Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Latehomecomer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Politics, Refugee Camps, and Inhumanity
The Immigrant Experience
Death, Spirituality, and Home
Love and Family
Gender
Summary
Analysis
Kao’s family has been in the United States for 10 years; Kao is 14, and Dawb just got her driver’s license. They’ve been living in an apartment for some time, and it’s bursting at the seams, so they look for a cheap house to buy. Dawb manages to negotiate the price down to $36,500. It’s old and dilapidated, but they still marvel at owning a home—it feels like a miracle. The homes they owned in Laos are only fragments of memories now, which are disrupted by Hmong movies about Laos, memories of Thailand, and old legends like the story of Yer and the tiger.
The journey to financial independence is often long and arduous for immigrant families: it’s taken 10 long years for Kao’s family to become financially self-reliant. Immigrant children like Dawb often take on extra burdens in managing family affairs (like negotiating a house sale) that are challenging for immigrant parents with language barriers.
Themes
The house is small, but it has a living room, kitchen, den, and two and a half bedrooms. The paint is chipping, and it smells like mold. Chue wanted something better, but Bee, Dawb, and Kao think that it’s a good house. Kao is excited because this house will live in future memories as the family’s first piece of the United States. Bee says that someday they’ll do better, when Dawb and Kao are educated and have good jobs—they’re all waiting for that day to come.
The house is far too small for the family of seven, and the mold indicates that it’s somewhat unsanitary. This underscores how, despite all their hard work, the family still have a low economic status. Bee’s comment reinforces the idea that immigrant children face a lot of pressure to help their families succeed.
Themes
Dawb and Kao attend Harding High School, a multicultural inner-city school with many Hmong students. Kao has figured out a way to do well in school: she does her homework every day and always looks at the teacher in class, so that it looks like she’s paying attention. Kao’s body is changing, and she feels an urge to reinvent herself; high school feels like a time to glimpse into different worlds. This idea doesn’t resonate so well with Chue and Bee.
As Kao enters her teenage years, she begins to feel the pressure of living in two cultures at once. Kao wants to assert her independence, like her American peers—but her Hmong parents feel uncomfortable with this, despite having urged her to try and fit it for years. In this way, Kao’s adolescence is a delicate and taxing balancing act between managing the cultural norms in her school environment and the contrasting cultural norms she must adhere to at home.
Themes
Dawb and Kao dream about going the University of Minnesota and helping not just themselves, but all poor children. Dawb is a natural at school, but Kao struggles more because she’s quiet. But in ninth grade, her literature teacher, Mrs. Gallentin, makes her feel like she’s special. Kao realizes that she understands literature. She has to write an essay on whether Romeo and Juliet were in love or lust, and she writes about the love that she’s seen—of people sticking together through hard times, through war, loss, and hardship. Kao decides that Romeo and Juliet never had the chance to get that far, and that love is hard to capture in literature, because real life is always more complex.
Even after a decade in the United States, Kao still feels shy about speaking English, showing that the language barrier continue to plague her. Meanwhile, the essay about Romeo and Juliet explicitly articulates Yang’s argument about love, which is very different from the blind romantic infatuation that Romeo and Juliet feel. Instead, genuine love grows over time, and it evolves through commitment and mutual support.
Themes
Get the entire The Latehomecomer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mrs. Gallentin tells Kao that the essay is beautiful, and she has a gift for writing. It’s the first time Kao starts to believe what Bee always told her: that education can open up horizons beyond anything she’s ever imagined. Kao is excited to tell Youa about this feeling of possibility, but that summer, in 1996, everything comes crashing down. The welfare program to help Hmong people is shutting down, and Youa doesn’t have American citizenship. The situation reminds them all that the United States is not really their country—they’re still refugees.
Kao is excited to tell Youa about her successful essay for two reasons: first, she loves Youa more than anyone else (emphasizing the importance of familial love). She looks up to Youa and seeks her approval, which suggests that despite Hmong culture’s patriarchal norms, Youa is the true head of the family. Meanwhile, despite working for years to settle in the United States, the family’s residency status is still uncertain—in this way, immigrant life is often precarious and anxiety-ridden.
