What does it mean to remain faithful to our shyness? When feeling at home in ourselves is different from feeling at home in the world.
Author
Kao Kalia Yang
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong-American teacher, public speaker, and writer. She is the author of the award-winning book The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and The Song Poet, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017. She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Kao Kalia lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her family.
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Going through hardships gives us strength in the places we’d never thought to develop, spaces we didn’t know we’d occupy, room to reach beyond ourselves, toward others who are where we had been.
Kao Kalia Yang shares a memory of the days when her family was new to America, and the ways they found sustenance from the unfamiliar lands around them.
Kao Kalia Yang reflects on how caring for her younger siblings has taught her about "life's possibilities and the different pathways that people can take into the road of tomorrow."
Kao Kalia Yang on miscarriage and the fragility of motherhood and its tremendous strength, how it lives beyond life and death.
“Still, America is the place where we are hoping to cultivate life — even as death visits us in life and in dreams.”
In a plot of grass, behind a bar on Payne, right off Maryland Avenue on the east side of St. Paul there was once a blue house that I loved.
The doctors said they could not change the conditions of her life, that the only thing they could do was change the conditions of her head. No one knew what to do with her heart.
Something dark lurks in the shadows of Kao Kalia Yang's childhood memories. Two spectral encounters, unsettling and unexplained.
A reflection acknowledging that the injustice of suffering can't be wrapped up in a neat bow of closure. Instead, we the author looks to her culture’s understanding of ancestry — in the responsibility we have to the loved ones we’ve lost.
A tender, empathetic, and honest letter to an unknown friend about the anguish of grief — through a story of young love, the loss of a child, and the realization that pain marks an opening to a future where new life can take root.
Our stories hold power no matter the circumstances of our lives. A Hmong-American woman looks on her father's modest life, and her own — through refugee camps in Thailand to their new life in the American Midwest — and reveals lessons from the powerless on our inherent dignity, even through our most vulnerable times.
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