After having gone through extensive research and time reading editorial reviews to book summaries, I decided that the book: The : A Family Memoir would be the one I would dive into first. I wanted to select an appealing book so I could relate to the story. I realized that this particular book aided me to understand how the old way of life was back in Laos and Thailand. I now have a better understanding of the sacrifices the Hmong took and all the things they left behind for coming to the Americas.
Actually, my parents were of the first generation.
In discovering that someone wrote a book about their struggles and challenges during the war as well as the survival up in the high mountains of Xieng Khuong I was ecstatic. Reading chapter to chapter, I was engrossed to learn of the author, Kao Kalia Yang’s journey from Laos to the Americas. Although Kao Kalia came to the Americas in the 1980s, my parents and older siblings lived through the similar pain and suffering she endured.
During Kao Kalia’s childhood life, she explained that “the mountains were their home and they new them well. My parents explained to me that while you may know your way around in the mountains, survival was extremely hard because there was not a whole lot of food. The men hunted out in the jungle for meat. They feared for stumbling across a tiger and dreaded to be a tiger’s meal for the evening.
In the book, Kao Kalia’s grandmother could relate to this as she ran to get away from the tiger that left her with a scar. The hardest part surviving the mountains was for nursing mothers who had to keep their bodies filled with good nutrients to produce enough breast milk for their crying babies.
Often times, the breast milk was not enough, or infected due to mothers being sick as described in the book. The only alternative mothers could do was substitute breast milk with a sip of sweetened condensed milk. This substitution would make the babies stop crying. My mother told me that my brothers were mostly fed with sweetened condensed milk because she was incapable to produce enough breast milk for the hungry boys. Kao Kalia explained in the book that during their mission to cross the Mekong River her older sister, Dawb was given sweetened condensed milk because of her ill other who was unable to produce breast milk. As many Hmong can contest, the Mekong River is a treacherous river. When my parents, my siblings and my grandparent decided to cross the risky Mekong River, they too used pieces of long bamboo to float across from Laos to Thailand as described in the book. My mother described to me that the part they crossed on the Mekong River was roughly one mile long, which was longer than Kao Kalia’s family experienced. The Mekong River was monstrous and was not forgiving at all for those that try to cross its body of water.
My mother said that hundreds, if not thousands of Hmong died on that river due to drowning and I believe her. One time, my father told me his brother died trying to come to the America, but not because he was gunned down by Laotian soldiers. It was an attempt to cross this wild river to find a better life for his family. My father did not blame his brother for making the effort to cross the monstrous river, knowing he could not swim. To date, the Hmong have neither land nor a country after scarifying for so long in hiding.
With that said, the first generation folks continue to believe that one day, we will have our own country. When I read that Kao Kalia’s grandmother hoped to go back to Laos one day, it made me think about my father’s dream for having to go back one day, too. With the late General Vang Pao who brought us to the Americas and led us to a better place to live more serenely, the first generation folks like my father, hope that we will regain a piece of land that will be ours. It may not be now, or ten years from now, but hopefully one day the Hmong will have a country.
Most importantly, we can lead the dead to trace their footsteps back to their ancestors if we have our own country. So today, we continue to live in the Americas and appreciate that we no longer need to run away from fear. Also, we need to remind our second and third generations to value what they have in life. We need to continue telling our children the story tale of Yer and the Tiger up in the high mountains of Laos so that they too would remember where they came from and who their ancestors were.
We need to remind our children and our children’s children that we fought across this treacherous Mekong River even though life on the other side of the world was an unknown to us. I believe that Kao Kalia’s grandmother wanted her grandchildren to remember all the stories she told even the part about the burial of her late husband up in the mountains. On occasion, my father mentions that one day he would return to Laos to fix my grandfather’s tombstone up in the high mountains, too.
I have enjoyed reading this book that I finished it in three days. I wished they taught this in high school because I felt so emotionally attached to Kao Kalia’s life long journey to America. I felt like I was right next to her even though I had never been to Laos or Thailand. This book is so compelling and captures a well thought out history of our existence in the Americas today. What I enjoyed the most was Kao Kalia Yang as a profound writer with ambition to keep history alive.
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