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 Laos, their experiences in several camps are nonetheless utterly dehumanizing. Yang grows up malnourished, living in squalor, and surrounded by sickness and death. Moreover, her parents (Chue and Bee) and grandmother (Youa) suffer the humiliation of losing their freedom and being treated like they’re less than human. In exposing the dire conditions that refugees face, Yang questions the cruelty of a world that punishes people for being stateless, especially when their statelessness is forced upon them by wars and politics that have little to do with their own communities.
Throughout the story, Yang highlights the physical squalor, starvation, sickness, and death in refugee camps to underscore the inhumane conditions in which most refugees are often forced to live. Many camps don’t have toilets, and people are forced to sleep on platforms above their own excrement, surrounded by a “stream of urine and diluted feces.” Yang’s mother, Chue, becomes obsessed with keeping her children clean, and her family suffers deeply from the “stench and humiliation of human waste,” all of which emphasizes that being forced to live in such squalid conditions is utterly inhumane. The refugees subsist on meager, rotten soup rations, which cause widespread malnourishment and sickness. Yang notes that sometimes, soldiers squirt food at refugees out of a hose—much like the way farmers feed animals—highlighting further daily humiliations that refugees must face to access basic human needs like food.
Yang also emphasizes the emotional anguish of being treated as less than human and feeling perpetually caged, underscoring the cruel mental suffering that refugees must endure. When Yang’s parents are herded into a refugee camp, a soldier knocks her father, Bee, down for fun. Bee wonders why the soldier doesn’t see that Bee is “a man too,” showing that he feels dehumanized by the experience. Yang’s parents wake up after their first night of being fenced in at a camp to find the local community staring and pointing at them, emphasizing once more that they’re treated more like animals in a zoo than like human beings. Many of the Hmong refugees also feel trapped in their state of perpetual waiting—they’re unable to go back home, and they’re unable to move forward in their lives until the authorities let them, which feels disheartening and adds to their mental suffering.
Yang stresses throughout the book that the Hmong people are forced into statelessness by international political forces outside their community, showing how war refugees often find themselves stateless through no fault of their own, which makes their poor treatment in refugee camps seem exceptionally cruel. Yang explains that the Hmong people became political targets after American soldiers forced over 30,000 young Hmong men into helping the United States in their war against the Vietnamese. When the Americans left, Laotian and North Vietnamese governments began a genocide against the Hmong for their “support” of the United States military efforts. Both sides in the Vietnam War, thus, targeted the Hmong, who were caught up in a dispute that had nothing to do with their community. Yang implies that it’s ultimately cruel to punish stateless refugees, because such people—like the Hmong—often find themselves stateless for reasons that are beyond their control. Yang thus motivates her readers to understand that refugees are human beings too, and she concludes that they deserve to be treated with more dignity, especially given the suffering they’ve already endured.
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Politics, Refugee Camps, and Inhumanity ThemeTracker
Politics, Refugee Camps, and Inhumanity Quotes in The Latehomecomer
On May 9, 1975 Khaosan Pathet Lao, the newspaper of the Lao People’s Party announced the agenda: “It is necessary to extirpate, down to the root, the Hmong minority.”
My heart hurt more than my body-the flesh can take blows, the heart suffers them. […] The soldier who hit me was an older man. I was like a prisoner. I stood still, and then I walked into the place they would keep me. And I kept thinking: I was a man, too. I had a wife and a child. But it didn't matter because we had no home anymore.
For the adults, the stench and the humiliation of human waste were the worst part of that long week.
I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives; we give ourselves to people who make the earth look more inviting than the sky.
Although my grandma had always looked like an old person to me, in the camp, she never rested like one. She was always busy selling her herbal remedies because health care was bad in the camp and people were scared of Western medicine. Because Grandma was the type of woman who looked like she knew things, and did, people came to her for medicinal remedies frequently. Once they heard about her talent for healing, even the Thai men, the ones who wore guns and kept us in place, came to her, mostly for concoctions to nurse their sexually transmitted diseases. She was the only person whom I knew who could safely venture out of the camp under the supervision of armed guards.
Still, to be a ferocious tiger with a raging heart caught in a cave blocked by boulders was too mean.
Money was like a person I had never known or a wall I had never breached before: it kept me away from my grandma. I saw no way to climb this wall. Sometimes I thought so much about money that I couldn’t sleep. Money was not bills and coins or a check from welfare. In my imagination, it was much more: it was the nightmare that kept love apart in America.
The adults continued having nightmares. They cried out in their sleep. In the mornings, they sat at the table and talked to us about their bad dreams: the war was around them, the land was falling to pieces, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers were coming, the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts. In their dreams, they met people who were no longer alive but who had loved them back in their old lives. There were stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night. My aunts and uncles in California farmed on a small acreage, five or ten, to add to the money they received from welfare. My aunts and uncles in Minnesota, in the summers, did “under the table” work to help make ends meet if they could, like harvesting corn or picking baby cucumbers to make pickles.
