Local author Kao Kalia Yang’s mother was 16, in hiding from enemy soldiers and about to be married.

It was an extraordinary time in her mother’s young life and yet when Kao suggested that she write her mother’s story, her mother was convinced there was nothing to tell.

Fortunately, Kao prevailed. And she does something rather unusual with this compelling new book.

In “Where Rivers Part,” she writes in the voice of her mother, as if her mother were the one telling the story and she says of their collaboration: “I would travel on the winds of her memories … and together … we would sift through the pieces of her life, salvage the loves whose stories were buried in the debris of everything, find the moments of light and laughter…”

The book chronicles her mother’s escape, with her parents and siblings, into the jungles of Laos as they are being hunted by the North Vietnamese for the crime of cooperating with the Americans.

The family traverses well-worn animal trails and encounters other Hmong in hiding, which is how Kao’s mother, at 16, meets the man she’ll marry.

Leaving her own mother, Kao’s mother flees with her husband to a refugee camp in Thailand where they wait, in poverty and privation, for news that they’ll be immigrating to America.

“I know what courage looks like,” Kao writes in her prologue, “because of my mother.”


— Kerri Miller | MPR News