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 and force them into exhausting lives as industrial factory workers. Immigrant children must also grapple with the anxiety of growing up bicultural, the labor of taking care of parents who struggle with language barriers, and the pressure to succeed and live out their parents’ dreams. Yang stresses, in all this, that immigrant life is far from easy. Yang highlights that the immigrant experience is difficult no matter what, but that immigrant parents and immigrant children each face a unique set of challenges: for parents, financial strain and language barriers are most troublesome, while immigrant children tend to struggle with supporting their parents and navigating their bicultural identity.
Although Yang’s parents are profoundly grateful for being able to resettle in the United States, they struggle with poverty and their language barrier, showing that immigrants suffer substantive hardships because they have to adapt in environments for which they are unprepared. In recounting her family’s story, Yang exposes the undue financial hardships that immigrants face when trying to begin their lives anew. Because the Hmong people’s homes and villages were massacred by war, they have nothing to start their new lives with when they arrive in the United States. Moreover, Yang’s family enter the United States saddled with debt: they owe the government thousands of dollars for their flights from a Thai refugee camp to the United States, which takes them years to pay off. Yang thus shows how immigrant families often start out at a gross financial disadvantage, which limits their possibilities and chances of success. Yang also highlights how language barriers limits her family’s options, making it even harder to gain the footing they need to build a new life. Because Yang’s parents (Bee and Chue) struggle with English, it takes years for them to gain basic qualifications like high school equivalency certificates, which they need to find work. At best, their efforts give allow them to work as manual laborers—jobs that are time-consuming, exhausting, and poorly paid. This takes a tremendous toll on them over the years and drives them into poor health, showing how profoundly language barriers can set people back when they try to adapt in a foreign country. Yang’s parents also often feel inadequate and ashamed because of their poor English skills, and they face constant pressure to be exceptionally polite and express gratitude to non-immigrant Americans at all times—even when they face prejudice and hostility. This adds to their emotional burden as they try to establish themselves in the United States.
Yang stresses that immigrant children face heavy burdens in helping their parents cope with the challenges of immigrant life, while trying to find their own bicultural footing at the same time. Immigrant children often have to put in extra time and effort to help their families fit in to a new culture. Yang (Kao) and her sister Dawb have to step in and manage many aspects of daily life for their parents, who struggle with English, highlighting the time-consuming and laborious nature of being a bilingual immigrant child. Kao and Dawb’s cousins also feel tremendous pressure to succeed in school, find careers, and support their families, which adds an emotional burden their childhoods as well. Yang also stresses how difficult it can be for immigrant children attempting to fit in to two cultures at once. Kao develops crippling anxiety from trying to become American while also trying to hold on to her Hmong culture, emphasizing how emotionally taxing it can be for immigrant children to grow up in multiple cultures at once. Yang’s cousins also struggle with meeting the social demands of American childhood (such as socializing with their non-Hmong friends out of their homes) while trying to keep their traditionally minded parents (who would prefer their children to stay at home and socialize within the family unit) happy, which also emphasizes the emotional stress of trying to fit into two cultures at once.
Yang thus highlights the unique challenges that immigrant families face to enjoy everyday things like access to homes, education, family, friends, and careers. Yang ultimately argues that the burdens of language barriers and financial strain (for immigrant parents), as well as navigating family dynamics and bicultural identity (for immigrant children) limit people’s ability to fit in somewhere new.
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The Immigrant Experience Quotes in The Latehomecomer
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.
On October 20, 1980, the St. Paul Dispatch published a story titled “Hostility Grows Toward Hmong.” On June 11, 1987, the headlines read similarly, “Hmong Gardens Vandalized for the Third Time This Spring.” My family arrived in July; we were just beginning. On the streets, sometimes people yelled for us to go home. Next to waves of hello, we received the middle finger.
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.
My parents tried their best at English, but their best was not catching up with Dawb’s and mine. We were picking up the language faster, and so we became the interpreters and translators for our family dealings with American people. In the beginning, we just did it because it was easier and because we did not want to see them struggle over easy things. They were working hard for the more important things in our lives. Later, we realized so many other cousins and friends were doing the same.
A part of me grew protective of the little boy and the unspoken expectations of the man he would have to become.
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.
There was a clear division: the Hmong heart (the part that held the hands of my mom and dad and grandma protectively every time we encountered the outside world, the part that cried because Hmong people didn’t have a home, the part that listened to Hmong songs and fluttered about looking for clean air and crisp mountains in flat St. Paul, the part that quickly and effectively forgot all my school friends in the heat of summer) or the American heart (the part that was lonely for the outside world, that stood by and watched the fluency of other parents with their boys and girls […] The more I thought about it, the sicker I became[.]
Dawb, in her usual hurry to succeed, had enrolled in the post-secondary program at Hamline University: the parking situation was more affordable than the University of Minnesota. We didn’t talk about our dreams of the University. The choice became as simple as easier parking.
