Best Quotes from The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang with Page Numbers

The world that they were living in could no longer hold them safe.

For the families who surrendered to the soldiers, there were death and reeducation camps, syringes of hot liquid inserted into trembling veins.

They were young. They did not know of each other. They each dreamt of a life that could not have included one another.

A small moment in passing. If the sun had hidden behind a cloud, if the sound of wild game had come from a different direction, then perhaps I would still be flying among the clouds.

She was well loved. Her brothers told her stories late into the night about beautiful Hmong girls who ventured too deep into bodies of water.

My father has never been to the place where his father is buried.

The mountains were their home and they knew them well.

She was young. Would my father’s family please be patient with her? Teach her as they would a daughter of their own?

For her, the future stretched only as far as the next step.

Even among the dead bodies; my mother felt loved.

‘I love you’ are three words that only Americans say.

My father said, ‘If I do not return and two to three years have passed, go and find a new life for yourself.’

They were all torn and broken: shrapnel into skin, blood seeping from scratches, jagged cuts from rocks flying through the air.

It was in the moment of parting that she knew she loved him.

Even if there were ways of leaving, she would not let her leave. She had lost her sons. She had only her daughters-in-law now.

Whatever we were going to do against the enemy would be done together.

The days in the camp were long.

They would go higher, up to the mountains, the landscape they knew best.

He felt shy before the baby. Everything was too new and strong.

If she ever touched that bamboo again, she would remember.

They looked back across the expanse of the river, and they felt they were safe.

In their bellies, alongside the hunger for food, they carried a yearning for the land on the other side of the river.

My mother cradled Dawb in her arms carefully. Her baby was alive.

Grandma shook her head at the world around her, the men and women, the children with hollowed eyes, and called my grandfather’s name.

He would tell me, years later, “My heart hurt more than my body—the flesh can take blows, the heart suffers them.

There was long-ago China and despairing Laos—and the tones of a tongue...both born in an experience of being Hmong.

They found that it was not necessary to have a country to stand together as one people.

Once again, as in the jungle, Hmong people helped Hmong people.

There was no more fear because they had escaped from Laos and there were Hmong people all around.

I kept on looking out the window and feeling that I was not scared anymore.

Ban Vinai Refugee Camp was a place where kids kept secrets and adults stayed inside themselves.

I was their gift in a time when they could not dare to dream of presents.

I loved the idea and power of a journey from the clouds. It gave babies power: we choose to be born to our lives.

I fell from the clouds into her hands. When she first saw me, I was crying, my face suffused with color.

My mother only had two girls. Other mothers had a lot more children.

Together, Grandma and I went to all the neighboring houses to ask for hospitality and care for my sick spirit.

In Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, I discovered the shapes of stories, how to remember them, and how to tell them.

I learned about lands and creatures that did not live in my world.

Life in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp was hard for people who saw it clearly, those who remembered the freedom of place.

My biggest fear was the cries for the dead. The echoes of despair would come and I would start running.

"You cannot leave the camp, because I am your mother and I do not want to go to a new land where they will cut into my body when I die."

"Mother, there is no life here for me or anyone else. The Thai people do not want us here."

"You wanted to give me a chance at life. That life was ruined by the war."

"How much a mother loved her children; how she, a mere woman, had always worked hard to keep them together; how it had always been this thought of holding her children together that kept her alive."

"Safety in the camp was an illusion and that life in the camp froze the Hmong as prisoners of time."

"The only way to survive is to hold on to each other."

"The strongest thing that can hold people together is blood."

"Your father is holding you up to see the world."

"If we do not have the good fortune of meeting again in this life, I will be your daughter again in the next life."

"We will meet again, if not in this life, then surely the next."

This bus ride is my first memory of not belonging to Thailand.

The Hmong had been like the land, fertile and green, waiting for new growth.

Our big trees would be cut down, our large stones thrown out, and new seeds would be planted.

They looked around the enclosed camp and talked to one another.

I promised myself that one night I would be the first in my family to fall asleep.

I had never slept in a new place; every day before I had awakened next to my mother and father.

Even if we are only babies when our fathers die, we always remember the places where they are buried.

In Phanat Nikhom, my grandmother stopped being a woman and was turned into a child.

Both our spirits were lost, unsure of the way to freedom.

I thought ghosts couldn’t travel across oceans.

We were the travelers with the longest way still to go.

It didn’t matter what we looked like—I was happy to be with him in this shiny, new place.

If he could take care of me in the airport in Tokyo, I believed he could take care of me in America.

The idea that God helped people was hard for me to grasp.

I was very proud of him. He could speak English.

In America at last. The world was dark, but the lights on the high poles showed the way.

The night we arrived, we met family first.

Life in the camp was the same as when you left it. Nothing changed. You moved to the future. We are walking from the past.

I knew I would bathe for the rest of my life; not just short baths but long ones.

