Yeng Moua’s sons is from a previous relationship.

READ MORE

Minneapolis officials call for independent investigation in ICE killing of Renee Good

‘Kindness radiated out of her’: Renee Good’s wife says she was supporting neighbors when fatally shot by ICE

County Attorney Moriarty, Attorney General Ellison launch state probe of fatal ICE shooting