The Latehomecomer

I am reading The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang. I am about halfway in, and so far I am captivated by this powerful story of a Hmong family's escape from Laos after the American War In Vietnam. It is intense and vividly written: both a loving tribute her family, and a haunting story of the life and death struggle which many Hmong families who made this perilious journey faced.

One moment that illustrated this intensity is early in the book. Ms. Yang's parents had narrowly escaped a North Vietnamese prison camp, and were attempting to flee from Laos to Thailand by crossing the Mekong River. Because her father was the youngest, he had no money to purchase a raft like his brothers. Nonetheless, his own mother refuses her seat on any of her older sons' rafts. She explains her devotion to her family:"He was the youngest, you see. And he was poor and I was his mother, but I was poor too. So we got to the river and I could see it glitter and I could not see how to cross it. Your uncles took their wives and their children on the rafts with them; they all would have made room for me. I could not go with them. Your father had no raft. I was his mother. I chose to die with him" (page 36).

This part made me cry. It made me think about the fierce devotion to family evident in this book. As a member of a big family, and a fairly new mom myself, this is a value with which I can strongly identify. However, the circumstances of this moment are also a window for me into another life and time, and to the horrors that war brings to families.