The Song Poet Quotes

“On the planes, we leaned our heads back against the tall headrests, closed our eyes to what we had known, and imagined futures for our children - not for ourselves, because we knew that we were too old to start anew and filled with too much sorrow, too many regrets.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“I've not heard the world the way you do for a long time now.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Your trust in me then and now scares and reassures me.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“I missed my people in a way that I had never missed. I missed Laos. I missed my fatherless youth. It wasn’t only my father, or my mother; it was Laos that had orphaned me in my journey. Separated by decades of time, the leaves of my heart have yearned for a return. Laos was ravaged by war and its aftermath as I had been by life. I knew the old villages would be gone. I believed the majestic mountains would stand. Through the years there had been moments when I believed I would return to Laos only on the wings of death. In death, I would meet again the land that had given me life. I stood on the dark balcony, feeling the flow of liquid fall down my cheek. I felt the roughness of my hands on my weathered face.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“I listened to the melodious rise and fall of my language. With the poetry around me, it was easy to believe—as my father had done when his songs had come easily—that the entire world was a garden of meaning.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“My grandma’s parting took two and a half months. I think about that time often, but only through the haze of my own missing, my yearning to hold on. I could see it through my father’s eyes. I could not feel it through his heart. I did not want to because it would force me to reckon not only with my grandmother’s mortality but my father’s and my own. Perhaps, like me, my father had tried to put off my grandma’s demise by not reckoning with it. My father would not give words to her leaving and yet Grandma left.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“A Communist soldier told my family that a big truck would come for the men in the morning. The trucks had been picking up men and boys from their village for months. Those who had gone on the trucks had not returned. The soldiers said that they were sent to reeducation camps, but the family knew better. All over the mountain villages, people could smell the strong stench of rotten flesh coming from the jungle. Women and girls followed the smell in search of the men they loved. Sometimes the bodies were in a pile. Other times the bodies would be in different spots. Close to my father’s village, Grandma and my uncles had found the body of a young boy inches away from his father. He had left finger tracks on the ground where he had been pulled away from his father. He was sliced at the throat. The father had been shot. Most of the time, the bodies were remnants, half eaten by wild animals. What remained was bloated and blue, flesh ballooning from stained, torn clothes. The Hmong of Phou Bia mountain knew that the coming of the trucks meant death. My father’s family knew that they had to leave their village before the soldiers arrived with their guns on the big trucks.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“He said, “I want you to have a life that is better than mine. I don’t want you to become a machinist like me. I don’t want you to live your life with men and boys far stupider than you telling you that you don’t belong here, that you are no good for this country, telling you to return to a country you do not have. I want you to have a better life than me. I want you to be better than me.” Xue looked at our father. Xue said, “What if you are the best man I know how to be?” Our father shook his head. He didn’t want to accept Xue’s words. For the first time in his life, he heard the words of a son to his father. He knew what it was like to yearn for a father, to raise a son and burn to make him better than you, and Xue had tried to keep him safe in his fantasies of fathers and sons, but Xue could no longer save our father from himself. Our father said, “You cannot be me and survive in this country.” Xue said, “Then I cannot survive in this country.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“All we had was Xue, who was bullied at school, who had struggled to fight for himself. But we had told him to stop fighting, and so he had done as we had asked. Xue was now hiding from the world. We had become a part of the world that he was hiding from.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Sometimes our father asked us questions: “Do you have any ideas on what might help Xue survive in this country?” We could not offer good answers. We could not stop the white boys at school from hurting Xue or change the rules and protocol of the school district to take bullying and racism into account; we could not undo a system that was as old as this country we were told to call home. It all felt much too late. The newspaper articles about the culture of fear and the suicide epidemic that would break the silence of the Anoka-Hennepin School District hadn’t yet been written. It was only 2003. It wasn’t until 2012 that Dawb and I read Rolling Stone magazine’s piece about the bullying that was killing kids in Andover and other cities in Anoka County and shared it with our mother and father.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“The jagged cracks on the walls looked like the bottoms of Grandma’s feet, filled with dirt from long ago.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“The tall remains of summer grass poked out of the snow in the abandoned yards, a standing reminder of seasons past. The world had grown dull and heavy with cold, sharp ridges of frozen ice. We harbored hopes of spring, but latent with winter, we shivered through one cold day at a time, closer to each other to keep warm.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Outside, the heavy snow came. At first the snow was white and it made the crumbling neighborhood we lived in nice and clean. Even the dying, diseased trees looked dressed up in the white spread across their peeling limbs. The line of lilac bushes between our house and the abandoned house next door became a magical entry into another world. We made tunnels in the snow. It was great for the first month or so”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Neither Dawb nor I could talk about the loneliness that grew inside us with every new idea we loved, every new place in the world we wanted to visit, every drink we thirsted for, every dish we yearned to taste beyond our home. We were supposed to become doctors and lawyers and everyone would celebrate at the end; we didn’t know that we would have to become those things alone.