March 2017 Cares Committee Bookshelf: The Song Poet
The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, by Kao Kalia Yang. 2016, Metropolitan books. Thank you to UMRA member Linda Lindeke for this review.
Minnesotans can be very proud of local author Kalia Yang, whose exquisite memoirs are being read across the nation as well as abroad. Uniquely, in her own voice as a Hmong refugee, she honors her family and her culture by capturing the richness of her family members' lives, both here in Minnesota and in their homeland.
Kalia Yang's first book, The Latehomecomer, honors her grandmother and tells her family's immigrant story up to 2009. High school and college reading lists as well as many book clubs feature this book. Her much-anticipated second book, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, focuses on her father, Bee Yang, and continues the family narrative that takes place in St. Paul and Andover and back in his Laos homeland. As poetic and revealing as her first book, The Song Poet is a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has been selected by both the Boston Globe and Minneapolis Star Tribune as one of the best books of the year.
Kalia Yang, who has made more than 1,000 presentations since the release of her first book, speaks as eloquently and poetically as she writes. She is a graduate of Johnson High School and Concordia College, St. Paul. Her Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University gave her the foundation for her role as a faculty member, first at North Hennepin Community College and now at Carlton College, where she is a visiting professor of English and American Studies.
The Song Poet vividly describes the Hmong in Laos as experienced by her father, whose difficult life before coming to Minnesota is mirrored by immense Minnesota hardships supporting his family by working as a machinist in a factory that mistreated its Hmong workforce. Kalia and her siblings were not aware that their father carried the history and language of the Hmong people to Minnesota until he was called to the microphone to sing at the Hmong New Year celebration at the St. Paul Civic Center, telling the story of the Hmong people. These songs, capturing Hmong traditions, values and history, are a treasure that Kalia now shares with her readers. She writes beautifully in English, her second language, and conveys dignity and hope within the context of this proud family whose inspiring story deserves to be read and honored.
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