The Latehomecomer Themes

The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir of her family’s lives as Hmong refugees, questions the inhumane experiences that refugees are subjected to in today’s world. Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1980, a few years after her family fled the Hmong genocide in Laos in the wake of the Vietnam War. Although Yang’s family knows that being alive in a Thai refugee camp is better than being dead in…

The Latehomecomer explores Kao Kalia Yang’s family’s experiences as Hmong immigrants in the United States in the 1980s after fleeing genocide in Laos in the wake of the Vietnam War. Despite their profound gratitude for the promise of new opportunities that living in the United States brings, Yang’s family finds that the immigrant experience is bittersweet and fraught with hardships. Yang’s family suffers from poverty and struggles with language barriers, which limit their opportunities…

Author Kao Kalia Yang ruminates on the nature of love in her memoir The Latehomecomer. She notes that fictional stories tend to depict love as intense, short-lived, romantic infatuations, whereas she sees love as the slow-burn labor of a lifetime. Yang begins her story by describing her mother and father’s courtship as Hmong fugitives in the Laotian jungle after the Vietnam War. Their initial attraction to each other is a relatively unimportant component of…

In her memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang explores gender dynamics in Hmong culture. Yang stresses that traditional Hmong communities are patriarchal: women (like Yang’s mother, Chue) live with their husbands’ families, and they face tremendous pressure to bear sons instead of daughters. In earlier generations, Hmong women also had less personal freedom (to choose their own spouses, for example). But Yang shows that, despite their strong patriarchal values, the Hmong community’s strongest…