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.

Emotions are captive to reality

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.

Once we are, we will always be.

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.

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

In English, his voice lost its strength. The steadiness was gone; it was quiet and hesitant. Did all Hmong people lose the strength of their voices in English? I hoped not.

Lasting change cannot be forced, only inspired

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

If we garden so we can have food in the seasons to come, why are we in school? To garner the lessons for the long years ahead. I couldn’t say that out loud. I gripped my pencil so hard that first day, my fingers ached into the night.

It was May of 1975 when the Americans left Laos and the Communist Party took over the government. All teachers’ salaries were suspended. Genocide was declared against the Hmong for helping the Americans. I lost hold of my pens as I took up a gun to protect my family.

With each Hmong family we visited, a relative or a neighbor, we were reminded of how unpredictable life can be, how harsh it can be.

My fear of embarrassment vanished. In its place there was no pride, just an understanding of the man I had always seen exclusively as mine, now standing before his people, with his heart open, bleeding hardship and harrowing hope. The words had nothing and everything to do with my being in the big arena. There was no room for refusal, for thoughts or ideas, it was all just a moment felt, emotions bubbling forth from losses the Hmong had endured. In his song, I was no longer young. I was one with a people who had lived for a long time, traveled across many lands, a people clinging to each other for a reminder, a promise, of home, that place deep inside and far beyond where the Hmong people had hidden our hearts so that we could heal. There was nothing to be embarrassed about.

I did not want to tell my father that his song had shaken my heart, taken me to a place that I did not want to visit for fear I would never return. Now that I had heard, I could not forget the suffering and sorrow of the Hmong story.

When Youa Lee, our father’s mother, died in 2003, he forgot all his songs. He had never written them down. They were either recorded on old scratched tapes or memorized in his heart. His heart had broken. The songs had leaked out. The poetry was gone from our house.

I want my father to understand that aside and apart from my mother and his children, he has offered the world a gift all his own.

My brothers say that I was born at the beginning of 1958, in the midst of the Laotian Civil War. In the bigger cities of Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Vientiane there were battles and debates between members of the Royal Lao Government and coalition groups of Communist revolutionaries. On the world stage, Laos had become a faraway place for the superpowers of the Cold War to test their might against each other. But on the high mountains of Phou Bia, in the province of Xieng Khuoang, in the village of Phou Khao where I was born, the Hmong continued the life we knew.

My father explained where babies came from to me. “Before babies are born 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.” 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.

No one had told us that education could change the way you felt about the world and the people in it, that it could give you words to use, and actions to take, not in support of those who love you but as a response to them, that education in America would make our father and mother less educated in our eyes.

Neither Dawb nor I could talk about the loneliness that grew inside us with every new idea we loved, every new place in the world we wanted to visit, every drink we thirsted for, every dish we yearned to taste beyond our home. We were supposed to become doctors and lawyers and everyone would celebrate at the end; we didn’t know that we would have to become those things alone.

Outside, the heavy snow came. At first the snow was white and it made the crumbling neighborhood we lived in nice and clean. Even the dying, diseased trees looked dressed up in the white spread across their peeling limbs. The line of lilac bushes between our house and the abandoned house next door became a magical entry into another world. We made tunnels in the snow. It was great for the first month or so

The tall remains of summer grass poked out of the snow in the abandoned yards, a standing reminder of seasons past. The world had grown dull and heavy with cold, sharp ridges of frozen ice. We harbored hopes of spring, but latent with winter, we shivered through one cold day at a time, closer to each other to keep warm.

Threads torn, skin broken, eyes wild and empty. Hmong men were beaten. Hmong blood seeped into the Thai earth, drops and streams to be washed by the monsoon rains that fell each year.

It felt like there was a magical wall that allowed us to see other people passing in and out of the camp, but we could not cross it ourselves. We could feel the air moving all around us, but we were heavier than air. We could only wish we had the freedom of air. If we did, the wind could blow us to our homes in the mountains of Laos—at least that is what the older people in my family yearned for. I was different from the adults. I believed I was as light as air.

