Kao Kalia Yang - The main character and the narrator of the book. She was born in Ban Vinai Refugee camp in Thailand. She has a very strong family with her grandmother. Youa Lee - The main. The Latehomecomer — Literature to Life Unleash the power of a book!

A Hmong Family Memoir

Yang’s award-winning memoir of her family’s harrowing escape from war in Laos is a love letter to her grandmother, a troubling portrait of the consequences of us intervention in Southeast Asia, and a glimpse into the little-seen exodus of the Hmong people, first to refugee camps in Thailand and then, for many, to new homes in Minnesota.

Yang’s award-winning memoir of her family’s harrowing escape from war in Laos is a love letter to her grandmother, a troubling portrait of the consequences of us intervention in Southeast Asia, and a glimpse into the little-seen exodus of the Hmong people, first to refugee camps in Thailand and then, for many, to new homes in Minnesota.

• Coffee House Press
• Paperback
• April 2017
• 312 Pages
• 9781566894784

About Kao Kalia Yang

Kao Kalia Yang is a teacher, public speaker, and writer. Yang is the author of the award-winning book The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008) and the book The Song Poet (Metropolitan Books, 2016). She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Yang lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her family.

Praise

2010 PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist
2009 Minnesota Book Award Winner
2009 Minnesota Readers Choice Award Winner
2009 Skipping Stones Honor Award Winner
2009 Asian American Literary Award Finalist
2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Winner

“A narrative packed with the stuff of life.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Inspiring . . . Yang has performed an important service in bringing readers the stories of a people whose history has been shamefully neglected.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[The Latehomecomer] is the love story of [Yang’s] parents, a gripping tale of adventure and escape, a history lesson of the Hmong people dating to their years in China, a tribute to Yang’s beloved grandmother and a window into Hmong funeral customs. . . . Thanks to Yang, the grandmother will not be forgotten. And neither will this book.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

Discussion Questions

1. The Hmong language is intimately tied to Yang’s experience of, and expression of, Hmong culture. Her arrival in the United States means learning English and having to navigate a new culture in that language. How do the languages of our families, communities, and cultures color how we inhabit those spaces? How do they create and sustain those bonds?

2. Yang’s grandmother is a powerful figure in The Latehomecomer, and her resourcefulness and wisdom in many ways make possible the family’s journey from Laos to Minnesota. The attention to her role in their story is one of many ways the author focuses the story on others, making this a “family memoir.” How does that choice affect your reading of the book? What does it mean for an author to define “self ” in the context of “family”?

3. The United States was populated by colonized Native peoples, voluntary migrants, refugees whose migration was coerced by conditions at home, and slaves. How do the complexity of our origin stories and learning about the conditions under which Hmong families like the Yangs arrived change your understanding of citizenship, Americanness, and home?

4. When the Yangs cross the Mekong, they’re forced to leave their family photos behind. How do belongings carry meaning in The Latehomecomer? What other objects take on significance beyond their utility in the book? the latehomecomer 279

5. Yang pays close attention to her characters’ surroundings—we can see, smell, and hear the mountains of Laos, the refugee
camps in Thailand, and the family’s first winter in St. Paul. How does evoking the spaces her family inhabits create emotion?
How do those contrasts give weight to their journey?

Interviews

Families tell themselves their stories all the time—it’s one of the ways that we define ourselves as related, as more than demographic units. What inspired you to move from sharing stories within your family to capturing your family’s stories on the page?

Too many people in my community have lived for far too long without understanding on their side. They have not had the language, the time, and many times the opportunity to answer an often-asked and sometimes-acted question, “What are you people doing here?” I want to work on behalf of a deeper understanding of how it is that the Hmong are here in America, spread across the globe; this was a source of great motivation and inspiration for me to write the book, to become a writer.

The Latehomecomer Sparknotes

How did you capture the parts of your family’s story that happened before you were born? What research went into representing those moments in a way that felt real to the people who lived them? Did you worry about the ways in which their stories and your research might diverge?

I was born at a time and in a place where stories were the only means by which the Hmong could leave the confines of the refugee camp. I was a vessel for these stories, some hope of some future somewhere. A big part of the work I did in the writing of this book was to piece together the stories inside of me within memories from my family, within the larger framework. I read pretty much all that had been written in English on the Hmong American experience. I took the stories I had been told by my loved ones and wrote them alongside the documented histories; we’ve been sadly neglected, often misrepresented.

Oral storytelling is a big part of Hmong culture, and so many people first experienced The Latehomecomer from your presentations and live performances. Does telling your story to communities, schools, and groups alter your relationship to your book? Does it change your relationship to your family’s stories?

I belong to a people who are new to what is written. My father says that when I write, I write on paper, but when I speak, I write on the fabric of the human being. This is what gives me the courage to speak. I am much more comfortable on the page. Living a comfortable life is not one of my goals. Telling these stories out loud has forced me to become a much more public, more influential, perhaps more responsible person.