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“No one had told us that education could change the way you felt about the world and the people in it, that it could give you words to use, and actions to take, not in support of those who love you but as a response to them, that education in America would make our father and mother less educated in our eyes.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“With each Hmong family we visited, a relative or a neighbor, we were reminded of how unpredictable life can be, how harsh it can be.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“It was May of 1975 when the Americans left Laos and the Communist Party took over the government. All teachers’ salaries were suspended. Genocide was declared against the Hmong for helping the Americans. I lost hold of my pens as I took up a gun to protect my family.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“If we garden so we can have food in the seasons to come, why are we in school? To garner the lessons for the long years ahead. I couldn’t say that out loud. I gripped my pencil so hard that first day, my fingers ached into the night.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“I have not been the father my children have wanted or needed me to be. I have been, at my best and at my worst, only the father I imagined for myself.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Sometimes they told me that the lottery system is a ruse to win money from the poor and the hopeful. They were not willing to see that poor and hopeful is exactly what their father was.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Each of us is aware that the glittering particles in the air of the factory are dangerous. The whirling fans that spread the shine do not help our odds. We are confined by the knowledge: every job kills you eventually. Some jobs kill you with a single carefully weighted bullet, while others kill you slowly by floating the pieces and particles of metal over time.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“She has never been the type of woman to invest time in the kind of battle that my coworkers wage against each other using food from home. She says the search for leverage in the world using Tupperware containers is futile and pathetic.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“of the factory are dangerous. The whirling fans that spread the shine do not help our odds. We are confined by the knowledge: every job kills you eventually. Some jobs kill you with a single carefully weighted bullet, while others kill you slowly by floating the pieces and particles of metal over time.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Mealtime is the moment in our work shifts when we get to bring pieces of our homes to work. Through the food we bring, we show how well we are treated by our wives and children and how much we are loved.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“I know that the price for the future is the present, and I am much weaker than they believe me to be: as I was in Thailand before the men with guns, I am in America before the men in suits.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“the price for the future is the present,”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“The moment I exit our front door and enter the paved streets, my deep voice loses its volume and its strength. When I speak English, I become like a leaf in the wind. I cannot control the direction my words will fly in the ear of the other person. I try to soften my landing in the language by leaving pauses between each word. I wrestle with my accent until it is a line of breath in the tightness of my throat. I greet people. I ask for directions. I say thank you. I say goodbye. I only speak English at work when it is necessary. I don’t like the weakness of my voice in English, but what I struggle with most is the weakness of my words.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“Hmong women are renowned around the world for their embroidery, but not many people know how many backs have been bent permanently for the beauty and the bounty of a story told in cloth. In the camp, Hmong women sat on low wooden stools close to the ground. The ones with babies held their babies in the spread of their sarong skirts between their widespread knees. The women sat with curved necks and narrowed eyes. They settled in groups of three or four in the early morning, worked through the hot afternoon, until the light dissipated from the sky and the cries of the night crickets sounded. Each woman held a needle between her thumb and her forefinger and she picked at the white fabric strewn across her lap with her needle and her thread, telling the stories of her people, drawing the animals of her past, envisioning the way life could be again—if we could return the bullets to the guns, suck out the craters from the earth, stop the bombs from falling in the sky and the planes from flying overhead, and if we could stop time and tragedy from happening to the Hmong. The long pieces of thread, bright pink, neon green, and deep blue, rested in crumpled plastic bags by their sides. Without looking up, the women swatted at the black flies that came close to their children every few minutes. Occasionally, one stopped to heave a sigh in the midday heat, to stretch the tight muscles of her neck. When mothers got up at the day’s end, we heard the cracking of weary backs. When they reached out to the older children for steadiness, the young boys and girls stood still and grew as solid as they knew how so that their mothers could blink away the blur in their gazes, gain stability with their help.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“But it was not until I was a grown man with children of my own that I could speak of my endless yearning for a father. Day by day, I stored my loneliness and the constant missing deep inside of me. To appease the hungry heart inside, I started gathering the beauty of flowers that blossomed from people’s lips in the presence of those they loved and adored. I used to run away to repeat the words to myself whenever the yearning grew unbearable.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“My brothers say that I was born at the beginning of 1958, in the midst of the Laotian Civil War. In the bigger cities of Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Vientiane there were battles and debates between members of the Royal Lao Government and coalition groups of Communist revolutionaries. On the world stage, Laos had become a faraway place for the superpowers of the Cold War to test their might against each other. But on the high mountains of Phou Bia, in the province of Xieng Khuoang, in the village of Phou Khao where I was born, the Hmong continued the life we knew.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father