Old words, this time from my mother, come back to me: “It takes some men lifetimes before they learn how to cry.

All we had was Xue, who was bullied at school, who had struggled to fight for himself. But we had told him to stop fighting, and so he had done as we had asked. Xue was now hiding from the world. We had become a part of the world that he was hiding from.

They were no longer young like when my mother had died. They had lived through their own grandmother’s death. They knew how the death of our loved ones shook us until the pieces of who we were fell around us, how if there was no one to pick up those pieces, they can be lost forever.

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. I cannot control the direction my words will fly in the ear of the other person. I try to soften my landing in the language by leaving pauses between each word. I wrestle with my accent until it is a line of breath in the tightness of my throat. I greet people. I ask for directions. I say thank you. I say goodbye. I only speak English at work when it is necessary. I don’t like the weakness of my voice in English, but what I struggle with most is the weakness of my words.

it is funny the things we remember on the days that people we love die.

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.

Grandma believed that the only way to keep a family together was to have many sons, many people, so that there were many different points holding on. It was easy to tear apart two hands, no matter how strongly they held, but if they had many hands, coming from all different directions, the grip would always hold, at some point, no matter what tried to sever the bond. At the very least, a tearing apart would take longer. She believed that a big family could buy time.

From the moment we arrived, I knew that my family had survived a great war to bring me to this country. I understood that the conditions in Thailand and the camps were hard for those who knew more than I did. But for me, the hardness in life began in America. We are so lucky to be in this country, the adults all said. Watching them struggle belied this fact. We are so fortunate to be young, new lives opening before us, they believed. And yet the life in school that opened before me made me feel old in a world that was struggling to be young. A silence grew inside of me because I couldn’t say that it was sometimes sad to be Hmong, even in America.

wrote about the love I felt I knew: 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.

In the cold of winter, the wind blows the snow off the ground and waves of white come sweeping across our tiny stretch of lawn and hit the house in sprinklings of icy snow. Invisible streams of air seep through the cracks of the old windows and the smell of our rice-scented home swims in the currents of cold. Outside, the sound of police sirens resonates in the rippling, urgent winter winds. In the warmth of spring, the wind transforms the empty parking lot by the corner Laundromat into a field of fallen petals as crab apple trees release their blooms and the hard pavement feels the soft brush of tender, ephemeral beauty. Wet rain falls into shattered concrete and the pools of black water lie still for the pink and white and red petals to swim in. The wind carries the voices of laughing children into our house as we watch the petals sway to and fro in the dark puddles across our street. In the heat of hot summer, the green grass grows while the yellow dandelions die, and in the wake of their demise the wind carries their spirits and their seeds across open lots, rotting houses, small yards, littered avenues, and everywhere there are little parachutes of pollen floating away. Late into the night, we listen to the voices of friends and neighbors talking outside on their porches, hear the clinking of cans, turn our heads toward their laughter and their tears, and the wind loses its appeal for a season because the pull of people grows strong across the fertile green.

If I grew embarrassed, I figured I could always pretend I didn’t exist.

The communist Pathet Lao soldiers and their North Vietnamese allies infiltrated Hmong villages and began a systematic campaign to kill off the Hmong who believed in the tenets of democracy and had fought against communist rule. While many of the 30,000 Hmong men and boys recruited by the CIA of the United States had been killed, the remnants of their fight remained, in the hearts and the homes of their wives and children, their mothers and fathers, their friends and neighbors. The Secret War, the biggest covert operation in CIA history, and its ramifications would tear into the history of a people, break into the pages of their lives, and let the winds of war and death blow them all over the world.

of the factory are dangerous. The whirling fans that spread the shine do not help our odds. We are confined by the knowledge: every job kills you eventually. Some jobs kill you with a single carefully weighted bullet, while others kill you slowly by floating the pieces and particles of metal over time.

Why does love in a war always mean choosing?

My grandmother was an intelligent woman. She looked at the pieces of her life carefully, got up slowly, and tried to fit the jagged edges together, no matter how crudely, so that her life was never completely empty.

