Kao Kalia Yang Quotes

Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might each have an easier one apart; love is the reason why you choose a life with someone, and you don't turn back although your heart cries sometimes and your children see you cry and you wish out loud that things were easier. Love is getting up each day and fighting the same fight only to sleep that night in the same bed beside the same person because long ago, when you were younger and you did not see so clearly, you had chosen them.

Patience is the road to wisdom.

Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might each have an easier one apart

I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.

I learned that what made our parents sad was not so much the hardness of the life they had to lead in America, or the hardness of the lives they had led to get to America, but the hardness of OUR lives in America. It was always about the children.

I told her we will not become the birds or the bees. We will become Hmong, and we will build a strong home that we will never leave and can always return to. We will not be lost and looking our whole lives through.

Once we are, we will always be.

Time had been something we feared, but with the babies the things that held time together - the years, the months, the weeks, the days - melted and flowed toward the future.

Emotions are captive to reality

I wanted to bubble over the top and douse the confusing fire that burned in my belly. Or else I wanted to turn the stove off. I wanted to sit cool on the burners of life, lid on, and steady.

On the planes, we leaned our heads back against the tall headrests, closed our eyes to what we had known, and imagined futures for our children - not for ourselves, because we knew that we were too old to start anew and filled with too much sorrow, too many regrets.

I've not heard the world the way you do for a long time now.

Hmong tradition dictated that only a son could find the guides who would lead the spirits of his mother or father to the land of the ancestors.

He was young, and it didn’t matter that he already had a wife and two girls—the lonely women in the camp were still willing to become his second wife. Only

Your trust in me then and now scares and reassures me.

Lasting change cannot be forced, only inspired

Everything in the world that mattered was gone. I prayed secretly. Perhaps we all did. No one wanted to be identified as a probable terrorist. So we prayed hiding in our rooms. We prayed for a return to what was, and a future that could be. We were held in a place that felt as if war didn't exist, in a world that we knew was fraught with fighting.

When the Americans left Laos in 1975, they took the most influential, the biggest believers and fighters for democracy with them, and they left my family and thousands of others behind to wait for a fight that would end for so many in death. A third of the Hmong died in the war with the Americans. Another third were slaughtered in its aftermath. From

Also, although the great majority of the letters I’ve received from Hmong readers have been positive, most of the negative ones have criticized me for telling a story that was not mine to tell. I am no lover of identity politics; I believe that anyone should be allowed to write about anyone. Still, I would have harbored the same proprietary resentment had I been they. It was exactly how I felt thirty years ago, when women’s voices were harder to hear because men were drowning them out. Now that young Hmong writers are starting to publish—including Mai Neng Moua, who edited a landmark literary anthology called Bamboo Among the Oaks, and Kao Kalia Yang, who wrote a fierce, sad memoir called The Latehomecomer—I am happy to shut up and listen. I hope The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is settling into its proper place not as the book about the Hmong but as a book about communication and miscommunication across cultures.

My parents tried their best at English, but their best was not catching up with Dawb’s and mine. We were picking up the language faster, and so we became the interpreters and translators for our family dealings with American people. In the beginning, we just did it because it was easier and because we did not want to see them struggle over easy things. They were working hard for the more important things in our lives. Later, we realized so many other cousins and friends were doing the same. I

My parents knew that I was not speaking much at school, but they both knew that I was learning English. They had seen me write letters to Grandma in California. They had noticed when I laughed at the funny parts of Tom & Jerry. But the thing that gave me away most was my anger. Whenever I got angry, I spoke in English, unless I was angry at them, in which case I would want them to know everything I was saying, so I would try my best at being angry in Hmong: “Dawb is a lazy bum, and you never ask her to do anything. You always ask me because I do it. I make it too easy for you! You are being unfair! You are parents, and you are not doing your job well!” I

The adults continued having nightmares. They cried out in their sleep. In the mornings, they sat at the table and talked to us about their bad dreams: the war was around them, the land was falling to pieces, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers were coming, the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts. In their dreams, they met people who were no longer alive but who had loved them back in their old lives. There were stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night. My aunts and uncles in California farmed on a small acreage, five or ten, to add to the money they received from welfare. My aunts and uncles in Minnesota, in the summers, did “under the table” work to help make ends meet if they could, like harvesting corn or picking baby cucumbers to make pickles. And the adults kept saying: how lucky we are to be in America. I wasn’t convinced.

