The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father
A song poet is a person who sings the stories of the Hmong people, a vocal tapestry of sorts of the family line, telling of successes and failures and any other details that should be a part of the family history. This allows that no one should ever forget the past. Kao Kalia Yang tells not only her own story as the daughter of a Hmong refugee, but that of her father, Bee Yang, born in 1958 during the Laotian Civil War. Nineteen years later, he and his family were hiding in the jungles of Thailand, foraging for food. It was not until 1987 that Bee was able to fly his family to America to live as refugees from America’s Secret War in Laos.
Yang illustrates here the importance of oral tradition, and the way stories are passed down through the generations. It is important to recognize that no one is here without those that came before us, and Yang shows that by focusing primarily on her father’s story, which also allows her to tell her own. Though a work of nonfiction, her story is rich and her prose is lyrical. At first it takes a while to get used to the fact that Yang is not telling her own story and that the first-person narration is meant to be that of her father. It is not easy to be confronted with the harsh truths of our families, and it is easy to forget the sacrifices made by those before us to make our own lives a little better.