How do the rhythms of oral storytelling shape what’s on the page?

The Latehomecomer Quizlet

My Uncle Eng once told me that the purpose of a story is to serve as a stop sign on the road of life; its purpose is to make audiences pause, look at both sides, check the trajectory of the horizon. This is a guiding principle for me on the page. I don’t stumble over traditional beginnings, middles, and ends; I am interested in making my readers act—which is very much the function of oral storytelling, the form I come from.

The Latehomecomer is, in many ways, a series of love stories— between your parents, between you and your grandmother, and between you and your family. How does love animate and reshape what is, in purely historical terms, a story of war, loss, and trauma?

Love, for me, is the reason why we remember our lives in stories, with characters and places, vivid and true. It is easy to talk of the contents of a book. It is far harder to forget the love one encounters between the pages of lives.

When Kao Kalia Yang was very young, her father explained to her how children come into the world. “Before babies are born,” he said, “they live in the sky where they race along with the clouds and can see everything – the beauty of the mountains, the courses of streams, the dirt of the paths that people take down on earth.” The babies decide to be born only when they find people “who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.” Yang loved the idea that even before her life on earth began, she had the power to choose her own destiny.

Yang is Hmong, an ethnic group that lived in China for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years until they were forced to flee during a period of unrest. They resettled in the mountains of Laos, where they remained for almost 200 years. Yang’s mother was a bright girl who dreamed of becoming a nurse and marrying an educated man. Her father dreamed of a small farm and chickens – plump, fluffy chickens clustering and squawking around his feet. The dreams of both parents were blown to dust by the Vietnam War.

Kao Kalia Yang’s book The Latehomecomer is a record of her family’s escape from flying bullets in Laos to temporary safety in Thailand and finally to a home of sorts in Minnesota. Latehomecomer includes vividly detailed accounts of events that occurred before she was born; evidently she relied on stories told by her parents and especially by her widowed grandmother, who was the rock of her large extended family. “Grandma” was a healer and a shaman. She spent much of her time searching the hillsides for medicinal herbs and walking from village to village to perform healing rituals for the sick of body and the sick of heart. In this way she managed to support her nine children.

During the Vietnam War, many of the Hmong men fought beside the Americans. When the war was over, the Americans suddenly left, and the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao soldiers set out to kill all of the rebels. The Hmong were forced to run for their lives into the jungle, where they camped for four years, constructing simple shelters and foraging for food. Yang’s parents met and married in the jungle. All too soon Hmong were on the run again. For a time the women and children were captured and held prisoner in an occupied village that had been ravaged by chemical warfare. In this place of tombstones and scorched grass, Yang’s older sister Dawb was born.

The only possible escape from Laos was to cross the Mekong River, a difficult undertaking for mountain people who had never learned to swim. Yang’s father had no money to purchase a raft, so he tied his small family together – mother, wife and infant daughter – and miraculously managed to ford the river and pull them up on the shores of Thailand. Later they learned that if they had waited until two months later to cross, they would have been slaughtered. The Thais had decided they had no more room for refugees and that the best way to handle the new arrivals was to kill them.

Yang’s people were eventually settled in the Ban Vinai refugee camp, a windy and dusty place where she was born 17 months later. Yang remembers happy times at Ban Vinai: “the tall grass waving on the hills, me riding on the back of a wide, brown buffalo, almost toppling into a rushing stream, saved by an older cousin; me standing on tiptoes to peek at a litter of puppies, their eyes still closed, their heads searching, disoriented by the light of my bright world.” Normal life resumed, after a fashion. her grandmother had a shop where she sold food and medicines, and she was happy. Yang was surrounded by people who loved her, and life was reasonably good.

But Ban Vinai was no land of promise. Word came that Thai officials were going to close down the camps and send the Hmong back to Laos – a death sentence. Only one refuge remained: America.

Yang’s grandmother all but refused to go, and Yang worried about the food. She had heard that Americans eat nothing but chicken sandwiches. The family settled in Minnesota, but life in America was disappointing. Her father asked for a job but was given welfare. The family finally bought a house that was cute on the outside but moldy and rotten on the inside. “America was supposed to be for all of us,” Yang wrote, “only we were lonely, lost, and struggling every day at a life that constantly looked to the future for happiness.” She found it impossible to speak English, but she at least learned to write English well – a necessary skill to win admission to a college.

Some critics may question the accuracy of Yang’s youthful memories, especially when she describes her encounters with ghosts. But to read this book is to learn what it means to be a refugee and an immigrant. They are fathers, mothers, infants, children, grandparents – brave and honorable people who are worthy of respect and love.

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang / 277 pages, Coffee House Press, 2008