The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

In this chapter, Kalia returns to the first-person; she no longer speaks as her father, Bee. Here, Kalia talks about growing up in the United States as a Hmong child. Her father emphasized the importance of education, especially for Kalia and her older sister, Dawb. He wanted Dawb to be a lawyer, and Kalia to be a doctor.

Kalia and Dawb listen to the stories of their uncles, who tell them about what education meant back in their village. Their Uncle Chue, for example, attended the first school in their village. Already a grown man, Chue began as a kindergarten student, absorbing everything the teacher said. The teacher told them “to memorize the Laotian script, practice writing it, practice reading it, and then to learn how to write numbers and do simple mathematics” (141). Eventually, Chue became a teacher himself, but when the Communists took over in 1975, “[a]ll teachers’ salaries were suspended” and he “lost hold of [his] pens as [he] took up a gun to protect [his] family” (143).

Similarly, their Uncle Hue reveals his encounter with education. Unlike his older brother, he was lucky to go to school as a child. In fact, he was accepted at the “American university in Vientiane, the capital of Laos” through excellent test scores.