Where Rivers Part Quotes

“I promised my mother that while the war had taken so much, it couldn’t take away my memories of having been born hers, my memories of the house we shared in the village where two rivers met, that place where the scent of the citrus trees are strong and its flowers carpet the earth where my father rests.
I told my mother that the love she gave me in sixteen years was enough to last a lifetime without her, that the river of her love, despite the partings we have endured, has flowed through the darkest of nights and the brightest of days.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“It has taken me forty-two years to realize that mothers will wait for their children, no matter how long it takes.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“In the tradition of my family, the graves are set in mounds. In the village of Dej Tshuam, the graves were piled with river rocks, but in 52, there is no supply of river rocks, so my mother’s grave is covered by a mound of concrete. There is a little door at the end of the burial mound. It faces the east, in the direction of the rising sun. The door is for the spirit of the deceased, so that they may wander free, see the approach of day each morning.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“What I was, what I had become, was a woman trying to turn the tides of luck in favor of her children. All along the way, I was not sure how to find good luck for myself because I came from women who others feared and labeled, so I had clung blindly to the idea of love, a love that might have the power to not only sustain but offer comfort in an unjust world.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“What was there to document? How I wish for a record of my life, something to show that I had indeed lived and that I had tried my best not only to build myself but my children up to something that mattered, people the world might see and care for.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“They were no longer young like when my mother had died. They had lived through their own grandmother’s death. They knew how the death of our loved ones shook us until the pieces of who we were fell around us, how if there was no one to pick up those pieces, they can be lost forever.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“how all of us were alive and part of different countries now and how we belonged to the world, even if the world didn’t know who we were.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“Time is the only thing that none of us gets, no matter the need.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“to survive in a world without my mother, I had to become some other version of myself. Instead of looking to her in the world of the living, I had to find her in myself.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“What if that was the magic for all mothers?—the simple survival of her children. Watching the journeys they take and believing that life was possible despite what you have seen and what you have experienced.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“What if that was the magic for all mothers?—the simple survival of her children.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“These children, born in America, talk to us of the systemic racism of America, and somehow, they feel like it is their job to be able to deal with it on their own, that the weight of their experiences will crush our vision of this new country.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I fashioned a woman out of the process of my grief. I”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“cried until my tear ducts looked like wounds.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“thought to myself, this is my adult life, a life so full and yet so empty at the same time.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“had left the house of my feelings a long time ago when I left my mother for marriage.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I know what it is like to dream—and now you, Zuabli, are the keeper of many dreams, your father’s and mine, but most importantly your own. These dreams are riches that money cannot buy, a way of waking up the heart when it is weary, calling on the spirit when the body is weak.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“wanted my children to know my mother. I didn’t know how to impart her but through my own mothering, my own decisions as a parent.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“In raising this child, I will learn something fundamental about motherhood, that our children will make decisions across the trajectories of their lives and that sometimes these decisions will take them far from us.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I think about how little I knew, thinking that I could just be one kind of mother, not realizing that to each child I needed to be a different version of myself.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“Even in the camp, some of the old practices from village life survived. If I pass by a stranger’s open door and they are gathered around the dining table, inevitably, they would invite me to join the meal. Of course, a refusal is customary, but the older people practice a tenacious insistence. They would set down their spoons and come to the doorway, compelling me inside to a bite of rice and a sip of broth. They would say, “There’s not much to eat, but all our hearts will get fuller if we sit together awhile.” If someone died, no one waited for an invitation to visit. We would all go and gather close to speak of our communal grief and lament the loss as a Hmong family. If there was heavy work to be done, such as butchering an animal, or tedious work such as washing baskets of mustard greens, or complicated work such as helping to move a family from one segment of the camp to the other, then everyone close by would lend a hand. In a difficult moment, we would all help carry the sorrow, the weight of work, and the sadness. These are beautiful things about my people.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“Old words, this time from my mother, come back to me: “It takes some men lifetimes before they learn how to cry.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I have no shoes on. I feel the prick of the sticks on the ground, the pebbles hard against the sensitive soles of my feet. I walk as a traveler might in the land of the dead on the backs of the spiky caterpillars.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I had married a poor man. He has been marked by poverty in ways I had not. He does not talk of the things we might one day do together, the places we might visit, the houses we might live in. He is a man who has been trained to live for one day hoping for the next. He is not used to the idea of dreams, the logistics of planning a future. In our talk and in our life, the only thing he has offered is the one thing he has, himself. In this way, in this strange and peculiar way, Npis was free in a way that I knew many men were not. He was not chasing a position in the world, running toward notions of education or class or power. He does not know how to pretend to be anything but what he is: a poor man standing by the side of a dusty path, waiting for his thin wife to feed his fragile child.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“Npis was used to pretending he didn’t want the things other people had. I was not like him. My yearning showed all over my face, my figure, invisible hands reaching for my heart’s desires.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“Mothering, I learned on the banks of the Mekong River, was a gift given and accepted.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“They said that there were refugee camps set up by a group of powerful countries. We would be subjected to their decisions, these foreign nations, though this fact did not feel like new information. Hadn’t we been all along? Even in Laos, we were at the mercy of the countries who had sent planes across our skies, dropped rice and bombs for our people to eat and to die.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I was going to love him so much more, so much better. In those months apart, I learned a desperate truth, that I missed him even more than I missed my own mother. But as life would have it, as life would teach me, and perhaps Npis, too, we could only love each other the same. We were young, we were already at our full capacity, only neither of us knew it, so we kept thinking that there was more goodness, more tenderness, more sweetness to love, something waiting around the corner, a truth that would come out, and somehow all our mistakes, our decisions, our indecisions, the blind trust, the emotions that singed us, all of it would finally be justified.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“No one had ever told me that I had been nursing a raging storm inside and that the pressure would build until nothing less than my blood spilling would ease it. No one had told me that inside me there were threads of skin, muscle, and fat, and that I was a thing sewn together by the pulsing heat of life, and for me to produce it, I had to come undone. For all the babies I had seen, for all the women I had known, right up until I delivered my first child, I did not know how much bringing life into the world necessitated me placing my own on the line.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life

“I wanted to be, even with all these examples, the kind of mother my mother had been to me. I wanted to be well put together like her, to offer my children a quiet pride in the way I cared for myself. I wanted to be the kind of mother a child would always remember as a fountain of love and care.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life