The Latehomecomer Quotes

“Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might each have an easier one apart; love is the reason why you choose a life with someone, and you don't turn back although your heart cries sometimes and your children see you cry and you wish out loud that things were easier. Love is getting up each day and fighting the same fight only to sleep that night in the same bed beside the same person because long ago, when you were younger and you did not see so clearly, you had chosen them.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Patience is the road to wisdom.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“I learned that what made our parents sad was not so much the hardness of the life they had to lead in America, or the hardness of the lives they had led to get to America, but the hardness of OUR lives in America. It was always about the children.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“I told her we will not become the birds or the bees. We will become Hmong, and we will build a strong home that we will never leave and can always return to. We will not be lost and looking our whole lives through.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Emotions are captive to reality”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Time had been something we feared, but with the babies the things that held time together - the years, the months, the weeks, the days - melted and flowed toward the future.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Once we are, we will always be.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“I wanted to bubble over the top and douse the confusing fire that burned in my belly. Or else I wanted to turn the stove off. I wanted to sit cool on the burners of life, lid on, and steady.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Hmong tradition dictated that only a son could find the guides who would lead the spirits of his mother or father to the land of the ancestors.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“My parents knew that I was not speaking much at school, but they both knew that I was learning English. They had seen me write letters to Grandma in California. They had noticed when I laughed at the funny parts of Tom & Jerry. But the thing that gave me away most was my anger. Whenever I got angry, I spoke in English, unless I was angry at them, in which case I would want them to know everything I was saying, so I would try my best at being angry in Hmong: “Dawb is a lazy bum, and you never ask her to do anything. You always ask me because I do it. I make it too easy for you! You are being unfair! You are parents, and you are not doing your job well!” I”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“When the Americans left Laos in 1975, they took the most influential, the biggest believers and fighters for democracy with them, and they left my family and thousands of others behind to wait for a fight that would end for so many in death. A third of the Hmong died in the war with the Americans. Another third were slaughtered in its aftermath. From”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“In English, his voice lost its strength. The steadiness was gone; it was quiet and hesitant. Did all Hmong people lose the strength of their voices in English? I hoped not.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“He was young, and it didn’t matter that he already had a wife and two girls—the lonely women in the camp were still willing to become his second wife. Only”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“My parents tried their best at English, but their best was not catching up with Dawb’s and mine. We were picking up the language faster, and so we became the interpreters and translators for our family dealings with American people. In the beginning, we just did it because it was easier and because we did not want to see them struggle over easy things. They were working hard for the more important things in our lives. Later, we realized so many other cousins and friends were doing the same. I”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“The adults continued having nightmares. They cried out in their sleep. In the mornings, they sat at the table and talked to us about their bad dreams: the war was around them, the land was falling to pieces, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers were coming, the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts. In their dreams, they met people who were no longer alive but who had loved them back in their old lives. There were stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night. My aunts and uncles in California farmed on a small acreage, five or ten, to add to the money they received from welfare. My aunts and uncles in Minnesota, in the summers, did “under the table” work to help make ends meet if they could, like harvesting corn or picking baby cucumbers to make pickles. And the adults kept saying: how lucky we are to be in America. I wasn’t convinced.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Lasting change cannot be forced, only inspired”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“My Uncle Eng once told me that the purpose of a story is to serve as a stop sign on the road of life; its purpose is to make audiences pause, look at both sides, check the trajectory of the horizon.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“The Thai teachers in Phanat Nikhom tried to teach them to be very polite in a new country with a new language—they could not be who they were, they had to be what they were taught.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“My mother said the trip to America was only a day and a night. She kept saying that it was hard to believe that we had crossed an ocean, that we were really making our way to the other side of the world. Personally, I was disappointed by the speed of a plane that could not possibly fly as fast as birds, as babies in the sky. In the hours of sitting and then falling asleep and then sitting again, I could only think: how easy it was to impress adults.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“We were in America at last. The world was dark, but the lights on the high poles showed the way. The cars had lights too, red and white ones that blinked in front and back. The world was big and I was small and there were lights everywhere, and for the first time since we left Ban Vinai Refugee Camp and lived the six months that had felt like years in Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to America, the dark was no longer full of the dead woman waiting for my soul. That night, I believed that if I followed the lights, I would never get lost in America, just as my mother and father had believed in the lights of Thailand, just as that night in the Mekong River would live forever inside of them—the night we got to America would live forever inside of me. The wind and the night and the lights. I had the feeling that my family had arrived at a place that was more perfect than we knew how to imagine. America was before me, my mother and father were close by me, and the world was open.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“The basement belonged to no one. It was dark and empty. Sometimes I stood in the open doorway, looking down the shadows that cloaked the stairs, feeling the cold air seeping up and into the pores of my skin, shivering before the darkness, challenging and shirking away from its unhesitating reach. Each time I stood at the top of the stairwell and looked down, I wondered: why were rooms made to hold darkness in America when lights could be shined on everything? It was as if our time in Thailand—the way we had lived and played and waited—had not been a part of the world.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Money was not bills and coins or a check from welfare. In my imagination, it was much more: it was the nightmare that kept love apart in America.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Emotions are captive to facts.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“From the moment we arrived, I knew that my family had survived a great war to bring me to this country. I understood that the conditions in Thailand and the camps were hard for those who knew more than I did. But for me, the hardness in life began in America. We are so lucky to be in this country, the adults all said. Watching them struggle belied this fact. We are so fortunate to be young, new lives opening before us, they believed. And yet the life in school that opened before me made me feel old in a world that was struggling to be young. A silence grew inside of me because I couldn’t say that it was sometimes sad to be Hmong, even in America.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“My mother wanted Dawb to write that she would try her very best to work to feed her children. Dawb said that “to try” is not enough on a resume in America. Dawb would put instead that my mother would do great work to feed her children. My mother was scared of this line, but Dawb said it sounded much more confident. “Mommy, on television the only people who get jobs are the ones who say they are going to do great things, not those who try.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“There was no room to complain in our home about work. It was the only way we could have a life in America. It wasn’t just us. It was what all the Hmong people were doing.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Why does love in a war always mean choosing?”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“The more people there were in a life, the faster it goes. Life was a fleeting thing.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“Grandma believed that the only way to keep a family together was to have many sons, many people, so that there were many different points holding on. It was easy to tear apart two hands, no matter how strongly they held, but if they had many hands, coming from all different directions, the grip would always hold, at some point, no matter what tried to sever the bond. At the very least, a tearing apart would take longer. She believed that a big family could buy time.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir