The Late Homecomer reviewed by Thomas Maltman

The Late Homecomer by Kao Kalia Yang

Before babies are born they live in the sky where they fly among the clouds. The sky is a happy place and calling babies down to earth is not an easy thing to do. From the sky, babies can see the course of human lives.

This is what Hmong children of my generation are told by our mothers and fathers, by our grandmothers and grandfathers.

They teach us that we have chosen our lives. That the people who we would become we had inside of us from the beginning, and the people whose worlds we share, whose memories we hold strong inside of us, we have always known.

From the sky I would come again.(Yang IX)

How could you not keep reading after such a lyrical beginning? The above passage opens Kao Kalia Yang’s The Late Homecomer, winner of two Minnesota book awards, and a memoir that some instructors across Normandale are using in classes this coming year. In The Late Homecomer, Kao Kalia Yang tells the story of her family’s escape from genocide in Laos following the Vietnam War, first to refugee camps in Thailand, and later to America. Reading it now will prepare you for the author’s visit to campus on February 11, 2010 as part the Midwinter Writing Festival.


This simple focus is part of the genius of The Late Homecomer and what it has to offer any reader. Through the eyes of one they will see a people, a culture, an exodus, the American immigrant experience, which is similar to what other immigrants face and also unique for the Hmong, a people without a homeland or a written language of their own. Used by the American military during the Vietnam War and later abandoned, they were a forgotten people whose beliefs and customs are little known in the United States. Reading this book will also cause students to think about their own families, the journeys that make them who they are. I’ve found in my classes that first generation immigrants are deeply impacted by the Yang family story, and the response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic from all students.


In the memoir’s opening pages we are in the jungle with Kao Kalia Yang’s mother and father, on the run from North Vietnamese soldiers. “They both insist that in a time there was no room for choices, they had chosen each other.” This is the first of many difficult choices the family faces. By choosing Yang’s father, her mother must leave her own family behind and she never sees them again. In a frightening battle that follows, the family is split, the men escaping into the jungles while the women are captured and taken to a prison camp, where Kao Kalia’s oldest sister, Dawb is born. Eventually the family escapes and is reunited, crossing the Mekong River to a relative safety in the Ban Vanai refugee camp in Thailand. This is where Kao Kalia and spends the earliest years of her childhood—unaware of the death and danger that surrounds her. The family moves on to Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp and then to St. Paul where we find out that coming to America is in some ways just the beginning of their troubles.


I don’t want to say much more about the story here. Oh, there are legends and folklore, ghosts and hauntings and cruelties and surprising kindnesses. It’s all told in simple but lovely prose. You pick up this book and you are wrapped up in an experience. The true subject of the memoir, the most fascinating character of all is Kao Kalia Yang’s grandmother, a shaman and the matriarch of her family. As I read it, I thought about my own ancestors. I came to understand the Hmong culture in ways I had not before. It opened up the ways I look at the contemporary American immigrant experience.


All of these things are beautiful to share with fellow readers, as I hope to with my students this coming spring. The Common Book committee is excited to announce that Kao Kalia Yang will be speaking at our campus as part of the Midwinter Writing Festival on February 11, 2010! Your adventure begins if you pick up a copy of this book at the Normandale Store.


Tom Maltman