The world of winter becomes bearable in the promise of spring.

For someone who had so little schooling, for someone who forgot clinic and dentist appointments and our birth dates, my father had an astounding memory for his songs.

What I was, what I had become, was a woman trying to turn the tides of luck in favor of her children. All along the way, I was not sure how to find good luck for myself because I came from women who others feared and labeled, so I had clung blindly to the idea of love, a love that might have the power to not only sustain but offer comfort in an unjust world.

My grandma’s parting took two and a half months. I think about that time often, but only through the haze of my own missing, my yearning to hold on. I could see it through my father’s eyes. I could not feel it through his heart. I did not want to because it would force me to reckon not only with my grandmother’s mortality but my father’s and my own. Perhaps, like me, my father had tried to put off my grandma’s demise by not reckoning with it. My father would not give words to her leaving and yet Grandma left.

If my family had crossed the river two months later, they would have been massacred. Thailand was no longer taking Hmong refugees from Laos; there were too many coming in because of the continued influx of North Vietnamese soldiers to help the Pathet Lao kill the remaining Hmong. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, a journalist from America, recorded the deaths of two hundred Hmong people, families with small children, on the Mekong on July 27, 1979. The group was on a sandbar gathering vines to weave a bridge to Thailand. They built fires and boiled water in old U.S. Army canteens. The women took off their shirts to put over sticks to shelter their babies and the old women. They fed their hungry children. Many of them were little more than skeletons. The adults didn’t eat. They saved their rice for the children. Thai soldiers appeared on the Thai bank in jeeps with a machine gun bolted to the front hood. In two Thai patrol boats, the soldiers traveled to the island. The Thai soldiers slashed the vines that tried to connect the people to Thailand. Thailand had had enough Hmong refugees. On August 2, 1979, Hamilton-Merritt learned that a group of thirty to forty Pathet Lao soldiers had landed on the river island and the Hmong were massacred.*

For many of the Hmong, their lives on paper began on the day the UN registered them as refugees of war.

In the mountains, the white Hmong and the green Hmong had lived in separate enclaves. They had each spoken their own dialects and eaten their own foods of choice. Though friendly, they had hardly intermingled. Out of the mountains and into Thailand, they would all live together, sleep together, be comforted and scared together. In this camp, they found themselves listening carefully so they could understand each other; they felt they were all just Hmong—people without a history, rooted in the same past. There was long-ago China and despairing Laos—and the tones of a tongue, one lyrically smooth, the other stark and simple, both born in an experience of being Hmong. The difference was their own. They had learned from their years in the jungle that when no other peoples would help, Hmong people could help Hmong people. They had found that it was not necessary to have a country to stand together as one people. They found that without a country, finding a place to sleep was difficult.

I have no shoes on. I feel the prick of the sticks on the ground, the pebbles hard against the sensitive soles of my feet. I walk as a traveler might in the land of the dead on the backs of the spiky caterpillars.

In raising this child, I will learn something fundamental about motherhood, that our children will make decisions across the trajectories of their lives and that sometimes these decisions will take them far from us.

Laos had been the most heavily bombed country in the war,

We kept holding hands. We chose a direction. I had no idea it would lead to marriage. Did I love him? Did he love me? It is the kind of decision that only young people can make in a war of no tomorrows. At that moment, I think neither of us saw the future.

I know what it is like to dream—and now you, Zuabli, are the keeper of many dreams, your father’s and mine, but most importantly your own. These dreams are riches that money cannot buy, a way of waking up the heart when it is weary, calling on the spirit when the body is weak.

I have not been the father my children have wanted or needed me to be. I have been, at my best and at my worst, only the father I imagined for myself.

My mother wanted Dawb to write that she would try her very best to work to feed her children. Dawb said that “to try” is not enough on a resume in America. Dawb would put instead that my mother would do great work to feed her children. My mother was scared of this line, but Dawb said it sounded much more confident. “Mommy, on television the only people who get jobs are the ones who say they are going to do great things, not those who try.

the price for the future is the present,

The more people there were in a life, the faster it goes. Life was a fleeting thing.

