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A review by robyn_m
The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father by Kao Kalia Yang
5.0
When I was six, I befriended classmates that were newly arrived in Minnesota, and originally from Laos. Over the years, I learned bits of their histories, but not much. I was often welcomed into their homes, though, and treated as family. So I was looking forward to reading local author Kao Kalia Yang's memoir of her father, The Song Poet, as our next book club selection.
While Yang's book is the story of her father's / family's experience, I imagine pieces are representative of that of many families. Themes include family, leaving home, repeated loss, feeling otherness, sacrifice. It is a story filled with sorrow, but also strength. It is a story that will stay with me.
(Yang's first book, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, won a Minnesota Book Award. I have not yet read it.)
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Passage from Track 6, page 157:
The problem of education had entered our lives. [...] 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.
While Yang's book is the story of her father's / family's experience, I imagine pieces are representative of that of many families. Themes include family, leaving home, repeated loss, feeling otherness, sacrifice. It is a story filled with sorrow, but also strength. It is a story that will stay with me.
(Yang's first book, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, won a Minnesota Book Award. I have not yet read it.)
- - -
Passage from Track 6, page 157:
The problem of education had entered our lives. [...] 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.