It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for Hmong hip-hop in Minnesota—and specifically for one of its most well-respected and well-known figures, Tou Saiko Lee. In the span of two weeks, he’s been laudably profiled in a video piece for the New York Times and skewered by radio host Jason Lewis on KTLK.

PosNoSys will be performing with the French hip-hop groups La Rumeur and Ursus Minor on May 22 at the Triple Rock Social Club as part of the Minnesota sur Seine Festival.

Tou Saiko was born in 1979 in the Nongkai Refugee Camp in Thailand. He and his parents lived in Syracuse and Providence before coming to the Twin Cities in 1991. All of his other siblings, including his brother Vong who performs alongside Tou Saiko as Knowstalgic in the hip-hop group Delicious Venom, were born in the United States. As director of Creative Development and Outreach at CHAT (Center for Hmong Arts and Talent), a St. Paul non-profit organization that aims to nurture Hmong artists, Tou Saiko organizes the ICE Open Mic series at Metro State University, coordinates a number of after-school community classes and programs, and helps to organize the annual Hmong Arts and Music Festival. He also travels to California once a month to work with Hmong youth in Sacramento, one of the other large Hmong communities in America.

Patrick Farrell of the New York Times contacted Tou Saiko and CHAT last winter. Soon Farrell and his crew came to the Twin Cities to follow Tou Saiko around for a weekend. They interviewed his family and Hmong activists and academics in the area, as well as capturing a performance by Tou Saiko’s rock-rap band PosNoSys, which stands for “Post Nomadic Syndrome.” Although some criticized the resulting video for mapping the Hmong community onto a stereotypical binary that equated “Hmong” with “ancient” and “United States” with “modern,” the piece was generally seen as a sympathetic and positive portrayal of Tou Saiko specifically and the Twin Cities Hmong community generally.

Tou Saiko is intimately aware of hip-hop’s place within the larger Twin Cities Hmong community. Many Hmong parents were suspicious when their kids starting bringing home CDs of 2Pac and Dr. Dre and started to rap like those artists. Tou Saiko said that his own parents did not like him rapping until he started talking about Hmong community issues, as well as performing in schools. One poem in particular, “Generation After Generation,” which explicitly talks about the struggles of the Hmong community in Minnesota as well as intergenerational conflicts, helped to alleviate some of this tension. In it, he explicitly links his own rapping to Hmong spoken oral poetry, kwv txhiaj, which he’s also performed with his grandmother Youa Chang, as Fresh Traditions. “My grandma’s just an ill poet,” he told me. “She’s an ill MC! I’m continuing on that tradition through this different style and language.”

None of this seemed to matter to Jason Lewis when he targeted Tou Saiko on his May 2 program. In question was a week-long event, organized by the arts and education non-profit COMPAS, that had Tou Saiko visiting Woodbury 6th graders to teach them about Hmong culture, hip-hop, rap, and spoken word. The students worked on individual pieces, as well as a collective poem to be presented at an all-school assembly. To make this assembly happen, students were pulled out of class. This was the fifth year that Tou Saiko has organized and led such workshops in Woodbury schools; before him, artists such as Desdamona and Frank Sentwali led similar activities.

On Lewis’s program, what started off as a criticism of deviations from a “back-to-basics” curriculum became an all-out assault on Tou Saiko, the immigrant and diasporic communities of the Twin Cities, and hip-hop itself. Lewis lambasted the Woodbury Lake Junior High PTA and teachers for approving such a program.