“Fiona McCrae, Anderson Center board member and publisher/CEO of Graywolf Press, said in a prepared release: ‘Kao Kalia Yang is a cultural force — a writer with an expansive vision and a fierce heart. In her books for adults as well as for children she explores and celebrates her Hmong heritage with a rare and compelling compassion. Her words have moved thousands in Minnesota and around the world …Through Yang’s work, many thousands of Americans of all ages now have a better understanding of the experiences and culture of Hmong people. Yet part of what makes Yang’s work so powerful is that while the experiences she describes are specific to her family and to her people, they also reflect universal themes.’” — Mary Ann Grossman, Pioneer Press, 2022
“Kao Kalia Yang has been called the foremost chronicler of Hmong life in the United States, and though this isn’t wrong, it’s the kind of tempered acclaim with which immigrant authors are especially familiar. Let’s retire the qualified praise. Her immensely powerful new book confirms Yang as one of America’s sharpest nonfiction writers.” — Kevin Canfield, Minnesota Star Tribune, 2024
“Kao Kalia Yang’s narration of her book “The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father” ought not to work. As she tells the story of her father, Hmong song-poet Bee Yang, and his life in Laos during the Vietnam War, the oppression and killing fields that followed, his tenuous existence as a refugee in Thailand, and his sacrifices as an immigrant to the United States, Yang breaks all the rules. She narrates in a simple, declarative style, seemingly artless and with a largely unvarying pitch and cadence. There is no acting, no emoting, no verbal pyrotechnics whatsoever; simply line after line of experiences, memories and impressions about her father, Hmong life and culture, and the quiet struggles of immigrants riding on gently swelling tides of restrained emotion. Yet this is easily one of the most moving and eloquent audiobooks you will ever experience, and the perfect illustration of a truth that even veteran narrators struggle to grasp: less is often more, and the listener’s emotional journey must take precedence over the narrator’s.” — David Wright, The Seattle Times, 2019
“Enter Kao Kalia Yang, among the most lyrical and eloquent memoirists of her generation.” — Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, The Christian Century, 2017
“Where Rivers Part confirms Kao Kalia Yang’s position as not only the most important figure in Hmong American literature but one of the most interesting memoirists at work today.” — Ann Fadiman
“A“collective refugee memoir” that serves as an object lesson in the utility of creative nonfiction. In the prologue, Yang describes wanting to write this book years ago but feeling like she was not yet ready as a writer. Whether she was correct in her self-assessment then, she’s certainly up to the job now. This is a work of technical as well as empathetic mastery. The narrative consists of a series of stories of refugees who have ended up in Minnesota, Yang’s home state. (The author is a Hmong refugee who was born in a Thai refugee camp after her parents fled Laos.) Her subjects’ origins are global but cluster primarily in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The stories are as powerful as they are unique, and Yang makes the wise decision to get out of the way and let her subjects express themselves. For example, Awo talks about her weekly calls home to Somalia: ‘Every Saturday, in those conversations, they become a full family: a mother, a father, and their children, voices celebrating their gratitude for each other’s safety and small successes. Each is reminded of the immense love in their lives, a love that survives unimaginable distance.’ Throughout, the author’s straight-ahead, declarative sentences can’t conceal that her presence is all over this book. Her immersively descriptive language is reminiscent of her two previous memoirs, The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet, and her delicate touch allows us to see what is right in front of us: luck. If we are not refugees, we might have been. If our lives have been relatively stable, they may not remain so. ‘The people in this book are people going through this storm with us all on this very night,’ she writes near the end. She is addressing her own children, but she is speaking to the rest of us as well. A potent lesson in empathy that is all the more powerful for never presenting itself as a lesson.” — Kirkus Review of Somewhere in the Unknown World, 2020