But it was not until I was a grown man with children of my own that I could speak of my endless yearning for a father. Day by day, I stored my loneliness and the constant missing deep inside of me. To appease the hungry heart inside, I started gathering the beauty of flowers that blossomed from people’s lips in the presence of those they loved and adored. I used to run away to repeat the words to myself whenever the yearning grew unbearable.

We did not ask him what the new songs were about, or offer to listen to them. We understood his kwv txhiaj in American terms, as little more than our father’s hobby. There were mornings, afternoons, and evenings when our father would recite his songs to his brothers on the phone or to my mother when they found a moment together. All around us, we heard fragments of his words coming together in song and we took it for granted that this would always be so.

Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992. (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1993).

The jagged cracks on the walls looked like the bottoms of Grandma’s feet, filled with dirt from long ago.

Even in the camp, some of the old practices from village life survived. If I pass by a stranger’s open door and they are gathered around the dining table, inevitably, they would invite me to join the meal. Of course, a refusal is customary, but the older people practice a tenacious insistence. They would set down their spoons and come to the doorway, compelling me inside to a bite of rice and a sip of broth. They would say, “There’s not much to eat, but all our hearts will get fuller if we sit together awhile.” If someone died, no one waited for an invitation to visit. We would all go and gather close to speak of our communal grief and lament the loss as a Hmong family. If there was heavy work to be done, such as butchering an animal, or tedious work such as washing baskets of mustard greens, or complicated work such as helping to move a family from one segment of the camp to the other, then everyone close by would lend a hand. In a difficult moment, we would all help carry the sorrow, the weight of work, and the sadness. These are beautiful things about my people.

I think about how little I knew, thinking that I could just be one kind of mother, not realizing that to each child I needed to be a different version of myself.

The Hmong had been living in the mountains of Laos for nearly two hundred years—since they fled from the wars in China. The mountains were their home and they knew them well. When Edward Landsdale, an agent for the cia, advised the use of the Hmong in Laos against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao soldiers, he could not have known what history would do to them. The Americans entered the country and recruited Hmong to serve, first as guides and then later as fighters, without thought to the price their recruits would pay with their lives and the lives of their children for generations to come. The old ones who survived would carry shrapnel in their bodies, broken lives in their souls. For the young, for people like my mother and father, seeing bodies on the jungle floor, pieces of cloth wilting in the humid heat, was a horrible sight but a fact of being alive.

Before my mother left the clearing for the walk to where my father’s family was camped, her mother gave her gifts—fine embroidery she had spent hours in the hot sun making, little pieces of cloth carefully lined with flowery symbols and connected squares that told the history of the Hmong people, a lost story, a narrative sewn but no longer legible. The Hmong in Laos had fled from China. Legends told of war and murder, slavery and escape. The Hmong language had been outlawed. The written language was hidden in flowers. It was a women’s rebellion; they devised a plan to hide their stories in their clothing, in the child-carrying clothes that bound their children to themselves. They did not know that in the passage of time the written language would become lost in the beautiful shapes and colors, no longer legible in words, holding on to meaning. My mother knew that the gifts her mother was handing her were pieces of the history. She also knew that a Hmong woman needed to have something of her mother’s if she hoped to find her way back to her mother once life ended.

Hmong women are renowned around the world for their embroidery, but not many people know how many backs have been bent permanently for the beauty and the bounty of a story told in cloth. In the camp, Hmong women sat on low wooden stools close to the ground. The ones with babies held their babies in the spread of their sarong skirts between their widespread knees. The women sat with curved necks and narrowed eyes. They settled in groups of three or four in the early morning, worked through the hot afternoon, until the light dissipated from the sky and the cries of the night crickets sounded. Each woman held a needle between her thumb and her forefinger and she picked at the white fabric strewn across her lap with her needle and her thread, telling the stories of her people, drawing the animals of her past, envisioning the way life could be again—if we could return the bullets to the guns, suck out the craters from the earth, stop the bombs from falling in the sky and the planes from flying overhead, and if we could stop time and tragedy from happening to the Hmong. The long pieces of thread, bright pink, neon green, and deep blue, rested in crumpled plastic bags by their sides. Without looking up, the women swatted at the black flies that came close to their children every few minutes. Occasionally, one stopped to heave a sigh in the midday heat, to stretch the tight muscles of her neck. When mothers got up at the day’s end, we heard the cracking of weary backs. When they reached out to the older children for steadiness, the young boys and girls stood still and grew as solid as they knew how so that their mothers could blink away the blur in their gazes, gain stability with their help.

