Jennifer Xiong spent her summer helping Hmong people in California register to vote in the US presidential election. The Hmong are an ethnic group that come from the mountains of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand but don’t have a country of their own, and Xiong was a volunteer organizer at Hmong Innovating Politics, or HIP, in Fresno. There are around 300,000 Hmong people in the US, and she spent hours phone-banking and working on ads to run on Hmong radio and TV channels. It was inspiring work. “This was an entirely new thing for me to see,” she says. “Young, progressive, primarily women doing this work in our community was just so rare, and I knew it was going to be a huge feat.” And by all accounts it was. Asian-American turnout in the 2020 election in general was extraordinary, and observers say turnout among Hmong citizens was the highest they can remember.