Reviewed by Yu-Han Chao

Clint Eastwood’s grunts aside, I was truly glad to see the movie Gran Torino in the theaters because there was finally representation of Hmong characters in entertainment and media. The Hmong minority is very present and culturally unique in many parts of the United States, yet somehow they have managed to remain largely invisible in media and literature. Persecuted all the way from China, Laos, Thailand, until finally settling in various parts of America and Europe, the Hmong do not have a country, and despite their services to Americans (with dire consequences) during Vietnam in what has been appropriately called the Secret War, they are unmentioned in history books.

This appeared to be what spurred Kao Kalia Yang, as a young Hmong woman born in a refugee camp in Thailand, to write her memoir. With unadorned language and realistic dialogue, Yang depicts with haunting detail the terror that her parents lived through in the Laotian jungles escaping from communist soldiers, in the refugee camps in Thailand, and her family’s struggles in the housing projects of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Kao’s language comes across most vivid and terrifying when she describes ghosts from her past. After tripping in front of a woman’s dead body, Kao was haunted by the dead woman every night. The Hmong believed that falling in front of a corpse enabled the deceased to take one’s spirit. “I couldn’t close my eyes because I knew the dead woman was waiting for me in the shadows to call my spirit to the land of the dead” (Yang 108) Although she hoped there were no ghosts in America, Kao and her family saw and heard the ghost of a little American boy who died falling down the attic stairs in their old section eight house.

Interspersed with realism and supernatural events are also Hmong legends about tigers who marry village beauties and disappointed mothers who turn into frogs. One of the most beautiful legends in the book is a simple one with which Yang opens the book—that before babies are born, they live in the clouds and see everything that happens on earth, and when they are born they choose the lives they are born into and the family that will be theirs.

Compared to other excellent books such as Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, it is refreshing to finally hear a young Hmong voice among the few cultural studies and ethnocentric descriptions by outsiders. The Hmong have their own cultural and religious beliefs which span every area of their lives, from traditional clothes, medicine (Yang’s grandmother is a shaman/medicine woman), food, taboos, to ancestor worship.  Yang introduces readers to her private ghosts and the truly heartbreaking past of her people while showing us the strength and resilience of all the characters she depicts, spanning three generations and across three nations.

Yu-Han Chao is Poetry Editor at the Rose & Thorn Journal. Her poetry book, We Grow Old, was published by the Backwaters Press. Visit her writing and artwork at her web site .