ABSTRACT
In 1979, Kao Kalia Yang’s family, members of the Hmong minority group, left their native Laos to escape life under the Communist Pathet Lao. They crossed the Mekong River into Thailand and were met by UN workers who eventually placed them at Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, the largest camp for Hmong people. Yang was born in 1980 at Ban Vinai, a place she described as dirty and dusty, where “kids kept secrets and adults stayed inside themselves.”1 Once it was announced sometime in the mid-1980s that the camp would be closed, residents scrambled to make plans to go elsewhere. Among their options were to go to Australia, France, or the United States, where people were offering to take in Hmong refugees. In 1987, Yang and her immediate family members arrived in Minnesota, where an uncle was already living and a family friend who had also been at Ban Vinai was able to sponsor them. Having come without any resources, they settled in a low-income housing unit in St. Paul and relied on welfare. To help support the family, Yang’s father took classes at a technical college to learn how to operate heavy machinery.
