Transcriber: Heather Morgan Reviewer: David DeRuwe
The impossible happens in the life of a refugee every day.
My name is Kao Kalia Yang,
and I'm a writer.
In the late nineteen-fifties
when the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America
went to the high mountains of Laos
to commission 32,000 Hmong men and boys to fight and to die on America's behalf,
because the war was unpopular here,
they believed that we would all die.
The CIA's biggest covert operation would always remain that:
a secret.
A third of the Hmong died in the war with the Americans.
Another third was slaughtered at the genocide of its aftermath.
When the Americans left Laos behind because the war was unpopular here,
the protests were getting uncontrollable.
Khaosan Pathet Lao, the leading communist paper,
announced the agenda:
"It is necessary to extirpate down to the root of the Hmong minority."
My family and thousands of others waited for peace,
when big trucks came.
They came for the men and the boys to become re-educated.
The women and the girls waited.
When the men and the boys did not return,
they went looking, and they found them on the jungle floor, like fallen fruit.
When the trucks came for my father’s and mother’s families,
they fled into the jungles of Laos.
The impossible happens in the life of a refugee every single day.
My mother was 16,
out with her mother gathering cassava.
My father was 19,
out with his brother chasing the call of wild birds.
They met.
He noticed the young woman with beads in her hair.
She thought that his teeth were absolutely perfect,
a brilliant white in contrast to the dirt on his skin,
the dirt on his feet.
Because long ago, his flip-flops had melted away.
Surrounded by death, and carnage and destruction,
two young people decided
that it was the right time to begin a life filled with love.
The impossible happens in the life of a refugee every single day.
In 1979, my mother and father made it with my one-month-old older sister,
starving survivors, across the Mekong river to Thailand,
to Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.
Thailand was practicing a humane deterrence policy.
They were only giving Hmong people food three days out of the week.
We couldn't leave the camp.
When men and boys left, they came back bleeding,
sometimes they never came back at all.
When women and girls left to look for food,
if they did come back,
their hair covered their faces, and blood seeped in between their legs.
I was born December of 1980.
I was born the runt of all of the babies born in the camp that year.
According to the documents, more babies are born per capita
in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp than any other place in the nation.
We, the Hmong, were making up for lost numbers.
And with my bird bones,
everybody thought I would die.
Suicide was the number one cause of death.
All of my life, I heard the cries of the dead:
"Why are you dying here in this place that does not want you?"
"Why are you dying here?"
"Get up, get up, so we can go home."
I would ask all the adults in my life where home was.
For my grandmother, it was the story of Laos,
on the other side of the river.
For my father, it was an imagined future in America,
where one day his little girl, he said, could become an educated person,
whatever that meant.
My father used to take me to the tops of the trees
because we could not leave the four hundred acres.
He used to hold me in his hands and tell me,
"The size of your hand and your feet,
these things will not determine your life journey, Me Naib."
My father would say, "Look, look at the horizon.
One day your little feet will walk on the horizons your father has never seen."
My father looked at me, and he told me,
"You're not a child of poverty; you're not a child of despair.
You’re hope being born - the captain to a more beautiful future."
A future that I did not know how to envision,
but words that I wanted to live in, and live in forever.
The impossible happens in the life of a refugee every day.
July 27, 1987,
my family arrived in America,
in Minnesota,
in the "Great Heartland."
They take me to register me for school, and all I can say is A, B, and C.
And this lady in a red ranger sweater that I’ll never forget
looks down at me, and she says, "Say your ABCs."
And I look up, and say "A, B, and C."
(Laughter)
She shakes her head. She says, "Say your ABCs."
I look up at her, and I say again everything I know, "A, B, and C."
Didn't do well.
They placed me in the first grade anyway.
A year and a half after we came,
Dawb won the Northern Elementary School Spelling Bee -
Dawb, my older sister, a year and nine months older than me.
And our father, our father told us
what generations of immigrants and refugees have told their children,
"To survive in America, we need doctors and lawyers.
Doctors protect our bodies,
lawyers protect the rights that we never had enough of."
So because Dawb won the elementary school spelling bee,
we decided that she was the one that was good with words.
So she would become the lawyer.
Which meant that by default, maybe I could become a doctor.
The impossible happens every single day in the life of a refugee.
I'm studying to be a doctor at Carleton College.
I'm studying American studies and cross-cultural studies
and women and gender studies, and I’m on the pre-med track.
It’s my senior year, and I start dreaming about the day
my grandmother will be there with me to receive my bachelor’s.
She’d always said to me,
"Me Naib, education is the garden that you cultivate in America.
One day we will reap the harvest together."
December, I go visit her before returning for my last term.
