CONTACT: Phillip Yang, (608) 263-7365, paoyang@wisc.edu
MADISON – Madison is deep into summer raspberry season. At the moment, Phillip Yang, adviser to students in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology (SoHE), is completely hemmed in by a prairie-scape of the little red orbs.
Fruits and vegetables B through Z (for zucchini, of course) soon will join the berries at Yang’s stand at the Capitol Square Dane County Farmers’ Market: basil, beets, sugar snap and snow peas, green and yellow beans, cilantro, sweet white and purple onions, dill, tomatoes, potatoes.
Such bounty! And such a change from when Yang was growing up in as a member of the Hmong community in Laos.
There, he worked with his parents and siblings in the rice fields – until the Vietnam War, anyway, when Yang’s father shouldered arms on the American side. After the Communists took over Southeast Asia there really wasn’t any place for the family to go, at least not safely.
“We hid in the jungle. I remember picking wild berries there when I was 5 or 6 – We had to be so quiet,” he says. After a while, the family crossed the Mekong River from Laos to Thailand, where they found temporary sanctuary in a refugee camp. In 1986 they immigrated to the United States. In 1992 Yang’s father found work in the Madison branch of Coverall Cleaning Concepts, headquartered in Chicago.
The hardship, of course, wasn’t over when the Yangs came stateside.
“We couldn’t speak the language,” he says. “We didn’t understand the culture at all, and since we were among the first wave of immigrants, there was no Hmong community already established in America. We had to do a lot of guessing. I had never been to a grocery store – I remember buying a can of cat food by mistake because it had a picture of a tuna fish on it.”
The ultimate goal was to continue in agriculture, Yang says, but most Wisconsin farmland is not conducive to the cultivation of rice. So the family branched out to the aforementioned crops, renting five acres near Oregon and another five near Deerfield.
Eventually, Yang was able to attend college, the first member of his family to receive that opportunity. After receiving his B.A. in social work and his M.S. in guidance counseling from UW-Whitewater, Yang became SoHE’s minority and disadvantaged coordinator. In that capacity he provides academic advising to SoHE’s prospective, new or continuing students. In addition, he develops and carries out recruitment and retention initiatives in the school.
He’s also working on his doctorate in educational leadership at Edgewood College. “When I finish my degree I would like to be a faculty member, or perhaps an administrator. It’s important to me to be a role model for my brothers and sisters, and also for minority students,” he says. “I believe that education is one of the keys to a brighter future. Higher education enables us to help each other. We learn to discipline ourselves. More importantly, we get into the habit of opening our minds to other people, new ideas, different cultures.
“As you might expect, I have a great passion for working with students.”
That endeavor that cannot help but spill over into the Yang family stand and out into the entire Farmers’ Market, he says. Although advising students and selling tomatoes may not seem at all similar on first blush, the skills required to do both effectively amount to the Wisconsin Idea in living, breathing action. To Yang, the Farmers’ Market is another venue to swap cultures, tell stories and inspire.
“I try to motivate everyone I meet, whether at work or at the market,” he says.
And how exactly does he accomplish his mission of motivation? By telling stories, his and others’, of course.
“I know first hand how difficult it is to start over, and I try to inspire others who are having a hard time. I had a Latino student from Austin, Texas. When he arrived in Madison I met him at the bus station, got him into SOAR [the university’s Summer Orientation and Advising for Registration program]. As the fall semester really got under way he got burned out, and I told him that it would be hard to get his degree. But that’s no reason to give up. He himself would have to be the one to make it happen, and he did. He graduated with a degree in political science. He went back to Austin to work for awhile and then enrolled in law school.”
Yang believes ardently that UW-Madison represents a critical human and economic resource for the nation, world and especially for the state.
“We educate students to enter the workforce and contribute to the economy. In turn, Wisconsin communities are the primary pipelines for future students. It feels great to see our students graduate and go back to build a life and contribute to his or her hometown,” Yang says.
Meanwhile, the beans and tomatoes are beckoning on the near agricultural horizon. After 14 years, Yang and his family have no plans to curtail their work at the Farmers’ Market. “We are planning on expanding our berry acreage over the next few years,” he says.
Anyone can visit the family booth, just made permanent this year, Saturdays on the Capitol Square across the street from the Veterans Museum, and Wednesdays on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard across from the old courthouse.
