The Latehomecomer

The Latehomecomer, a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, was published in 2008. It won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. Yang was born in Thailand’s Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in 1980 and immigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota when she was six years old. She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University and co-founder of Words Wanted, an organization committed to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. Yang's other well-known works include The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father (2016) and Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir (2020).

In The Latehomecomer (2008), Yang explores what it means to be Hmong woman living in America through remembering her time in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp and compiling the stories of her family. Throughout the memoir, Yang chronicles the lives of her family as they move from place to place, displaced by the aftermath of war, and traces her own movement from the refugee camp to America. While her family members' lives are often marked by starvation, violence, and poverty, their familial bonds give them hope to keep going. Yang’s parents move to America so that their children could have a better life and, once there, work night shifts to pay for school supplies and clothing. Yang and her sister, acutely aware of their parents' sacrifices, strive to do their best in school. 

Yang was also motivated to write this memoir to commemorate her Hmong heritage. Because the Hmong don’t have a traditional written language, history was collected and preserved through oral tradition. However, that history is in jeopardy because of Hmong displacement, and Yang is afraid that the lives of her family members and their history will be lost. This feeling is amplified by the fact that in America, she doesn’t see Hmong stories in the history books. Her memoir documents the history of her family in order to share the Hmong story with the world. While Yang chronicles her family’s journey from place to place, she intertwines these stories with Hmong myths, which serve as metaphors for the Hmong experience.