Love Stories of the Miao Book Trailers

I am working on a couple of short stories for my collection, Love Stories of the Miao, and decided to share the book trailers first. With time, hopefully, I will get a chance to present the actual story here.

**Disclaimer** All art/audio clip belongs to its rightful owner.

Flower Embroidery
This story is about the Hmong/Miao of Wenshen/Yunnan, China. 

A Candlelight Dream

  

The Miao drum thundered through the mountains.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Each strike seemed to shake the earth beneath my feet.

I stood at the edge of the battlefield, watching smoke crawl through the valleys like dark fingers. Blood soaked the grass. Arrows hissed through the air. Men shouted names of the dead while women cried from the hillsides, their voices rising above the chaos before disappearing into the roar of war.

A Sad Hmong Love Story

I first came across this story on YouTube in 2011. At first, it was the haunting background music that caught my attention. But after replaying the video a few times, I began to pay closer attention to the spoken words and realized that the speaker, Liaj Xyum Vaj, has an extraordinary talent for Hmong speech. He is able to tell a short story that is both compelling and deeply poetic.

This is something I have always struggled to achieve. As someone who is more fluent in English than Hmong, I often feel limited in my ability to produce the same kind of poetic expression in Hmong.

This story was originally published on this site in 2012. For this 2026 edition, I have revisited and rewritten the piece in both English and Hmong, while making every effort to preserve the spirit, imagery, and distinctive beauty of the original. The story has also been given new artwork to accompany this updated version.

Below, I have reproduced the portion of Liaj Xyum Vaj’s two-part video that I particularly enjoyed, along with his audio for those who cannot read Hmong. 

Beyond the Fence

The razor-wire fence curled around Phanat Nikhom Refugee Processing Camp in long, rusting loops, enclosing a world that somehow managed to be both crowded with life and cut off from it. During the day, the camp buzzed with the sounds of a small town: vendors calling out from makeshift stalls, children chasing one another through dusty paths, freshly made ice cream melting almost as quickly as it was scooped, and Cantonese love songs spilling from old cassette players with voices softened by worn-out tape. In classrooms, young and old practiced English and learned bits of American culture, preparing themselves for a country most of us knew only through stories, photographs, and the occasional television screen.

At night, the camp took on another rhythm. Children gathered around storytellers whose voices rose and fell beneath the darkness, carrying folktales from one generation to the next. Young men lingered near the paths, laughing shyly as they courted girls with flushed cheeks. Older men sat together drinking beer, their laughter occasionally bursting above the hum of the camp as they took turns standing guard against the possibility of a reprisal from the enemy we had left behind. Beyond the huts, the night stretched toward the Thai countryside, but we remained inside our circle of wire.

The Fairy Queen

This story was originally published on this blog in 2011. In 2026, I returned to the story and completely reimagined it, expanding the characters, rewriting the narrative, adding new scenes and artwork, and creating a new ending.

Rather than replace the original story with the revised version, I have moved the story to a new post so that this page can preserve its place in the history of the blog.

✨ Read the new 2026 edition by clicking on the thumbnail on the left ✨

Once upon a time, Altair and Vega merged in the Milky Way and flared into a dazzling, twinkling plumeria. When its petals slowly opened, an enchanted fairy emerged.

She was beautiful and possessed the combined power of two star systems. Whenever she flew, her wings left a glittering rainbow trail behind her. But her extraordinary abilities made her proud, wild, and reckless. She wreaked havoc every day in both the fairyland and heaven, disturbing and angering the Heavenly Emperor.

To punish and tame her, the Heavenly Emperor stripped the gifted fairy of her magic and banished her to Earth. She was ordered to live as a mortal and perform one hundred good deeds to atone for her sins before she could return to the fairyland.