The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

I didn't finish this. Similarly to The Road of Lost Innocence, I recognize that this is a good story. However, it was monotone and even and bereft of personality. If I cannot connect to the speaker as a person and not as words on a page, it is difficult for me to connect with the story. If nothing else, the book introduced me to the Hmong people and their strife during the late 1970s and 1980s in Laos.

I'm bowled over by the beauty of this memoir. Kao Kalia Yang writes the history of her family with such simplicity, but it's a story of hardship and endurance at least as much as a story of family love. These two sentences, from near the end of the book, bring to bear much of the emotional weight of the story: “My grandmother's death (in 2003) was the first natural death in our family since 1975. It was the outcome we had been struggling so long for: a chance to die naturally, of old age, after a full life.” Tales of genocide in Laos and overcrowding in the refugee camp in Thailand to grinding poverty in the United States are stark, but they are told with such love for the people in them, even people the author knew only through the stories heard from others, that they shine.