We are proud to present this year’s Fox Cities Reads – The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang.
Yang was born in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand. She moved to St. Paul, Minnesota when she was just 6 years old. To fill her time, especially during the long winters and because she couldn’t afford to attend movies or concerts, Yang would read. While she loved books like the Little House on the Prairie series, Yang recalls asking the librarian for books about people like her.
“She gave me a book about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, but she couldn’t give me a book about Hmong kids,” said Yang. That was one of her first callings to write.
Yang is a natural storyteller having grown up listening to tales in Thailand, where her family painted a world beyond the walls of the refugee camp and told stories of mythical tigers and real ghosts. Yang was a pre-med student at Carleton College before she started writing what would later become her first book, The Latehomecomer.
The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir is the first memoir written by a Hmong-American to be published with national distribution. Driven to tell her family’s story - and the story of the Hmong people - Yang wrote it as a “love letter” to her grandmother. It was her grandmother's spirit that held her family together through their imprisonment in Laos, their harrowing escape across the Mekong River and into a refugee camp in Thailand, their immigration to Minnesota, and their transition to a hard life in America.
Since the publication of her first memoir, Yang has been an avid public speaker on such topics as literacy and education; race, class, and gender; and the refugee and immigrant experiences. She has made a deep impact on the lives of, among others, Hmong readers and American Vietnam War veterans who have come to her readings. With her sister, she co-founded Words Wanted, a company dedicated to helping immigrants in the Twin Cities with writing, translating and business services. Yang lives in St. Paul with her husband and their three children, and her younger sister and brother.
Copies of The Latehomecomer can be found on our first floor. Check your copy out today.
For more information about this year’s selection, please visit the Fox Cities Book Festival website.