The Latehomecomer

Yang’s family has been living in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp for a year and five months by the time Yang is born in 1980. Yang’s grandma names her Mai Kao, meaning “the maiden” in Hmong. While most woman in the camp are having multiple children, Yang’s mother only has her and Dawb. Yang’s mother will go on to have six miscarriages after giving birth to Yang—all boys.

Yang’s father tells her that “Before babies are born they live in the sky where they race along with the clouds and can see everything—the beauty of the mountains, the courses of the streams, the dirt of the paths that people take down on earth” (56). In the reality of the Ban Vinai, where babies and young children are dying from sickness and disease (Yang’s older sister barely survives polio), Yang finds this story comforting; it means that babies have power and choose to be born, even though they know how things will end.

The Ban Vinai is a four-hundred-acre valley that houses thirty-five to forty-five thousand Hmong refugees. Without shade, the Ban Vinai is dry, hot, and dusty, with families living cramped together in long, wooden rooms. Unable to grow crops in the scorched soil, most Hmong families are constantly hungry, despite receiving rations of dried fish and rice three times a week.