20 Quotes by Kao Kalia Yang

Patience is the road to wisdom.

Hmong tradition dictated that only a son could find the guides who would lead the spirits of his mother or father to the land of the ancestors.

I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.

On the planes, we leaned our heads back against the tall headrests, closed our eyes to what we had known, and imagined futures for our children – not for ourselves, because we knew that we were too old to start anew and filled with too much sorrow, too many regrets.

When the Americans left Laos in 1975, they took the most influential, the biggest believers and fighters for democracy with them, and they left my family and thousands of others behind to wait for a fight that would end for so many in death. A third of the Hmong died in the war with the Americans. Another third were slaughtered in its aftermath. From.

I learned that what made our parents sad was not so much the hardness of the life they had to lead in America, or the hardness of the lives they had led to get to America, but the hardness of OUR lives in America. It was always about the children.

My parents tried their best at English, but their best was not catching up with Dawb’s and mine. We were picking up the language faster, and so we became the interpreters and translators for our family dealings with American people. In the beginning, we just did it because it was easier and because we did not want to see them struggle over easy things. They were working hard for the more important things in our lives. Later, we realized so many other cousins and friends were doing the same. I.

Emotions are captive to reality.

Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might each have an easier one apart.