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
Ban Vinai Refugee Camp is a dirty place. Whenever Kao runs around with the other children—just like children do everywhere—and then blew her nose, it was always full of black dirt. Kao was born after Chue and Bee had been in the camp for a year and five months, in December, when the Hmong would normally feast to celebrate the New Year. There was no feast, and the family had nothing except some donated clothes—but Kao was a symbol of hope for them. When she’s older, Bee tells her that she fell from the clouds that year. That image makes Kao feel powerful.
Clouds represent the opposite of life in refugee camps, which are portrayed as filthy places where people go hungry, suffer from diseases, and feel captive. The clouds, in contrast, are connected to the vastness of the sky, as well as the spiritual realm that the Hmong people hold in such high esteem. In this way, they represent abundance, freedom to roam, happiness, and empowerment. By contrast, Yang highlights how the refugee experience is profoundly shaped by a feeling of powerlessness: refugees are forced to wait for years in squalid conditions without knowing when they’ll be free. Kao imagines herself freely choosing to fall from the clouds, and her vision of that freedom makes her feel empowered in a way that life as a refugee cannot.
Themes
Youa delivers Kao and names her. Kao is a happy baby, and she smiles and giggles as she’s passed around the laps of her family. In her earliest picture, she’s smiling and plump, though she has no diaper. Kao gets sick when she’s a baby, but the nurses at the refugee camp give her an injection, and she gets better. Even though the camp is dirty, Chue meticulously bathes Kao and Dawb twice a day to keep them clean.
The support of family bonds helps people weather difficult times in the refugee camp. Kao draws a lot of support from being surrounded by a loving family, which further contributes to the idea that true love is more familial than romantic. Despite these happy memories, Kao’s childhood as a refugee is also marred by sickness and filth—Chue’s obsession with bathing her children indicates that she’s developed anxiety (and perhaps even obsessive behaviors) around cleanliness, which speaks to the mental toll of living in filth.
Themes
When Dawb is two, she gets polio. Youa prays to the spirits, offering them a chicken, and Dawb survives—though one of her legs goes limp forever. After Dawb recovers, she stops listening to her parents and often acts out. Kao is calmer and happier. From 1980 to 1987, about 40,000 people live in the camp together, just waiting. Like the other children, Kao dreams about having a pink doll, a bicycle to show that she’s not poor, and a boiled egg to eat (instead of the usual rice and fish). They get rations of moldy-smelling rice and dried fish three times a week. Kao craves sweets, but ration days are still good days.
Dawb’s continued struggles with illness show the lifelong damage that victims of war and persecution often experience—and her physical struggles seem to affect her emotional development as well. The refugees must live on meager rations, and children in the camp dream about food, which underscores how malnourished everyone is; this is almost certainly a factor in Dawb’s poor health. The experience of perpetually waiting for rations is also deeply disempowering and dehumanizing.
Themes
Sometimes, the older kids in the camp climb trees to eat fruits that make them sick—they know that they’ll get in trouble for, but they do it anyway. Other kids find a coin in the floor and buy rotten fish noodle soup. They pee on their hands to hide the fish smell, so that they won’t get in trouble. Twenty years later, when Kao closes her eyes, she remembers the camp in vivid detail. It’s dismantled now, and she wonders what happened to the unmarked graves of those who died in there. She imagines their spirits blowing through the grass. When Kao smells grass and water, she always remembers the camp. It was the last place her whole extended family were together.
The refugee children’s obsession with food further underscores how hungry they are most of the time. Even though one might assume that being sent to a refugee camp would mean that people are protected and cared for, this clearly isn’t the case for Yang’s family and the other thousands of people in Ban Vinai. The way Yang frames her memories of those who died in the camp also speaks to the Hmong people’s belief that their spirits will be unable to unite with their ancestors (who are buried in their homeland), and that this means they’ll be doomed to wander alone (or blow through the grass) wherever they die. In this way, life in exile—away from their homeland—causes the Hmong people spiritual anxiety as well as practical hardships in day-to-day life. Yang’s happiest memories always center on times when her family is together, showing that her notion of love centers on family bonds.
Themes
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Kao vividly remembers being six years old in the camp. She knew even then that there were places she wasn’t allowed to go, and she remembers children sneaking outside the camp to forage for food and being beaten by Thai soldiers when they were caught. Kao remembers the sound of her grandmother’s flip-flops on the floor; the feeling of cement by well she bathed around; the heat and the dirt; and most of all, the adults’ cries as they buried their dead. Whenever Kao heard crying, she’d run into her mother’s lap to feel safe.