My grandmother has fallen down, in Brooklyn Center in Minnesota.
I tell her "Get up, Grandma."
She looks at me,
and she says, "Grandma can’t get up."
My grandma said that all of her paperwork said that she was only 93 years old.
She was already over 100.
My grandma told me
that while there is no Hmong land in the map of a bigger world,
she was going to climb this Hmong mountain in her heart.
She was going to swing open the door to the house of her youth.
Dinner would be ready.
Everybody who loved her would be there.
Because there were people who had loved her before me.
Before me, she had a mother and a father,
my grandfather, her most precious baby girl.
And they would all be waiting.
And they would look, and they would say, "Why are you so late in coming home?"
My grandmother said it would be selfish of me
to cry for her to stay.
It’s time for her to go.
The impossible happens everyday in the life of a refugee.
After my grandmother died, I wanted to write her one, final love letter.
Because all of our lives in America
we couldn’t afford the long-distance phone calls
between Minnesota and California
before grandma moved to live here with us.
And so, when they went through her thirteen suitcases,
because my grandma never had a room of her own,
they found a thirteenth suitcase
full of just letters, postcards,
all the things that I had written my grandmother.
And although my grandmother did not know how to read or how to write,
I pressed hard on those pages,
knowing that she would feel my love bleeding through.
I was going to write my last love letter to my grandmother,
I was on page 37.
My father walked into my room, and he said,
"Me Naib, what are you doing?"
And I tell him what I’m doing.
I’m writing the last love letter to my grandma
to tell her all of the things I would never forget about her.
She, who had never been to school.
She, who didn’t know how to read or write.
My father looked at me, and he said,
"If you dream in the right direction, the dreamer never wakes up,
the dream never dies.
It always only grows bigger, Me Naib."
And the dream was born.
The impossible happens every day in the life of a refugee.
In this country, it is harder to survive as an artist
than it is to become a professional athlete.
But after my grandma died, on the day that we buried her,
a new journey opened up for me.
I told my mother and father that I wanted to write my grandma’s story.
Because wouldn’t it be great if I could say to the world
that you did not have to be a man or a woman of letters
to have lived the lessons worth learning from.
My father and mother looked at me.
My mother was not surprised,
I’ve always loved stories.
It was the gift that they’d given me in all of those years we had so little.
My father looked at me, and I thought he would be so disappointed and so sad.
But he said, "If the sky that I live under can fall on me,
if the earth that I walk on can throw me off,
who would I be to stand in your way?"
On the day that my grandmother died,
I found out that I’d been accepted to Columbia University.
one of the fine Ivy Leagues in this country.
Children like me from the camps,
children like me from the housing projects of St. Paul,
from the falling-down houses on the east side -
we do not dream of such institutions.
The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
said that they would pay for half of my tuition,
and give me a living stipend.
Columbia University granted me their Dean’s Fellowship.
The impossible happens every day in the life of a refugee.
As a seven-year-old girl, I stopped talking in English.
My beautiful, my brave mother and I went to Kmart
because the lights started flickering, because we were looking for light bulbs.
My mother who had walked, her chin parallel to the ground,
when all those bombs were raining on Laos,
because Laos is the most heavily-bombed nation in the world,
because my mother and father lived
in the most heavily bombed province of Laos.
But my mother had walked, her chin parallel to the ground.
My mother, who had six miscarriages
after I was born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.
Because every time I looked at her, she gave me the food in her hands.
Every time I looked at her, she gave me the food in her mouth.
Six little boys, big enough so the adults could see they were little boys,
but not big enough to come to a life with us.
My brave mother went up to the clerk and she said,
"I’m looking for the thing that makes the world shiny."
My mother has a thick accent.
The clerk starts tapping on the desk.
My mother struggles, but she struggles, she pushes out the words.
The clerk walks away,
and my mother and I wait for her to return.
We look, and there is a round clock on the wall,
and it ticks away the minutes.
Fifteen minutes pass. No one came back.
And my mother, my brave, my beautiful mother,
bowed down her head.
And I decide that if the world that we live in
does not need to hear my mother and father,
then surely it does not need to hear me either.
All of my St. Paul public school files will say I’m a selective mute.
But the impossible happens every single day in the life of a refugee.
Here I am.
When the CIA came to the high mountains of Laos,
they could not have imagined
a writer like me emerging, of all of the places,
from Minnesota.
Here I am.
Here we are.
Minnesota,
home to more refugees per capita than any other state in the nation,
in a world teeming with refugees.
(Applause)
If you want to know what to believe in:
Believe in the power of love.
Believe in the power of the impossible.
Because here we are together.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)