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.

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.

Emotions are captive to reality

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

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.

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.

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.

There is no life that does not contribute to history. —DOROTHY WEST

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.

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.

I wanted to be, even with all these examples, the kind of mother my mother had been to me. I wanted to be well put together like her, to offer my children a quiet pride in the way I cared for myself. I wanted to be the kind of mother a child would always remember as a fountain of love and care.

had left the house of my feelings a long time ago when I left my mother for marriage.

thought to myself, this is my adult life, a life so full and yet so empty at the same time.

cried until my tear ducts looked like wounds.

I fashioned a woman out of the process of my grief. I

These children, born in America, talk to us of the systemic racism of America, and somehow, they feel like it is their job to be able to deal with it on their own, that the weight of their experiences will crush our vision of this new country.

What if that was the magic for all mothers?—the simple survival of her children.

What if that was the magic for all mothers?—the simple survival of her children. Watching the journeys they take and believing that life was possible despite what you have seen and what you have experienced.

I saw how humble our hands were: small hands, small fingers, middle finger and ring finger bending toward each other like old friends with secrets to share. My mother’s movements were sure and fast, unlike my own. My hands tangled unproductively against the deep-rooted dandelions. I wrapped my fingers tightly around the base of the green plants right where the white roots were showing and pulled hard. When the earth gave way and I held the broken roots, I knew that they would sprout again in a couple of weeks. I sighed quietly to myself but did not complain or voice my observation. Instead, I listened as my mother told me stories of how she’d once, long ago, weeded alongside her own mother.

The cicadas in the nearby trees sang their high-pitched songs, like the buzz of electricity but louder and alive.

At the driveway, beneath the old oak trees, my mother filled brown paper bags with produce for me and my new husband as we headed back to the home we now shared. The weight of the bags grew heavy in my hands. It was too much for the both of us to eat, but I did not know how to stop her hands from pushing the vegetables in mine. I accepted them all knowing we would never finish them. I understood them for what they were: a wish for my marriage, for my life ahead, one in which she would not be at the same table sharing my meals.

In that hospital room, now aglow in the embers of memory, I learned the power of my mother, not only over me but over the lives that would emerge from me, however their stories would go. Awash in waves of her fearless love, I was able to say goodbye to Baby Jules, send him off to a world beyond the one I breathed in, knowing that he would be cradled already by those who’ve loved my mother, her mother before her, so on and so forth.

Niam, I am sorry that I never got to meet your mother. Niam, I am lucky that I get to be your daughter in this lifetime.

Niam, in all the lifetimes to come, if I get to choose, let me be your daughter again.

I grew up with only one grandmother, my father’s mother, my pog. Both of my grandfathers had died when my parents were children. My pog was a force to be reckoned with. She had many grandchildren. We only had her. We raced each other to be by her side, to hold her hands, to sit at her feet, to be bathed in her scent, Tiger Balm and medicinal herbs. I knew the feel of her hand, dry like paper, fingers strong and straight, blue veins like rolling vines soft underneath her skin. I knew her voice, too, rough and low, steady and slow.

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.

I was going to love him so much more, so much better. In those months apart, I learned a desperate truth, that I missed him even more than I missed my own mother. But as life would have it, as life would teach me, and perhaps Npis, too, we could only love each other the same. We were young, we were already at our full capacity, only neither of us knew it, so we kept thinking that there was more goodness, more tenderness, more sweetness to love, something waiting around the corner, a truth that would come out, and somehow all our mistakes, our decisions, our indecisions, the blind trust, the emotions that singed us, all of it would finally be justified.

Mothering, I learned on the banks of the Mekong River, was a gift given and accepted.

Npis was used to pretending he didn’t want the things other people had. I was not like him. My yearning showed all over my face, my figure, invisible hands reaching for my heart’s desires.

I had married a poor man. He has been marked by poverty in ways I had not. He does not talk of the things we might one day do together, the places we might visit, the houses we might live in. He is a man who has been trained to live for one day hoping for the next. He is not used to the idea of dreams, the logistics of planning a future. In our talk and in our life, the only thing he has offered is the one thing he has, himself. In this way, in this strange and peculiar way, Npis was free in a way that I knew many men were not. He was not chasing a position in the world, running toward notions of education or class or power. He does not know how to pretend to be anything but what he is: a poor man standing by the side of a dusty path, waiting for his thin wife to feed his fragile child.

wanted my children to know my mother. I didn’t know how to impart her but through my own mothering, my own decisions as a parent.

