How A Mother's Love Works
Kao Kalia Yang on Lessons From a Refugee Mother
Dear friends, in honor of Mother’s Day, I bring a conversation with Kao Kalia Yang: memoirist, children’s book author, and descendant of shamans. Her new memoir Where Rivers Part is the story of her mother Tswb’s (pronounced “Chew”) life as a Hmong woman and refugee. In the 1970s, the CIA recruited Hmong soldiers for its “secret war” in Laos; when the U.S. left, the reigning government began slaughtering them. Kalia’s parents fled. In Where Rivers Part, Tswb’s astounding story unfolds: her escape, her survival in a Thai refugee camp. Poverty in the U.S. Six children, seven miscarriages. Courage, sickness, return. Kao Kalia Yang is a daughter, a mother, and someone I’m fortunate to call a dear friend. In truth, this book is about love— love that travels across decades and continents, love that lives beyond death.
Jessica Nordell: I want to start with your mother, a young Hmong woman who had to flee her country. Who was she?
Kao Kalia Yang: My mother Tswb was a young girl growing up in the high mountains of Laos. She was the only girl in her village to go to school. She grew up knowing of Long Tieng, the CIA military base, where the warplanes landed.* Her mom would take her to sell fruits from her father's orchard. She had seen nurses and thought, "One day I want to type like them." She had looked into a doorway and seen a nurse typing. There was something beautiful about that. That has always been her dream. Of course that is the dream that I carry—of typing away.
For folks who might not be familiar, can you talk about the CIA and its relationship with Hmong people during Vietnam and the Laotian Civil War?
The CIA started recruiting Hmong soldiers from Laos. There was an understanding: there are people, farmers predominantly, who live in the mountains, who are seen as perhaps second-class citizens by the Laotian government. Let's find leaders in this community. They found General Vang Pao, a son of Hmong farmers who had been trained in the Royal Lao military. He was brilliant and ambitious, and he wanted to have a say in the fate of his people.
They recruited 32,000 Hmong men and boys—7- to 10-year-olds. Google "Hmong boy soldiers." The children were issued socks so they could layer them to wear the combat boots required to do the fighting. My uncle used to tell me when the bombs fell, if you saw shoes flying, then you knew it was a child.
When America left, they left with the highest-ranking military officials and their families. The communist paper of the time published, "It is necessary to extricate down to the root the Hmong minority." We were expected to have died in that jungle.
And just go quietly.
Exactly. My mom and dad's families didn't know what was coming: trucks that carried out men and boys and did not return. The women would find them, in the words of my grandmother, "like fallen fruit on the floor of the jungle." So when they came for my uncles, my father, they chose to flee for a chance at life. My parents were barely teenagers. They ran into the jungles with what they had.
Your mother is 16 when she marries your father, a boy she barely knows. They're escaping through the jungle. And they practice the Hmong marriage ritual in which the spirit of your mother is freed from its ancestral home and welcomed into her husband's.
The Hmong culture is patriarchal. But because of the war, many of the men had died. So when my dad brought my mom home, my grandmother took on a job that would normally be done by the father of the household. She found a chicken, and in a big arc swung it over my mom and dad's heads. She freed my mother from the spiritual home that always held her and opened up the doorway into my father's, so that my mother could enter the family, not just physically but spiritually. Both of my grandmothers were shamans. The body wasn't the only thing that needed to be clean, it was the spirit.
In the Hmong cosmology, it's not just our bodies—our spirits are also having their own experiences?
Our bodies hold various spirits. If something really scares you, Jessica, pieces of your heart, your spirit, will run away. It needs to be called back to your body. That is the job of the shaman, the job of your family. For example, every new year my dad opens our door, burns incense, and calls out into the darkness, "Come in, Kalia, come in Dawb, come in, all of your spirits. You wandered far this year. Come back home."
Amid so much danger, your parents did the most hopeful thing possible, which is to say, "Yes, I'm going to create a future." How do you think they were able to do that?
My mother would say the stupidity of youth. My father would say she was unlike any person he'd ever met before her. My mother would walk even when the bombs were falling. Who does that? He thought, "Maybe if I team up with her, then even if I don't grow that courage, maybe we would have children who would have the courage to walk in an unsteady world."
For my mom, it was because she was young. She thought his teeth were perfect. She said his teeth were so white, they gleamed across the shadows of the jungle.
There were so many times in your mom's story that it could have ended so differently. She came close to death. She came close to taking her own life.
In the refugee camps of Thailand, my mother had six miscarriages. My older sister nearly died.
In the wash of those miscarriages, she decided that she wanted to visit them-- that this life was no longer worth living. She went to the camp market to buy silver cleaning pills. She thought death would be easy, but it became impossibly hard because this old woman refused to sell her the pills. None of the women sold her any. A lone man said he had three left.
She bought those three. One dropped to the ground. She refused to pick it up from the mud. This tells you so much about the woman I belong to! So she only consumed two. A child stumbled upon her and yelled, "A dead body!" My dad was able to take her to the camp clinic in time. She couldn't die even when she wanted to.
Suicide was the number one cause of death in Ban Vinai refugee camp.
By the time your mom is in her forties, she's suffering physically, emotionally. She's fired from her job because of her physical limitations. And she's prescribed antidepressants. It almost sounds like a joke: "Here's the solution." What did she actually need to heal her body and soul?
She needed work she could do, Jessica, work that would allow her to feed her children. She needed the world to recognize that she was not yet useless. The pain was in her heart, in her body, but it was also in the circumstances of their lives. If you can give somebody the space to feel valued, to feel like they're a meaningful part of the world that they now exist in, in many cases we wouldn't need all of those pills that did so much harm, that do so much harm.
