Based on eight years' experience with Hmong refugees in Seattle (Washington), this dissertation compares women's current lives with their Southeast Asian past. It finds that refugees reconstruct, as best they can, their previous social worlds, overcoming imperfections by substitution or by overlooking difference. Even very different arrangements often are recognized as acceptable reinterpretations, or extensions, of traditional cultural practices. This recognition of cultural consonance may bring into prominence activities or ways of thinking that had been subtexts or alternatives in the home country, some of them partially mitigating Hmong society's strong patrilateral focus. Chapters cover research considerations; the Southeast Asian background; convictions regarding gender among Hmong in Southeast Asia; Seattle's Hmong community through time; social relations in marketing of needlework; and how gender relations in the new setting express continuing ethnicity, seen especially through processes of marriage and domestic conflict.