The Latehomecomer: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

In 1999, Kao graduates from high school. Dawb has ended up at Hamline University, because the parking is cheaper than at the University of Minnesota. Kao hears about the prestigious Carleton College and applies, not expecting anything. To her surprise, she gets in. When her family drop her off at the dorms, she feels an aching sadness, but she eventually gets used to it. She learns many things, and her life becomes punctuated by visits home. Eventually, Kao starts collecting Youa’s stories; she realizes that documenting Hmong lives is important because their stories have gone unwritten. Kao wants the world to know what it was like to be Hmong in the past and what it’s like to be a Hmong American in the 20th century. 

Kao grows more and more attentive to Youa on her trips home. Youa likes to keep her hands busy: she often sits by the window and mends clothes or cuts plastic bags into strips and weave ropes. She thinks that ropes are always important for tying things together. Her feet are wide, leathery and cracked, their crevices caked with years of dust from Laos, Thailand, and the United States. Kao likes to sit with Youa’s feet in her lap and clip Youa’s toenails while Youa tells stories—it’s become a ritual for them.

Youa tells a story about the time when her older sister fell under a nearby witch’s curse and died. In the story, Youa’s sister was a magnificent beauty who visited a neighboring village for a festival. The young girls played catch coquettishly with Hmong boys. The witch, who was jealous of Youa’s sister’s beauty, brewed a liquid made of bitter tears and threw it at Youa’s sister. She went pale and died that night. Kao asks lots of questions, trying to figure out the times and places Youa remembers and asking if the Hmong people really knew witches.

Youa tells another story about an old woman in her village who turned into a tiger. In the story, Youa was a little girl, living in her village of 20 or so homes, in a safe and peaceful time. The children in the village peered through the split bamboo walls of a strange, lonely old woman’s home in her village. Youa saw the old woman jumping from to stool and curling her hands like tiger paws—she was practicing to go into the jungle. One day, the old lady disappeared. Youa really believes that the old woman turned into a tiger.

There are also things that Youa doesn’t tell Kao—like how Youa’s parents and siblings died. Kao wonders if their deaths are too painful to think about. Youa’s parents and elder siblings all died by the time she was 13 years old, so Youa had to take over the family—including a newborn baby sibling—at a young age. She chewed rice into a liquid and fed it to the newborn, the way parent birds feed their chicks. Kao asks Youa if she ever went hungry as an orphan, and Youa replies that a person doesn’t think about hunger if they’ve never known what being full feels like.

Youa tells Kao about her marriage: in this story, Youa was still young and looking after the newborn and her younger siblings. Youa’s cousin agreed to marry Youa off to an old widower who was addicted to opium but wanted a strong young woman to bear him sons, as he had no children. Youa cried and cried when she found out about the match—the whole village heard her crying, but it was no use. She knew that if her parents were alive, they would not make her marry the old man.

Eventually, Youa grew to love her husband, even though he was 52 and she was only 20 when they get married. He was wealthy compared to other people in the village: he had a full stable of horses and pigs, and he was incredibly generous. He always shared whatever he owns with others, especially orphans, and he was also a shaman. Youa tended their home while her husband performed rituals around the village. Youa thinks that she learned the beauty of kindness from him.

Youa and her husband were married for 30 years before he died. She still misses that period in her life, when she could lean on him. Youa’s sister was not so lucky: she married a Hmong man who lived on the border of Vietnam and Laos, and they disappeared in the thick of the Vietnam War. Youa wanted to have many sons and build a large, stable family—she had 10 children altogether, though her first child died as an infant. 

Youa recalls the day her baby daughter died at one month old. Youa’s older children looked after the sleep baby while Youa went to weed the garden. Suddenly, she heard the children screaming and returned to find a blue pig where her baby should be. Youa believed that evil spirits took her baby away. She cuddled the blue pig and tried to bring it back to life, but it died in her arms.

Youa made a vow that none of her children would die in her arms again; she was afraid of death and goodbyes. That’s probably why she became an herbal healer. Youa’s husband became a shaman when he got very sick one day. The villagers believed that the spirits were calling him, and they sedated him with opium over and over again. A famous shaman explained that Youa’s husband was being called by the spirits to become a shaman; when Youa’s husband agreed to become one, his illness disappeared. Later, the same thing happened to Youa, and she became a shaman too.

Youa tried to keep her family safe with her shaman skills, but she couldn’t keep old age away from her husband. When Youa’s husband was on his deathbed, he kissed his two youngest sons goodbye and closes his eyes. His body looked restful after death took hold. Youa started pulling her hair out from grief. Her husband died before the turmoil of war takes hold. Youa struggled to support the family after this, but she never let her children go hungry.

Kao is sitting by the window in the afternoon sun, holding Youa’s feet in her lap as Youa tells these stories about her life in Laos. Kao doesn’t know Laos at all, but she cherishes the stories. She pictures Laos vividly, imagining lush green foliage, beautiful hills, buzzing insects, and golden sunshine. Kao imagines Youa’s smiling face as she wandered through this landscape as a child; she imagines herself holding Youa’s hand, wandering with her, and seeing a tiger. Kao wonders if tigers linger in the jungle, waiting for the Hmong to return.

In retrospect, Kao thinks about Youa’s death: Youa was the only person in Kao’s family who died of natural causes. It’s what everybody in the family has been struggling for, through the war years and the refugee camps: the chance to grow old, die peacefully after living a full life, and return to the clouds.