On November 26, 2003, nine months after my mother died, you gave birth to Max, a little boy with an American name, a little boy I didn’t think we could handle and had said maybe we should consider not having, a little boy who looked up at me with almond eyes, who smiled my smile. Max was a surprise. Nearly nine years after our youngest daughter had been born, long after we said we were done having children, long after I had tried my hand at being a father to a son and was beginning to feel I had failed, out of the blue, cloudless sky a little boy traveled into our life on the wings of my mother’s death. In 2003, I realized I had never written you a love song.

On November 26, 2003, nine months after my mother died, you gave birth to Max, a little boy with an American name, a little boy I didn’t think we could handle and had said maybe we should consider not having, a little boy who looked up at me with almond eyes, who smiled my smile. Max was a surprise. Nearly nine years after our youngest daughter had been born, long after we said we were done having children, long after I had tried my hand at being a father to a son and was beginning to feel I had failed, out of the blue, cloudless sky a little boy traveled into our life on the wings of my mother’s death. In 2003, I realized I had never written you a love song.

It was the first time I could tell my story. Standing before me were 20 students. I stopped being embarrassed. The faces of my classmates show me that they were interested and engaged. The professor gave me an A. That A has given me the courage to live in my in my story fully and fearlessly. To say to anyone who wants to judge me or any other refugee in the world, judge me. Judge us only after you have heard our stories.

As they drove me to their home in Minneapolis I heard police sirens. I saw homeless people with their bags and shopping carts beside them. I saw broken concrete and uneven sidewalks. I thought - I've made a mistake. How can America go into the world and speak of humanity, peace, and prosperity, when there are so many within its own borders looking for help, searching for meaning, worth, a chance at a good life?

For the refugees from everywhere, men, women, and children, who's fates have been held by the interests of nations who's rights have been contested and denied, who's thirst and hunger go unheeded and unseen.

Somewhere in the unknown world a yellow eyed woman sits with her daughter quilting. Some otherwhere alchemists mumble over pots, their chemistry stirs into science, their science freezes into stone. In the unknown world, the woman threading together her need and her needle nods toward the smiling girl. Remember this will keep us warm. How does this poem end? Do the daughter's daughters quilt? Do the alchemists practice their tables? Do the worlds continue spinning away from each other forever? - Lucille Clifton

We didn't come all the way from the clouds just to go back, without a trace. We, seekers of refuge, will find it: if not in the world, then in each other.

Song said, 'Bee, there is no wrong time for love to flourish. Perhaps now, when so many men and women have learned to hate and fear, is the most perfect time of all, fo reach of us to be reminded of a lesson in love.

In America, my voice is only powerful within our home. The moment i exit our front door and enter the paved streets, my deep voice loses its volume and its strength. When I speak English, I become like a leaf in the wind

Patience is the slow road to success

Our baby was laid on the cool metal, on his side, six inches long, eyes closed, mouth open slightly, thin arms and legs, little red fingers and toes. You looked without blinking. I wanted to put my hands over your eyes, to block what you were seeing, to stop the gasps that you expelled.

I am sorry, dear heart, that I have more sorrows than joy. I am sorry I made you scale mountains, heedless of your soft skin. I am sorry I made you jump into rushing water, heedless of your inability to swim. I am sorry, dear heart, that you must bear the scars. Dear heart, that you remember . . . The day my older brother told me to run. In my flight away from home, I heard the shotguns blast. In my dreams, people found my brother, and they took him to the hospital in Sam Neua. In my dreams, the wild dogs entered our house, and feasted on my brother's fallen body. I am sorry, dear heart, that I wish to begin again, My tender, my wounded heart, Begin again before the mountains and the water, before the sorrows, when I knew joy at my brother's side.

My children wanted me to be brave. They did not understand that I have been running from the nightmare of what happened in Laos since I left. Or that there were things waiting for me in Thailand, little boys and lost dogs, that I knew I could never return to. They did not understand that the bravery they asked of me I never had in Laos or Thailand, and I could not have it on returning to those countries.

My father did not live to see his son yearn for a father, or struggle to become one.

I want you to be better than me. Xue looked at our father. Xue said, What if you are the best man I know how to be?