Madison’s Hmong Legacy Market has a long family history

Ze Yang, one of the owners of the independent Asian grocery, stirs a pot of squash curry that is half as tall as she is.

“I feel food is the one thing that connects people,” she said. “You can do without other things, but you can’t do without food, and it has the ability to connect, tell a story, just bring people together.”

Yang’s family have continued to be the only employees at the market since it opened in 2016. If you visit, you’ll likely find Yang or one of her six children working the front register, ringing up matcha layer cake or bottles of pad Thai sauce for customers.

Walk to the deli in the back of the market and one of Yang’s high-school-aged children may be chatting with boba-tea-drinking friends before grabbing a fried vegetable egg roll or a slice of crispy pork belly for someone at the counter.

The story of Hmong Legacy Market and the family behind it is not only one of freshly prepared food from various Asian cultures, including Japanese, Korean, and, of course, Hmong. It’s also about the power of persistence.

Three decades passed before Yang said her family’s dream of starting a business materialized.

>> The Yang family shares their papaya salad recipe

In the 1980s, Yang, less than 10 years old at the time, lived in a refugee camp in Thailand. Her family had escaped Laos during the aftermath of the Vietnam War, one group of six in the over 100,000 Hmong refugees who fled. The nation she left behind was now communist, and the ethnic Hmong population, who have distinct language and cultural traditions unique from Lao, were enemies of the state. Many Hmong people sided with the royal government and the U.S. in opposing communism, eager to preserve their autonomy and land.

“I remember being hungry and always a lot of dirt,” Yang said about her two years in the refugee camp with her family. “We would crave sweets and fun stuff, but you don’t get that. Only the basics. Only for survival.”

Then, in 1991, Yang said her family secured the papers to immigrate to the U.S., sponsored by a distant uncle who had made the trip years earlier as an orphan and had settled in central California.

So, Yang and her three younger siblings packed the few belongings they had and took a flight to the West Coast. Upon arrival, they all packed into their uncle’s apartment.

“It was my first time, culture shock,” Yang said. “You see all these different people, and I was really scared.”

Yang said she remembers sitting at her uncle’s kitchen table, eating ramen noodles for most meals, the cheapest food her parents could find at the grocery store.

“We didn’t have anything,” Yang said. “My parents didn’t know English. Without education or language, there were all kinds of barriers.”

But, Yang said, her parents could farm. They had experience growing crops back in Laos, so they rented out an acre near her uncle’s apartment, where they would harvest green beans, tomatoes and peppers to sell and ship out to larger companies, wholesalers and distributors.

After school, Yang would help on the farm, too, and remembers trying to catch quick breaks in the shade while monitoring the plants.

“I remember it was really hard to find shade and then the tomatoes,” Yang said, “You would wipe them off and eat them.”

But, after six years in California, Yang said her family knew they needed another option — a place with better public schools and more economic opportunities. They heard musings that a life in the Midwest could be the solution from cousins who had settled in Madison.

So, Yang’s family left again.

“We wanted to go somewhere where we can make a difference, so that’s why we moved here,” Yang said.

Wisconsin is one of the most popular destinations for Hmong Americans. Among the over 300,000 Hmong people in the U.S., a majority live in Wisconsin, California or Minnesota, according to Pew Research Center data. 

Once here, Yang said her parents worked multiple jobs in restaurants and factories. Her dad trained to be a carpenter, and her mom took English classes in the evenings.

“They worked very, very hard to make ends meet,” Yang said.

Seeing her parents strive to make a life for themselves in the U.S. ultimately inspired Yang to become a teacher. She wanted to help kids of immigrants adjust to school better.

“That’s why I wanted to do what I do,” Yang said. “Helping younger students with school assignments, interpreting parent-teacher conferences, because I was the first one. No one was doing it for me. But I could do it for my brothers and sisters.”

Yang studied education at Edgewood College and MATC and then spent 15 years working as a bilingual resource specialist in public schools, helping students and their families who had recently immigrated to Madison adjust to life in America.

The Madison School District has over a dozen bilingual resource specialists covering languages from Arabic to Nepali.

But, along the way, one dream always remained. Yang’s family had bought a house, built a family and put their kids through school, but they still wanted to fulfill their entrepreneurial drive.

To them, food was always essential, Yang said. They would journey to grocery stores in town, hopefully seek out the “Asian food” section and then walk away with a container of beige rice noodles.

She said they wanted a place where people from and outside of the Hmong community could gather, enjoy homemade dishes and buy pantry staples from across the continent of Asia. So, when the location at 2119 Fish Hatchery Rd. went on the market, and they discovered the prior owners were Hmong, too, they knew they wanted the space, Yang said.

“We are always a place where people can identify, go and shop and hang out,” Yang said. “A space to support and to give back to the community of Madison.”

By 2016, they began stocking the shelves, amassing a wide variety of products — spring roll skin the size of a human face, bamboo shoot chili oil, rice seasoning with seaweed and sesame, mango mochi, papaya salad, ginger pork sausages and traditional Hmong celebratory clothing. Through word of mouth, more people started journeying to the market for groceries, a hot meal or takeout.

In 2021, the market also partnered with Public Health Madison and Dane County to become a mobile COVID vaccination clinic.

Moving forward, Yang said there is a reason “legacy” is in the name of the market. She wants the spirit of the store to continue and grow well into the future.

“It’s hard to run a store just by yourself. We all rely on family,” Yang said. “But, my hope, vision and dream for the business is that the market could continue to improve and grow.”