Lao Voices

leaving is not the same as forgetting…

When does experience end? When does reflection begin? Until a people can reflect on where they’ve come from, they will spend all of time searching for where they are.

This is the Hmong refugee experience, reflected and refracted in the scope of a lyric documentary by Kao Kalia Yang, writer, and John O’Brien, filmmaker. Funded by the MN State Arts Board and sponsored by the Center for Hmong Studies, this work is dedicated to the Hmong people who lived in the camp. Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, like camps the world over, was never meant to last. But in the memories of those who lived there, those who loved there, those who belonged there: the camps will always be.

visit coffee house press for kalia’s new book: The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang
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, but their history remains largely unknown. Driven to share her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir is a tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together.

Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity in Laos, the daring 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. She evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language, and also gives voice to the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community.