Men who laugh too often and too fast are unsure of their own feelings. It is more important for a man to know how he feels than what he thinks.

Young men who smell bad will only smell worse with age.

to survive in a world without my mother, I had to become some other version of myself. Instead of looking to her in the world of the living, I had to find her in myself.

Time is the only thing that none of us gets, no matter the need.

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.

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

No one had ever told me that I had been nursing a raging storm inside and that the pressure would build until nothing less than my blood spilling would ease it. No one had told me that inside me there were threads of skin, muscle, and fat, and that I was a thing sewn together by the pulsing heat of life, and for me to produce it, I had to come undone. For all the babies I had seen, for all the women I had known, right up until I delivered my first child, I did not know how much bringing life into the world necessitated me placing my own on the line.

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.

They said that there were refugee camps set up by a group of powerful countries. We would be subjected to their decisions, these foreign nations, though this fact did not feel like new information. Hadn’t we been all along? Even in Laos, we were at the mercy of the countries who had sent planes across our skies, dropped rice and bombs for our people to eat and to die.

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.

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.

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.

My father, in an exasperated voice that grown men can use only with their mothers, responded to her pleas with rational arguments:

There was no room to complain in our home about work. It was the only way we could have a life in America. It wasn’t just us. It was what all the Hmong people were doing.

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.

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.

Grandma enjoyed the time in Thailand. Her sons were poor because there was no way for them to work. But she did not mind their poverty because her family was together and alive. The war was in the past, and for her that was enough to make the future a busy one, filled with living.

If I close my eyes hard, twenty years after living in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, I see the way the camp was. I know that it no longer exists. Everything was left to ruin in 1995 when the camp closed. The shacks were taken apart, and the signs of people having lived there, wiped away by people, by nature, by time. The people that were buried in the place I was born: what has happened to their graves, unmarked even then, just little mounds across the hills?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Grandma said, “Lasting change cannot be forced, only inspired.

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.

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.

fifteen years, my family knew this. The camps in Thailand had closed. Hmong people there were repatriated, sometimes without knowledge, back into Laos. Families went missing in the process. Lives were lost. Children were killed. Ours were only beginning to raise their eyes to a country of peace, where guns at least were hidden and death did not occur in the scalding of grass or rains that drizzled death. We could not handle any more death. In wanting to live, we were willing to try becoming Hmong Americans.

I could not translate all the things I was discovering at college to my mom and dad, to my home. But I could not help but apply them. This was when I started collecting my grandma’s stories. I began to realize how our lives in America would be our stories. I started to understand one of the many truths that governed life: by documenting our deaths, we were documenting our lives. The Hmong had died too many times, and each time, their deaths had gone unwritten. There were no testimonies. The witnesses grew old, and they died, and life continued, as if they had never lived. I didn’t want this happen to my grandma, to this woman I adored, whom I could not imagine not loving forever. I wanted the world to know how it was to be Hmong long ago, how it was to be Hmong in America, and how it was to die Hmong in America—because I knew our lives would not happen again.

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

They would never understand why American people talked about how expensive babies were and how poor people shouldn’t have so many. How was it that such smart people couldn’t understand that the best way to live life was to give life.

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.

Why does love in a war always mean choosing?

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.

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

My older cousins ran around playing Vietnamese and Hmong. Then we had believed that the enemies and killers were Vietnamese. We did not know of the Lao and Hmong communist soldiers. We played a simple game. When a Vietnamese found a Hmong and took a shot, the Hmong person would fall to the ground. Sometimes, a relative Hmong would run past a fallen Hmong and stop to lament, just like the adults: “Get up. Why have you fallen? Get up and we will run away together.” Of course, like in the war, there was no running for fallen bodies. In the end, if you were fast and you left everyone else behind, if you stopped yelling to the other Hmong people: “Run, they are coming! Run, they are coming!”—if you just looked behind yourself and ran as fast as you could, if you were lucky, you escaped, and you got to live in a refugee camp.

The grass around the village looked like it had been scorched by boiling water. The old people talked about airplanes that sprinkled bad rain. People were kept in the village-camp for months and then the Laotian and Vietnamese airplanes would pass overhead and many of the people would die afterwards. There was no need for guns. My mother, grandmother, and aunts did not know it, but chemical warfare was being used in the killing of the Hmong. It would be years later before U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig would state that poisonous gas had been used in Southeast Asia and the State Department could identify Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan as three places where Soviet-supervised chemical warfare attacks had taken place. The women just became afraid of the water and the grass.

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.