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By Pa Xiong Using the Dreaded Internet for My Homework Assignment For the first time since I've been at UCLA, I actually sat down and spent time browsing through the world wide web. I never really wanted to deal with it before, even when people are always raving about how great and fun and informational it is. I just didn't think so. Whatever I needed to find on the web, well, I thought I could probably find it in books -- no need to mess with technology or computers. Well, I was wrong. I found lots of things for my assignment -- searching for entries that came up under my name, "Pa Xiong." What surprised me was that I expected to find other "Xiong's," or other Hmong people. What I actually found instead, was that probably half or more were not Hmong at all, but rather Chinese. There were Chinese professors, Chinese engineers, Chinese students ... just a lot of Chinese people with that name or surname. Odd, because I haven't met one Chinese person in my life with that last name. Oh, it was also interesting to find a few websites on the Chinese Olympic swimmer I had mentioned in my name essay -- Xiong Ni, I think it is. First, I searched under Infoseek. Either my first name or last name was found on over 420,000 places or sites. I quickly looked through the first fifty or so. I noticed that most of the sites were put there by men. Especially for the Hmong sites that I found, it was mainly men. Not much interesting, so I searched under Yahoo. Over 8,000 sites were pulled up. Looking through this one, I noticed that many of the sites were the same ones. I just wondered why the difference in number of sites that they found was so greatly different. There was one website that really caught my eye. It was on ThaoMee Xiong, who I had met at last April's Hmong Conference in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. When I met her there, she had expressed interest in the Asian American Studies M.A. program here. She actually went to school with Leslie Ito. It's kind of strange, how small this world really is. Anyway, the website was an article that was published, I think, in the daily paper at the University of Massachusetts. It was on how she had one a scholarship (Sullivan Travel Award) to spend six weeks in Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China, studying the conditions of Hmong women during their time in refugee camps, as well as Hmong women in Southeast Asia. I was truly happy to find that one of the few sites that was by, on, or about a Hmong woman was actually something that was more than just a personal promotional website. I was happy to know that I wasn't the only one out there wanting to study Hmong women, our past lives, our struggles, and our history. I've found that Hmong women are always the one who comes back to study our history and our people. They're always the ones that want to do more with the community. I don't want to generalize, but from the thousands of websites by Hmong men, I have yet to find one like ThaoMee Xiong's. I also looked under the White and Yellow Pages. On that, what was so interesting was that I found my own e-mail address. It just came up when I typed in my name. I didn't even know that it was accessible to the world. Kind of scary, almost. Anyway, I found fifteen other Pa Xiong's -- 7 from Wisconsin, 1 from Pennsylvania, and from California. I found the one from Davis that I'm always being mistaken for. I was incredibly shocked to find that a "Pa Xiong" lives in Pennsylvania. I was almost even tempted to e-mail all of them and tell them what I did and what I found ... but ... I didn't. Well, this is what I did. I honestly learned a lot more than I thought that I would. (Pa Xiong is a Junior majoring in Asian American Studies.)