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jbingb 's review for:
The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir
by Kao Kalia Yang
19: The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang
I read this at the recommendation of a former teaching colleague and fellow lifelong learner and educator, and it is an extremely very well-written and enlightening history of one family's emigration from Laos to refuge in Thailand to Minnesota.
Most compelling and striking throughout this memoir is the fact and idea that "Hmong" describes a people, but these people have no real "place" to call home. There is no single place or geographical location from which the Hmong have come. They are a people united by culture and story, and they have made into "home" wherever they have landed or been taken in and allowed to perpetuate their own culture and ideas. And coming to America was absolutely a struggle.
Yang, however, speaks even of their struggles as opportunities to learn and grow. There is very little complaint at all that I can recall but moreso an overall appreciation for the life they were allowed to build and grow here...and with gratitude to America for allowing them in and supporting them to do so.
Kalia's story of becoming Hmong American, including her rich relationship with her grandmother, who moved here with them but would never be able to pass a citizenship test, so was always "outside" and sort of visiting here from there, is such a worthwhile and beautiful one to read. It creates on behalf of the 90,000+ in America by 1990 a sharing of Hmong history and culture that is likely true of, or somewhat similar for, many and as presented here in the most engaging and endearing way possible. It is impossible not to care about Yang and her family but also to better appreciate the challenge that existed for all in making new lives here as they arrived, a few as early as the mid 1970s and then continually for a couple decades.
And yet it is not only about the Hmong American experience that Yang writes so well. It is about family and honor and how we treat our elders, whether or not we know exactly how they have come to this place in their elderly lives that matters most. I reminisced about my own grandparents and my great fondness for them and sadness at their departure from this plane while reading this beautiful memoir, and I felt reconnected to them, somehow, as well.
I don't think anyone goes astray in making time to read this book. I am certainly pleased to have spent some time with it myself...and am grateful for the recommendation.
I read this at the recommendation of a former teaching colleague and fellow lifelong learner and educator, and it is an extremely very well-written and enlightening history of one family's emigration from Laos to refuge in Thailand to Minnesota.
Most compelling and striking throughout this memoir is the fact and idea that "Hmong" describes a people, but these people have no real "place" to call home. There is no single place or geographical location from which the Hmong have come. They are a people united by culture and story, and they have made into "home" wherever they have landed or been taken in and allowed to perpetuate their own culture and ideas. And coming to America was absolutely a struggle.
Yang, however, speaks even of their struggles as opportunities to learn and grow. There is very little complaint at all that I can recall but moreso an overall appreciation for the life they were allowed to build and grow here...and with gratitude to America for allowing them in and supporting them to do so.
Kalia's story of becoming Hmong American, including her rich relationship with her grandmother, who moved here with them but would never be able to pass a citizenship test, so was always "outside" and sort of visiting here from there, is such a worthwhile and beautiful one to read. It creates on behalf of the 90,000+ in America by 1990 a sharing of Hmong history and culture that is likely true of, or somewhat similar for, many and as presented here in the most engaging and endearing way possible. It is impossible not to care about Yang and her family but also to better appreciate the challenge that existed for all in making new lives here as they arrived, a few as early as the mid 1970s and then continually for a couple decades.
And yet it is not only about the Hmong American experience that Yang writes so well. It is about family and honor and how we treat our elders, whether or not we know exactly how they have come to this place in their elderly lives that matters most. I reminisced about my own grandparents and my great fondness for them and sadness at their departure from this plane while reading this beautiful memoir, and I felt reconnected to them, somehow, as well.
I don't think anyone goes astray in making time to read this book. I am certainly pleased to have spent some time with it myself...and am grateful for the recommendation.