Kao Kalia Yang, American Hmong writer, on book about her storytelling father
Author whose early life was spent in a Thai refugee camp devoted second book, The Song Poet, to her father, a keeper of Hmong history. ‘His is the voice I hear when I think of my home,’ she says
When Kao Kalia Yang was just a tiny girl, her father used to put her on his shoulders and walk around their neighbourhood in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, where she was born. As they walked, he talked.
“My father pointed out the world to me,” she said. “He told me stories about creatures – like tigers – that could not enter the camp, drew landscapes I had never known.”
After many years, the Yangs moved to the US and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. The family grew. No longer a farmer, Yang’s father now had an overnight job in a factory, a job that damaged his health and ground him down. But he continued to tell her stories.
“His is the voice I hear when I think of my home,” Yang said recently over a cup of steamed vanilla milk in a St. Paul coffee shop. So when she decided to focus her second book on him, those stories were already a part of her.
The Song Poet, to be published in May, is a memoir of her father’s life. It comes eight years after publication of her first book, the hugely popular The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, a top seller for Coffee House Press and the only book ever to win two Minnesota Book Awards.