In the Hmong community, teachers are considered role models, somebody to look up to and trust.

They're somebody like Neng Yang, a longtime teacher whose wife recently was promoted to school principal, who comes from a good family and who has a nice home in an upper-middle class Clovis neighborhood.

So Yang's arrest on Jan. 27 on allegations that he molested a student in his second-grade classroom at Freedom Elementary in Clovis was not only shocking to those who know him but also a blow to the large but close-knit Hmong community in the central San Joaquin Valley and across the U.S.

The allegations are particularly distressing to older Hmong, who identify strongly with their tradition, culture and family structure, a structure that identifies many Hmong by only 18 clan names.

"The first time I hear of this I could not believe something like this happens, and I think it's not good for the community," said Franklin Yang, a leader in the Yang clan, which spans 100 families and about 1,000 people in the area. "It's embarrassing because it's Hmong and it's Yang, and everywhere you go people ask you if you know the person."

Neng Yang, 43, began his career in Clovis Unified in 1993 as a teacher's aide and was hired to teach at Fancher Creek Elementary in 1997. He moved to Freedom Elementary in 2007.

His wife, Kia, is principal at Miramonte Elementary in Clovis and has been on leave since her husband's arrest. She is not a person of interest in the case, police say.

The details of what happened in the Freedom Elementary classroom could emerge as Yang's cases wind their way through the courts.

He is accused of 45 counts of child molestation in Fresno County Superior Court and one count of producing pornography in U.S. District Court. Because a federal magistrate denied bail on Thursday, he continues to be held in the Fresno County Jail.

Longtime acquaintance Mai Summer Vue said she struggles to reconcile the image of Yang as an accused sex offender with the young Hmong boy she grew up with in a Portland, Ore., neighborhood.

Vue and Yang were both refugee children, and like Yang, Vue became a teacher in the Fresno area. They saw each other occasionally as adults, she said; Yang was always pleasant and friendly when they met.

"Nothing indicates that he would do something like that," said Vue, who teaches fourth grade at John Muir Elementary School.

"I look at him as a friend, a brother," Vue said. "It really hurts my spirit to see this guy who I used to play with in my childhood going through this."

News of the allegations against Yang spread far beyond the Valley, said Choua Lee, a language lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She said she heard about Yang's case through family and friends.

"In the Hmong culture, there are family ties and everybody knows everybody," she said. "I have heard already what was happening through family. I was shocked."

But Lee's college-aged students live in a bigger world that is not so tied to small, family communities. As they've grown more Americanized than their elders, the world of the younger Hmong also has widened significantly.

"There is a transformation as the generation has changed," she said.

So to a Hmong generation coming of age today, Yang's alleged actions were less personal, said a group of Hmong language students at Fresno State.

"I felt disgusted, but I didn't think it should show on our community," said Pa Moua, a student in the class. "I felt like someone punched me in the stomach, but it's not something we should be ashamed of."

Many of her classmates agreed. They said they were shocked by the case against Yang, but about half the class said they didn't feel personally tarnished.

That shame, and the consequences that go with it, belong to Yang alone, several students said.