The Latehomecomer

 

We had been in America for almost ten years. I was

nearly fifteen, and Dawb had just gotten her driver’s

license. The children were growing up. We needed a new

home—the apartment was too small. There was hardly room

to breathe when the scent of jasmine rice and fish steamed

with ginger mingled heavily with the scent of freshly baked

pepperoni pizza—Dawb’s favorite food. We had been looking

for a new house for nearly six months.

       It was in a poor neighborhood with houses that were

ready to collapse—wooden planks falling off, colors chipping

away, sloping porches—and huge, old trees. There was a

realty sign in the front yard, a small patch of green in front

of the white house. It was one story, with a small open patio

and a single wide window framed by black panels beside a

black door. There was a short driveway that climbed up a little hill.

No garage. It looked out of place in the east side

of St. Paul. In fact, it looked out of time. The house should

have been on the prairie, in the early days of Minnesota. It

looked like it belonged to Laura and Mary Ingalls and a time

when girls wore cotton skirts with little flowers and bonnets

to keep the sun away and carried pails with their sandwiches

inside. The team of two old trees in the front yard dwarfed

the house. From the car, my imagination took flight. I never

thought I would get a chance to live in a house that belonged

to storybooks.

       I asked my mom, “Are you sure this is only $36,500?”

       “It was really $37,000 on the paper, but Dawb asked the

man to lower the price for us, and he agreed.”

       “It looks like at least $70,000 to me.”

       I couldn’t wait to get out of the car. We had been looking

for houses a long time—some we had liked well enough;

most we couldn’t afford. Now, this one that looked like a real

antique, was only $36,500. The deal was incredible. It felt like

a miracle.

       Together, we had scoured the city looking for a suitable

home. My mother, father, and Dawb in the front, and the rest

of us in the back, all our knees touching. We had looked all

summer long, driving up and down the avenues, the corridors,

the smaller streets, and the busy thoroughfares of St. Paul.

On days of fruitless hunting, my father would drive us past

the mansions on Summit Avenue for inspiration. We were

awed and discussed the merits of owning the structures before

us, humongous and intimidating, haunting and invincible.

We marveled at the bricks and the green lawns and the ivy

climbing up the walls and windows.

       Dawb and I posed creative arguments for why owning

such behemoths would never work for our family. These were

the homes that we saw on television, the ones with the ghosts

and the gun dramas, the ones with the 1980s movie stars and

their loose-fitting suits. These were the homes with the secret

drug addicts and the eating disorders. We’d much rather

live in places where men carried beverages in brown bags

and walked lopsided up and down the sidewalks and a child

could kick an empty beer bottle just as conveniently as a rock.

We had fun with our talk, but sometimes Mom and Dad got

annoyed. These houses were supposed to inspire us to work

extra hard in school. The small house before us would work. It

would be our first piece of America, the first home we would buy

with the money our parents earned. We were full of eagerness. Some

of our cousins had purchased houses already; others were

looking, just like us. It felt like we were joining the future

with the past, our dreams and our lives coming together. This

would be the home that the children would dream about for

years to come.

       Up close, we could see that the wood of the house was

falling apart in places. White paint had been applied to the

parts where the old paint had chipped. The floor of the porch

was rotting. The black panels on either side of the window

made it look bigger than it was. But that afternoon there was

a feeling like the house was special, like it would be ours for a

long time. I walked through the front door, into a space that

was small, like an elevator. Then I made a left and entered our

first home in America: 437 East York Avenue.

       The house had the simplest design I had ever encountered.

After the elevator-sized reception area, there were three bigger

rooms all connected, each with a small bedroom to the right.

There was a single bathroom in between the second and third

bedrooms. The first room was a designated living room. The

second was an “anything-you-need-me-to-be” room (that

would be used to full capacity as bedroom, playroom, study

room, and eating room). The third was a kitchen with enough

room in the center for a round dining table (a remnant of the

old owners). Off the kitchen there was a door leading to an

enclosed porch area that my father liked because there was an

old pencil sharpener nailed into the wall. The realtor had said

that the sharpener still worked. Also off the kitchen there was

a small room with just enough space for a washing and drying

machine and the requisite heavy-duty sink. The total area of

the house was 950 square feet, and it was built in 1895. It was

called a two-and-a-half bedroom house because the middle

room had no closet. The entire structure smelled old, like the

thrift shops we were frequenting less and less.

       My mother and father were in disagreement over the

house. My mother kept on hoping for better. My father’s

position was that we had to make do with what was before us.

But they both felt that they could not afford better for us.

       My father said, “We can hide from the rain and the snow

in here.”       “Ah-huh,” we answered in various octaves.

       “Someday maybe we can do better.”