Countless people are going through the same things, which is I think why my mother has been so courageous in letting me tell her story. She's not ashamed that she tried to kill herself. She understands there's work her story can do for others who are suffering.
You watched your parents’ marriage so closely. What did you learn about marriage from them?
One partner— sometimes you don't just have a bad day. You have a bad week, a bad month, a bad year. My mom had a bad decade. When my mom was going through all of the medicating, this pile of clothes was just gathering in their bedroom, like a mountain. My father didn't fold them and didn't ask her to fold them. He just waited patiently. Her heart needed to see that pile go up and up.
From my father, I've learned to make room for [my husband] Aaron to go through the things he needs to. I'm eager to jump in immediately, but is this necessary right now? Is this going to be useful for Aaron's journey or is it for me—my own sense of speed, of convenience?
My father gives my mother so much room to feel whatever she needs to feel.
It reminds me of a line by Thich Nhat Hanh. He said it’s important to ask your loved one, "Do you have enough space around your heart?" It sounds like your dad gives your mother a lot of space around her heart.
So much room. When she was going through all the medicating, there were years she would forget names. He would wait patiently for her to retrieve them. My mother prides herself on her memory. He left her room for that pride. He gives her room to be dignified in a life that hasn't afforded her many opportunities.
In your book Somewhere in the Unknown World, you interviewed refugees from many different countries-- Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico. What commonalities did they share?
It was the communal cry for peace. Each of these individuals understood with everything inside them that peace was worth working for. All the adults in my life have survived so much. The thing that they want beyond everything else is peace.
What do you want people to understand about the experience of refugees?
We don't hear very often about refugee women and mothers. My mother's story points to the incredible love within. The bullets didn't kill it, the poverty didn't kill it. She teaches me that love is our most valuable gift. She says, "I want you to know that my pride in you has nothing to do with what you're able to accomplish or what others see as worthwhile. That's not how my love works."
It's so important for children to hear—that love is not conditioned on what they do or achieve.
That's a hard-earned lesson for her. She left her mother at the age of 16. People have judged her for what she does or does not have, what she has or has not accomplished. In every job she's held in America, it was how fast her hands could move along the assembly line or the long aisles of a bank vault. For any refugee woman, so much of your worth is tied to what you can do for the world. And if your body's already done so much, it can't do more, you are now worthless. She never wanted me to think that my worth was tied to what people or institutions think of me.
Do you think that that lesson has affected the choices you've made in your life?
So much. It's allowed me to write these kinds of books. You and I both know as writers, so often we come up against, "What would they think?" and those things censor us.
Compared to love, what is the market? The market becomes very small.
Yes.
It's so easy for us to think of ourselves as the big sun in our own story. Everyone else is a minor planet. But you tell the story from your mom's perspective. You are a minor planet.
It's a first-person perspective. I'll be honest, it was the last perspective I wanted to write this book in. I tried all the others. Finally, I said, just do it. I wanted the reader to know her. I am not Tswb, but I'm as close to Tswb as you're ever going to get.
You came from her!
I came from her. I'm the descendant of shamans. Shamans adventure into worlds beyond to salvage the spirit of the sick and the lost. I don't want to be so presumptuous as to say that the work I'm doing is shamanistic, but there are pieces of my mother's broken heart that I'm collecting for her.
I also notice how little you self-aggrandize. Do you think, perhaps, that when you come from a deep ground of unconditional love, maybe you don't need to manage your image so much, because you're not still looking for approval?
I think that is so true. Someone asked my older sister Dawb, "What is one thing about your sister?" And Dawb said, "She has never been hungry for affirmation. My sister has never wanted a friend, never yearned for recognition."
Can you talk about the role of imagination in telling your mother's story?
There are a lot of things that I've always known. The walls were thin, the houses were small, Jessica. Mom was shocked, I think, by how closely I looked and listened.
To form the imaginative landscape, I did external research, but also trusted my own interests. I said, "Let me describe the banana peels"—peels you burn then put into clean water to boil. They become slippery like soap. You dip your toothbrush in and you brush. It's effective, but if you have bleeding gums, it stings. She's like, "Nobody wants to know. It's kind of gross." <Laughs.> And I'm like, "No, Mom. I think it's fascinating." And she goes, "Well, do what you think. But it's gross."
Your mom uses her iPhone to look for photos of flowers and post them. I almost cried learning that. My grandmother used to collect pictures of roses and ocean waves she would cut from magazines. I wish we did this with technology: post pictures of flowers and ocean waves.
I'm taking my parents to Yellowstone June 15th. She loves the flowers that plume up around the mountains, I think because she came from mountains. She spends years dreaming and searching. I'm trying to help her— in the ways that I know how— be with all of these images. It's lovely and heartbreaking at the same time.
You have a passage about mothers and the sky that sounds like a prayer, or maybe a blessing. Would you read it?
(Listen to Kao Kalia Yang read this excerpt below)
In the chasm between heaven and earth, all the mothers stand, holding the sky above their children. When the load is heavy, their knees bend, their arms shake. The earth trembles with their exertions. They do this so that the children remain protected. Even when the mothers are gone, the force of their love lingers in the light of dawn and dusk, beneath the sprinkles of sun and rain. May it always be so.
I have no idea where this paragraph came from. It is a mother's prayer. It's Tswb Muas's yearning for her own mother, the absence and the presence at the same time. Growing up, I thought my mother's mother was not a part of our lives. Growing older, I'm realizing how present she was through it all. Because my mother had been her mother's, the sky was still intact.
*At 40,000 inhabitants, the "secret city" of Long Tieng was the second largest city in Laos but did not appear on any maps at the time.
This newsletter is free. The End of Bias: A Beginning, my book about how people have measurably reduced bias and become more fair, just, and humane, is now out in paperback.
Now I want to start cutting pictures of flowers and waves out of magazines too.