By Kao Kalia Yang THE LATEHOMECOMER

The Latehomecomer is memoir written by Kao Kalia Yang in She tells of her family’s immigration to America from a war-stricken Laos/Vietnam area, how they are forced to move to America as refugees as a result of the Secret War of Laos. We follow a young Kao, her older sister Dawb, her mother, father and grandmother on their plight to becoming Americans.

Memoir: a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation. An autobiography focuses on the chronology of the writer’s entire life while a memoir covers one specific aspect of the writer’s life.

Latehomecomer: Kao Kalia Yang: “The word is German and used to described the Jews who had returned late from the internment camps, back to homes that were no longer so. I saw the relevance of it to my work immediately. My grandmother, would be the last one to return to her long-ago home. Her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters had all died long before. She would be The Latehomecomer. The Hmong have been searching for a home for a long time, since we left China, then the mountains of Laos and the camps of Thailand, for the planes to America and the rest of the world. If my citizenship papers are true, if indeed I am now a naturalized American, if my brothers and sisters, born in America, then perhaps, at long last, we are home.”

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the story of her family’s captivity, the rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language.

Vietnam War ( ) The US gave the Hmong people equipment to fight the Vietcong for us. This is what is called a proxy war, when one country provides money and the other fights for them American troops withdrew out of Laos, leaving no one to protect the Hmong people who helped them in the war. The North Vietnamese (Vietcong) soon start to come to eliminate all Hmong people, and Yang’s parents escape to Thailand where it is said that Americans have set up camps to keep Hmong people safe. ‘The Americans gave us weapons and told us to shoot the enemy,’ says Chor Her, waving a battered CIA-issued M79 in the air. ‘Then they left us and we’ve been slowly dying here ever since…When the Lao Army kills one of our men, they feel as though they’ve killed an American in revenge for us helping them during the war.’

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