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 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

“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 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

“Once we are, we will always be.”
― 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

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

“Emotions are captive to reality”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“My father says that when I write, I write on paper, but when I speak, I write on the fabric of the human being.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“That was when it came to me: I would never see my Grandmother’s face again. If I wanted snatches of her, I had to look to those around me, had to find it within myself. Grandma would not return to us. This is the way of a long life.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“it is funny the things we remember on the days that people we love die.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“She tried to say more things to me, and I tried not to cry, but neither of us could do what we wanted. In all the languages of the earth, in all the richness of words, there is no word, no comparison, no equivalent, for my grandmother trying to be strong for me, her one me naib.”
― 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

“My grandmother was an intelligent woman. She looked at the pieces of her life carefully, got up slowly, and tried to fit the jagged edges together, no matter how crudely, so that her life was never completely empty.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“I could not translate all the things I was discovering at college to my mom and dad, to my home. But I could not help but apply them. This was when I started collecting my grandma’s stories. I began to realize how our lives in America would be our stories. I started to understand one of the many truths that governed life: by documenting our deaths, we were documenting our lives. The Hmong had died too many times, and each time, their deaths had gone unwritten. There were no testimonies. The witnesses grew old, and they died, and life continued, as if they had never lived. I didn’t want this happen to my grandma, to this woman I adored, whom I could not imagine not loving forever. I wanted the world to know how it was to be Hmong long ago, how it was to be Hmong in America, and how it was to die Hmong in America—because I knew our lives would not happen again.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“fifteen years, my family knew this. The camps in Thailand had closed. Hmong people there were repatriated, sometimes without knowledge, back into Laos. Families went missing in the process. Lives were lost. Children were killed. Ours were only beginning to raise their eyes to a country of peace, where guns at least were hidden and death did not occur in the scalding of grass or rains that drizzled death. We could not handle any more death. In wanting to live, we were willing to try becoming Hmong Americans.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

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

“It was fighting that all the Hmong in America had done with the lives that had fallen to the jungle floor, the spirits that had flown high into the clouds again, that had fled life and refused to return—despite all the urgings, the pleas, the crying. But we were refugees in this country, not citizens. It was not our home, only an asylum. All this came crashing down. In American history we learned of the Vietnam War. We read about guerilla warfare and the Vietcong. The Ho Chi Minh Trail and communism and democracy and Americans and Vietnamese. There were no Hmong—as if we hadn’t existed at all in America’s eyes.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

“wrote about the love I felt I knew: 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

“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