This year marks 50 years of Hmong refugee resettlement and immigration to Minnesota. In 1975, after the Vietnam War and after Communists took over Laos, many Hmong people had to flee their homelands. Hmong families resettled as refugees across the world, including in Minnesota.
This experience is one of the stories Kao Kalia Yang describes in her writing: her memoirs, fiction, opera, public speaking and teaching. Born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand, Yang was 6 years old when she arrived in St. Paul with her parents and older sister.
When she published her memoir "The Latehomecomer" in 2008 — a work she referred to as a love letter to her grandmother — it was the first memoir by a Hmong American to be nationally distributed. The book has since been named an NEA Big Read.
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I think it's a lesson that my mother did such a good job teaching me. You know, my mother, she was always the person who opened the door when the Meals on Wheels truck came. With the WIC vouchers in her hand, she stood at the grocery stores to make sure that we could get fed. She's an incredible woman, and I think in all of those moments, it was hard for her, because she knew we were looking. She understood it, but she did it anyway with as much grace and dignity as she could muster. I gain courage and inspiration by thinking about these things.
In the beginning, when I was a much younger writer, I think the danger was that I was an example of the great American dream, and I knew how dangerous that was, because there were other equally smart, equally capable people around me in our community who didn't have the same access to opportunities, the same structure and support that I have in my own family. And so I've always been very keen that I'm one American story.
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