Kao Kalia Yang - The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir
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- Book:The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir
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In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her familys story after her grandmothers death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yangs tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard.
Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her familys captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.
When she was six years old, Yangs family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice.
Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.
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Across jungles, refugee camps, and oceans, The Latehomecomer is a journey to the center of everything: ones fast-held understanding of home. CRIS BEAM
Yang turns her familys odyssey into a full adventure of survival in the face of adversity. It is a triumph of the human spirit that refuses to capitulate, to give up hope, that finds a way to start all over again from scratch, and, above all, inspires others to do the same. DR. GARY YIA LEE
In telling the story of her Hmong familys flight from genocide in the jungles of Laos and poverty in the refugee camps of Thailand to achieve a safe life in America, Yang has fashioned a bittersweet and engrossing epic that is mythic in its beauty, tenderness, and power. HONOR MOORE
This is a wise, important, and beautiful bookan evocation of extraordinary human courage and the inspiring strength of familial love. STEPHEN OCONNOR
An impressive debut by a writer with an enchanting voice, The Latehomecomer reveals all that is worth knowing about endurance, the power of a familys love, and hope in the face of desperation. PATRICIA OTOOLE
A moving saga, The Latehomecomer is both sweeping and intimatean elegant, evocative story of a family, a way of life, a culture, a people. Dr. PAUL HILLMER , Director of the Hmong Oral History Project at Concordia University
A powerful book documenting the refugee experience that I believe, one day, my children will read to their children.
LEE PAO XIONG , Director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University
A HMONG FAMILY MEMOIR
Kao Kalia Yang
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS
2008
COPYRIGHT 2008 by Kao Kalia Yang
COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky
COVER PHOTOGRAPH supplied by author
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH Der Yang
Coffee House Press printed books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, www.cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: info@coffeehousepress.org.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals help make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
To you and our many readers around the world,
we send our thanks for your continuing support.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION
Yang, Kao Kalia, 1980
The latehomecomer : a Hmong family memoir / Kao Kalia Yang.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56689-208-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-56689-262-9 (ebook)
1. Yang, Kao Kalia, 1980
2. Hmong AmericansBiography.
3. ImmigrantsUnited StatesBiography.
4. Yang, Kao Kalia, 1980Family.
5. GrandmothersBiography.
6. Vietnam War, 19611975Refugees.
7. RefugeesLaosBiography.
8. RefugeesThailandBiography.
9. Saint Paul (Minn.)Biography.
I. Title.
II. Title: Late homecomer.
E184.H55Y36 2008
959.7043092DC22
[ B ]
2007046386
For my grandmother, Youa Lee,
who never learned how to write.
To my baby brother, Maxwell Hwm Yang,
who will read the things she never wrote.
Before babies are born they live in the sky where they fly among the clouds. The sky is a happy place and calling babies down to earth is not an easy thing to do. From the sky, babies can see the course of human lives.
This is what the Hmong children of my generation are told by our mothers and fathers, by our grandmothers and grandfathers.
They teach us that we have chosen our lives. That the people who we would become we had inside of us from the beginning, and the people whose worlds we share, whose memories we hold strong inside of us, we have always known.
From the sky, I would come again.
In Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, Loei Province, Thailand: December 1980January 1987
From the day that she was born, she was taught that she was Hmong by the adults around her. As a baby learning to talk, her mother and father often asked, What are you? and the right answer was always, I am Hmong. It wasnt a name or a gender, it was a people. When she noticed that they lived in a place that felt like it had an invisible fence made of men with guns who spoke Thai and dressed in the colors of old, rotting leaves, she learned that Hmong meant contained. The first time she looked into the mirror and noticed her brown eyes, her dark hair, and the tinted yellow of her skin, she saw Hmong looking at her. Hmong that could fit in all of Asia, Hmong that was only skin deep.
In Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to America,
Chonburi Province, Thailand: January 1987July 1987
The feeling that she was Hmong did not happen until the preparations for America began as her family was being processed. Thailand wanted to close its refugee camps, send away the remnants from the war:
You are going to America on a one-way ticket.
You are going to America as refugees of the Vietnam War.
You are going to America as Hmong from the camps of Thailand.
You are going to America to find a new home.
We do not want you here anymore.
All this was said in the things that were happening: the classes that her mother and father attended that taught them new strings of words (Hello. How are you? I am fine, thank you.); new kinds of food (pieces of chicken between bread with cilantro and green onion and a white, tasteless, fatty spread from a jar); the free set of clothing that each person was given: a dark blue sweater, walking shoes with laces, white socks, dark blue pants, a white collared shirt to go underneath the sweater. These were the Thai governments last gift to the Hmong for leaving their country, the American governments donation to a people who had passed exams stating they had fought under American leadership and influence during the Secret War in Laos from 1960 to 1975. All this was felt as she watched the preoccupied adults around her preparing for a new life, trying to end the yearning for an old one that she didnt knowshe saw how their eyes searched the distance for the shadows of mountains or the wide, open sky for the monsoons, one last time before it was gone forever.
All these good-byes made her feel very Hmong inside.
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