Kao Kalia Yang: Believe in the Worth of Your Words

Kao Kalia Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to America at the age of six. She is the author of The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, Yang Warriors, and most recently, Where Rivers Part. She also coedited What God Is Honored Here? and is the author of a collective memoir about refugee lives called Somewhere in the Unknown World. Find out more at KaoKaliaYang.com, and follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

Kao Kalia Yang

In this interview, Kao discusses the women-driven experience of publishing her new memoir, Where Rivers Part, her advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Kao Kalia Yang
Literary agent: Anna Stein (CAA)
Book title: Where Rivers Part
Publisher: Atria Books
Release date: March 19, 2024
Genre/category: Creative Nonfiction/Memoir
Previous titles: The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, Somewhere in the Unknown World, What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Native Women and Women of Color
Elevator pitch: Where Rivers Part is a love story between mothers and daughters, a call for peace in a world of upheaval, a Hmong American story of what it means to be a woman, to lose and to love in equal measure the countries we belong to and the people who make home possible.

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What prompted you to write this book?

In early 2018, my mother’s eldest brother’s wife died. My mother called Laos to speak with her brother, to share her condolences. They had last seen each other in the jungles of Laos in 1978. Separated by war, they had lived their lives on different continents, each holding the other close with memories. Eldest Uncle, who I had never met, said to my mother, “If there are words you want to say to me, say it now when I can still hear you.” She couldn’t say anything, instead tears fell. Eldest Uncle said, “I want you to know that you were the blanket that kept my heart warm after our father died.” In the space of my mother’s quiet cries, I knew that like my uncle, if there were words I wanted to say to my mother, words she had to say to the world, now was the time.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The idea that I might one day write a book about my mother was born shortly after I became a published author in 2008, but the impetus came with the death of my eldest aunt in 2018. After her funeral, my older sister and I were able to take our mother and father back to Laos. While in Laos, I was struck with not only the stories that had fled the country with my parents but the ones that had been waiting there. Among them, a truth of my mother’s life: She had left her mother to marry my father in 1976 when she was sixteen years old, and she never saw her mother again; this reality has lived with her in the absence of her mother’s presence.

On that trip to Laos, my mother got to see her mother’s grave mound. The cries that emerged from her were not that of a 60-year-old woman but that of the 16-year-old girl who had left her mother behind. I knew then that I would end the book with that long-awaited and long-feared reunion. I knew then that the stories would have to begin long before America, long before me, in the land of Tswb Muas’s childhood, the legacy of the woman that she came from.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Among the surprises in the publishing of this book, one: This is very much a women-driven publishing journey. My agent Anna Stein is a woman. My editor Lindsay Sagnette is a woman. The assistant editor on the project, Jade Hui, is a woman. My publicist, Holly Rice, is a woman. It is an enterprise that in many ways mirrors my own mother’s journey; the big forces in her life have been women-driven and women-led.

Two: Atria Books is the most commercial press I’ve worked with so far. This is new territory for me. I’m not quite sure what to expect from this point on. Now that the book is written, a cover is ready, and blurbs are beginning to come in, how far can we push the book? The potential to reach readers with this title feels different from my others.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

There were three big surprises to me on the publishing process.

The first: that this book would feel most natural in the first-person. To take on my mother’s voice to tell her story was something that I hadn’t known would or could happen.

The second: I hadn’t expected my mother and father’s marriage to be as strongly marked by the circumstances of their lives before each other, the forces of the war, the pressures of the refugee camp, and a life of poverty. I learned a great deal about marriage that I hadn’t quite known before; how it is a continuous series of new decisions to be together, how the joys and the sorrows come together and shatter the old decisions all the time.

The third: I did not know how I would handle the American years, the factory work, the children, the unchanging sea of poverty of my mother’s life, but then I realized that it was not a craft issue so much as a transparency issue; can I take the risk of having my readers wade through these years with Tswb, travel from one baby to the next, one year to the other? I did and was able to mirror the monotony of working for the clock, around the clock, into the story of her life, the anti-momentum of life as a poor person, as a refugee, in this country.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

My biggest hope is that readers will engage sincerely and deeply with Tswb Muas’s life story and that in the end will get to experience some of her incredible life, and that of so many women all around the world who have lived through war, survived despite the forces trying to kill them, whose lives are hardly ever the focus of a bigger gaze, whose work often go unappreciated and unseen.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Write what you can, to the best of your ability, and believe in the worth of your words—especially when others don’t.

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