Themes
Uncle Chue’s family and Youa move to Minnesota when California shuts down their welfare program. They all study to take the exam for American citizenship but fail, so they keep trying. Bee and Chue worry about trying to become American and failing. They have no home to go back to in Thailand or Laos. Meanwhile, Kao learns about the Vietnam War in school, and she notices there is no mention of the Hmong people—it’s as if they don’t exist to American eyes. She burns with a desire to change the world so that the Hmong can belong somewhere without war, loss, and poverty. Bee understands: he tells Kao that patience will bring about change.
Yang continues to underscore the family’s precarious residency status: even though they’ve already established themselves in the United States and they contribute to the economy, they’re still not seen as legitimate citizens. Kao’s school curriculum about the Vietnam War hearkens back to the American intervention in Hmong communities that her family experienced decades ago. This is the very situation that has caused the family’s current hardships and precarious residency status, all of which Yang finds deeply unfair.
Themes
There isn’t enough space for everyone, so Youa bounces around her sons’ homes, sharing people’s beds. Kao grows stressed and angry. She gets stomach cramps and can’t eat, and she feels her chest tighten. Her heart feels divided—as if she has a Hmong heart and an American heart. One night, she starts shaking and feels like she’s dying. She cries out, thinking that she’s having a heart attack, but then it passes. The doctors say that her body is fine, but Kao feels like she’s breaking.
In this passage, it’s implied that Kao is having a panic attack. The pressure of trying to navigate bi-cultural identity is extremely stressful for immigrant youths like Kao, and it can cause lasting mental trauma and anxiety. Meanwhile, the fact that Youa doesn’t have a bed of her own highlights the ongoing financial hardships that immigrant families face.
Themes
Youa grows worried, so she conducts shaman rituals and brews herbal concoctions to ease Kao’s mind. One day, Youa gives Kao a silver charm bracelet with tiny elephants on it to protect her. Kao feels reassured and she starts to eat again. She decides that she can’t change having a divided heart, so she decides to live with it. She decides that the two sides of her heart—the Hmong and the American—can help each other. The bracelet eventually breaks, but Kao keeps it in her purse. Even though she was a war child, she understands for the first time that her body is fallible and that she’ll die one day, but she makes peace with this.
Kao’s anxiety—from trying to be both American and Hmong at the same time—is truly debilitating. As before, her experience shows how immigrant youths face immense psychological hurdles as they’re forced to balance two sets of cultural values—especially if they conflict, like Hmong values (which center on community and family) and American ones (which center on cultivating individual freedom).
Themes
Other Hmong families who work in factories buy small houses in Kao’s neighborhood. They often drive by the mansions that Americans live in. They feel like they don’t belong in big houses, but they’re proud of where they are in their own journeys. Meanwhile, Youa’s hair turns from grey to white. One day, she tells Kao the story of her scariest encounter: it was with a tiger in the jungle in Laos. In the story, Youa was gathering bamboo shoots when the jungle goes eerily quiet. Suddenly, she heard a growl and ran for her life, terrified of being eaten by the tiger—or carried off to be its bride, like in the story of Yer and the tiger.
The economic disparity between immigrant families and non-immigrant families implies that the poverty many immigrants may be inescapable—and that the boundless opportunity that immigrants dream about is unrealistic. It’s unfathomable to the Hmong immigrants that they’ll ever be able to attain the wealth of their non-immigrant neighbors. They continue to straddle an uneasy line between fitting in (by establishing themselves in a neighborhood) and feeling like outsiders (when they compare themselves to non-immigrant Americans).
Themes
Youa ran through the jungle in a panic. A blur of bamboo, dense foliage, and dirt flew all around her. Eventually, she came to a stop, covered in blood and sweat. She realized that her earlobe was gushing blood: it got caught on a branch and as torn in two. When Youa finishes her story, Kao reaches out and holds Youa’s split earlobe together, thinking about how Youa outran a tiger to come to the United States. Another fall passes, and Kao emerges from the old, moldy house as a young woman who wants to be a writer. Inside the house, the mold continues to grow in the pattern of blood and tears.
Here, Yang shifts to focus on Kao and Youa’s relationship. She wants to emphasize how strong their bond is, reinforcing that familial bonds are powerful and important—particularly for immigrants, like Kao and her family, who feel unmoored in their environment. Meanwhile, the mold in the house symbolizes the family’s ongoing hardships, which never quite go away and always linger in the background.
Themes