She tried to say more things to me, and I tried not to cry, but neither of us could do what we wanted. In all the languages of the earth, in all the richness of words, there is no word, no comparison, no equivalent, for my grandmother trying to be strong for me, her one me naib.

That was when it came to me: I would never see my Grandmother’s face again. If I wanted snatches of her, I had to look to those around me, had to find it within myself. Grandma would not return to us. This is the way of a long life.

My mother and father speak of how little we had when I was born. They had already been in the camp for a year and five months. Each person had only a few pieces of donated clothing. This was much more than they had when they crossed the Mekong River, but they still say that I was born when they were poor because they had stopped wishing for things other than their lives. I was their gift in a time when they could not dare to dream of presents.

how all of us were alive and part of different countries now and how we belonged to the world, even if the world didn’t know who we were.

It was fighting that all the Hmong in America had done with the lives that had fallen to the jungle floor, the spirits that had flown high into the clouds again, that had fled life and refused to return—despite all the urgings, the pleas, the crying. But we were refugees in this country, not citizens. It was not our home, only an asylum. All this came crashing down. In American history we learned of the Vietnam War. We read about guerilla warfare and the Vietcong. The Ho Chi Minh Trail and communism and democracy and Americans and Vietnamese. There were no Hmong—as if we hadn’t existed at all in America’s eyes.

It has taken me forty-two years to realize that mothers will wait for their children, no matter how long it takes.

Sometimes our father asked us questions: “Do you have any ideas on what might help Xue survive in this country?” We could not offer good answers. We could not stop the white boys at school from hurting Xue or change the rules and protocol of the school district to take bullying and racism into account; we could not undo a system that was as old as this country we were told to call home. It all felt much too late. The newspaper articles about the culture of fear and the suicide epidemic that would break the silence of the Anoka-Hennepin School District hadn’t yet been written. It was only 2003. It wasn’t until 2012 that Dawb and I read Rolling Stone magazine’s piece about the bullying that was killing kids in Andover and other cities in Anoka County and shared it with our mother and father.

He said, “I want you to have a life that is better than mine. I don’t want you to become a machinist like me. I don’t want you to live your life with men and boys far stupider than you telling you that you don’t belong here, that you are no good for this country, telling you to return to a country you do not have. I want you to have a better life than me. 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?” Our father shook his head. He didn’t want to accept Xue’s words. For the first time in his life, he heard the words of a son to his father. He knew what it was like to yearn for a father, to raise a son and burn to make him better than you, and Xue had tried to keep him safe in his fantasies of fathers and sons, but Xue could no longer save our father from himself. Our father said, “You cannot be me and survive in this country.” Xue said, “Then I cannot survive in this country.

They said that during the saddest times in a life, when the meaning of staying alive is all confused, the only way to survive is to hold on to each other. The only way to get through life is to have a big team on your side.

Each of us is aware that the glittering particles in the air of the factory are dangerous. The whirling fans that spread the shine do not help our odds. We are confined by the knowledge: every job kills you eventually. Some jobs kill you with a single carefully weighted bullet, while others kill you slowly by floating the pieces and particles of metal over time.

Sometimes they told me that the lottery system is a ruse to win money from the poor and the hopeful. They were not willing to see that poor and hopeful is exactly what their father was.

I know that the price for the future is the present, and I am much weaker than they believe me to be: as I was in Thailand before the men with guns, I am in America before the men in suits.

My father says that when I write, I write on paper, but when I speak, I write on the fabric of the human being.