Even though Kao is very young, she knows that she’s not free, as she grows up feeling like she’s caged in. She and the other refugees were treated cruelly by the soldiers and were forced to live in dirty conditions and stifling heat, all of which contribute to the Hmong people’s disempowerment and dehumanization. Yang’s memories of adults mourning also paints the camp as a place filled with death and grief, which compounds the demoralization that comes with being a refugee.
Themes
Kao remembers the illness and disease—she could only drink water after Youa and Chue boiled it. As a kid, Kao feels like the camp is surrounded by magical walls that let others pass through but keep the Hmong inside. She grows quiet when adults talk of beatings, rapes, and death, or when they long for Laos. She’s not tall enough to go to the camp’s school yet, and time passes slowly while Dawb is in school. Other children tease Dawb and call her a cripple, but she never stops wanting to run and play. Life is hard in the camp, especially for the adults—but to Kao, it’s home.
The refugee camps are physically taxing places marked by poor sanitation, disease, brutal violence, and death. Furthermore, the feeling of being fenced in makes the refugees (the adults in particular) suffer emotionally and feel demoralized. Yang mentions all of these hardships to question why refugees are treated with such inhumanity, particularly given that they’re victims of war.
Themes
Kao thinks warmly about playing with her cousins and running into Youa’s arms. The children play games, pretending that soldiers are shooting them, and then they sing songs, playfully urging each other to get up to run away. Youa likes Thailand—the family is poor and there’s no work, but they’re together, and the war is in the past. Youa refuses to let her sons register to leave the camp for faraway places like Australia and France. The Thai soldiers even let her leave the camp sometimes to perform rituals for their families—these outings are like grand adventures.
Kao’s relationship with Youa forms the overarching love story in the book, which reinforces the idea that Yang thinks familial love is far more powerful than romantic love. Youa’s hesitance to allow her sons to separate also emphasizes the importance of family bonds in the story. Youa continues showing her adaptability and resilience—even in a refugee camp, she finds a way to earn a living and support her family, showing that she’s a true leader. The men in her family, meanwhile, feel disempowered by their lack of freedom and inability to move forward with their lives. Yang subtly suggests that women like Youa are actually stronger than men in Hmong culture, despite the fact that it’s structured in a patriarchal way (meaning that the men are traditionally more powerful or more respected).
Themes
Youa is always busy gathering plants and selling her remedies. Kao loses her baby weight, becoming thin and skinny, and she has trouble urinating. Chue and Bee worry about Kao, so Youa takes Kao on a shamanistic walk with ritual items in the misty dawn to cure her. Kao walks behind Youa, avoiding the streams of excrement and urine in the camp, trying to pee.
Youa continues adapting and thriving, emphasizing her resilience and leadership. Meanwhile, Kao’s childhood as a refugee is saturated with memories of filth, excrement, malnutrition, and illness. The camp is squalid and nearly unlivable, which begs the question of why victims of a genocidal war—like Kao and her family—aren’t given better living conditions.
Themes
Kao hears traditional Hmong stories about life outside the camp, and they let her travel in her mind to places she can’t go. In one story, a beautiful girl named Yer goes to the jungle surrounding her village and a magical tiger kidnaps her. The tiger keeps Yer in a cave and feeds her; he won’t let the other tigers to bring her food. One day, a handsome young man goes looking for Yer, and she’s the most beautiful Hmong girl he’s ever seen, though her eyes are full of fear.
Kao relies on stories to experience a sense of freedom, which she’s denied from as she lives behind fences and walls. The story of Yer and the tiger metaphorically represents Kao’s feeling that she lives as a captive (like Yer does), and it implies that it’s cruel and unnatural to keep human beings fenced in—especially when they’re victims, not aggressors.
Themes
The young man doesn’t know that Yer is pregnant with the tiger’s babies. He blocks up the cave to trap the tiger, and he takes Yer home to be his wife, where she gives birth to three tiger babies. One day, the young man kills Yer’s baby tigers and cooks them. When Yer realizes what the young man has done, she cries and cries. Kao feels bad for the tiger in the story—it makes her sad to think of it trapped in a cave, so she imagines the tiger being strong and living forever. There are no tigers or jungles in the refugee camp; Kao’s memories of the camp feel like a contained life with the people she loves.
The story of Yer and the tiger juxtaposes romantic union (between Yer and the young man) and family bonds (between Yer and her children). As before, Yang suggests that the family bond is more important. As a child, meanwhile, she empathizes with the tiger because she feels trapped in the refugee camp. Even her happiest memories are shrouded in a feeling of being held prisoner, exposing the mental angst that life in captivity causes—even for children who have never known anything else.
Themes