I fell asleep listening to Dawb’s regular breathing and the fervent voices of my mother and father, dimming voices talking about our new life in America.

We could no longer walk as we always had. The hands holding ours were more determined than before, and also full of pressure.

It was as if our time in Thailand—the way we had lived and played and waited—had not been a part of the world.

Money is not something the heart makes.

This country is big. But it is not as big as our love for you.

We must have yearly family picnics to discuss our problems and progress.

The weight of the road before us.

Emotions are captive to facts.

I could hear the tears on my own face.

Life without money became more than the things we wanted or could not do. It became the things I smelled and touched, the people I loved.

We will find our way to you.

It was a very American thing to do.

The waiting was nearly over. I felt my throat swelling.

Around her neck was a string holding a few index cards, which poked into my cheek.

My grandma was the light, and my emotions flew around her like the winged insects.

She was a woman who would travel far for those she loved, on a journey that must have been scary, unpredictable, and lonely.

I realized I was forgetting how to talk, and things got immediately more complicated.

You will never get to Thailand! You will never get to America!

I always believed that while the work that each family did was different, everybody worked just the same.

If our life was good enough for all these new babies, including a son, why wasn’t it enough for us all?

Our love for each other was stronger than the circumstances that held it together.

At the ends of the rainbows you can find anything.

I could see dragons in a world that only dreamed of them.

Our lives were progressing nicely.

Her name, like our life, was a blend of all the things we had and all the things we yearned for.

There was nothing to be afraid of in this house.

The question of what to do next was the hardest one of all.

Mothers do not die on their children if they can help it.

The more people there were in a life, the faster it goes.

We could not deal with a lonely ghost boy haunting our lives.

Leaving is not the same as forgetting.

We moved into the house in the fall, my first year of high school.

We had looked all summer long, driving up and down the avenues, the corridors, the smaller streets.

This would be the home that the children would dream about for years to come.

Beyond all the spoken wishes, a dream had even come true: eight years into America and we owned a house of our own.

Patience is the slow road to success.

If there was no resolution that I could willingly and happily pick, then why not just live with it?

Getting up in the morning became harder than it had been. But each day, I did get up.

All around our neighborhood Hmong people were buying the old houses.

A certain pride was born in who we were, where we came from, and where we were going.

I emerged from the moldy house, a young woman who wanted to be a writer and tell the stories of a people trying at life.

It seems like a closing of the eyes.

I could not translate all the things I was discovering at college to my mom and dad, to my home.

By documenting our deaths, we were documenting our lives.

I didn’t want this to happen to my grandma, to this woman I adored, whom I could not imagine not loving forever.

She said that there were always uses for ropes in life, things to tie together.

You do not think so much about hunger if you have never been full.

Grandma didn’t like to make me sad.

My grandmother believed that the only way to keep a family together was to have many sons.

Her beauty became such that one had to know her, love her, hear her, and hold her to see.

It was the outcome we had been struggling so long for: a chance to die naturally, of old age, after a full life.

"I had been preparing for my grandma’s death for a long time."

"Death had always been something scary."

"She was scared that she would not be able to find her long way back to the land of her mother and father."

"You are not a coward. You love her so go make sure she is O.K."

"When I die, I do not want anything. All I want is a good bed to sleep in."

"I wanted to tell her not to talk like this."

"I wish I could have said the same to her. 'Put your worries aside, Grandma. I am here. I will protect you.'"

"I still worry about them."

"It is only the scaring away of the bad things in your life."

"Yes, you do," was always her response to our love.

"In all the languages of the earth, in all the richness of words, there is no word, no comparison, no equivalent, for my grandmother trying to be strong for me."

"Grandma knows."

"Don’t cry, me naib. Grandma knows."

"Grandma is here, my girls are here."

"She wanted us to always remember where and who we came from."

"The black smoke trails from the dying candles vanished slowly into the air."

"I want to marry a Thai actor someday."

"Wasn’t there?"

"You have to go back to school."

"I kissed her temple again. A place I had kissed a thousand times before."

‘They look at me, old and wrinkled and not much. They do not know the reaches of an old tree, the high branches that go up to the sky.’

‘Tell my children to stay together, to love their wives and husbands and teach their children as I would teach them, as if life could continue and death did not call.’

‘Do not steal, do not cheat, do not hurt, and do not take from others.’

‘Lead a life that was better, filled with less tears and heartache, more laughter and love, than mine.’

‘It is very important that you tell this part of our story: the Hmong came to America without a homeland.’

‘We, seekers of refuge, will find it: if not in the world, then in each other.’

‘Our dreams are coming, Grandmother. I am holding on to you as you are holding on to my father and me.’

‘I promised my grandma that we will meet again, that I will be her granddaughter again in another life.’

‘I knew that it is a part of life.’

‘Life will continue.’