       We all knew he was referring to education. Someday when

Dawb and I became educated, and the kids grew up and did

well in school too, and my mother and father no longer had

to work so hard just to get enough food and pay the heating

bill. That is the someday my father was waiting for. It was the

someday we were all waiting for.

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

high school. Dawb was already attending Harding High

School, an inner-city school where nearly fifty percent

of the student body was multicultural—many of whom

were Hmong. Naturally, I would attend Harding with her.

She had helped me choose my classes; I would take all the

International Baccalaureate classes that I could get into, and

where I couldn’t, I’d take the advanced placement or college

prep courses. I had gone to a small junior high school, a

math and science magnet, in a white neighborhood with few

Hmong kids. There I had done well in my classes; I discovered

a formula I thought quite sacred: do the homework, go to class

every day, and when in class, follow the teacher with your

eyes. I was still whispering in school, but the teachers took

it in stride. I felt ready for the life changes that high school

would bring my way.

       I was feeling a strong push to reinvent myself. Without

my realizing, by the time high school began, I had a feeling

in the pit of my stomach that I had been on simmer for too

long. I wanted to bubble over the top and douse the confusing

fire that burned in my belly. Or else I wanted to turn the

stove off. I wanted to sit cool on the burners of life, lid on, and

steady. I was ready for change, but there was so little in my life

that I could adjust. So life took a blurry seat.

       I knew that the parameters of our life would continue,

but I pushed against the skin that contained me. There would

be school or work during the day and then a return to the

children and babysitting. The drama of a changing body had

taken me by surprise but had taken care of itself smoothly.

… Dawb drove around the block, often with me beside her

in the passenger seat. We were both growing up, we were big

sisters, and we took care of the children, and my mother and

father were convinced of our status as good daughters with

good grades. High school was important because it mean that

we were closer to college. It did not resonate in my family

that high school was a time to be young or to be old or that it

was a time to sneak peeks into different worlds. Such ideas hit

against the closed lids of my consciousness.

       Dawb and I had decided long before that when the time

came, we would strive for the University of Minnesota. We

were hearing of Hmong doctors and lawyers, both men and

women, all excelling in America, building successful lives

for themselves, their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and

grandfathers. I had never actually met a Hmong doctor or

lawyer, but they had clan names I recognized as clearly as I did

my own: Vue, Thao, Vang, Xiong, Lee, Lor, Moua, Cha, Hang,

Chang, Khang, Her, Chue, Pha, Kong, and Khue. Dawb and

I wanted to add to the success of our clan in this growing list

of Hmong people who had made lives for themselves and their

families in America. We wanted to make the life journeys of

our family worth something. Our ambitions had grown: we

contemplated changing not simply our own lives but the lives

of poor children all over the world. And the key, we believed,

was in school. But how far we could strive in school was

unknown. We didn’t tell anyone about our secret dreams.

       Dawb had teachers who supported her all the way

through. She had the kind of intelligence that a teacher could see

(she looked every part the interested learner), could hear

(her English had no accent), and could support (she soaked up

information and processed it into her world for her use). I was

lost, perpetually biting my lower lip: I didn’t speak well or

easily, and the link between what we were learning from books

and living in life was harder for my mind to grasp.

       In high school, this changed. I met a teacher who

changed the way I saw myself in education. Her name was

Mrs. Gallentin, and she opened up a possibility that I was

special. She taught ninth-grade English, where we read Romeo

and Juliet and Nectar in the Sieve, as well as other literary

classics. I sat near the front of the class and absorbed the

books. Mrs. Gallentin had a red face and a dry sense of humor.

She had little patience for kids who giggled or were fussy in

their seats—students who didn’t pay close attention to lessons

and did not do their assignments on time. I had overly curvy,

confident handwriting that was hard to read, and I did not

have a computer, so reviewing my work was a slow process.

She may have noticed me initially because of this, and her

interest was compounded by both my silence and my serious

approach to literature.

       Mrs. Gallentin became impressed with me because I could

tell the important parts of a book. I knew how to anticipate

the questions on her tests. At first, I was convinced I could

read her mind. But after a few thought experiments in class,

I realized I was picking up understanding from the books, not

from her. It was in this class that I wrote my first real essay in

response to the question: Is the story of Romeo and Juliet a

story of love or lust?

       It took me all night long to think about the essay. I had no

personal experience with love, or lust. Some of my friends said

that they were in love, but I was not convinced. The phone

conversations they had with their boyfriends were mostly

just listening to each other’s breathing. After many false

beginnings, I wrote about what mattered to me. I wrote about

the love I felt I knew: Love is the reason why my mother and

father stick together in a hard life when they might each have

an easier one apart; love is the reason why you choose a life

with someone, and you don’t turn back although your heart

cries sometimes and your children see you cry and you wish

out loud that things were easier. Love is getting up each day

and fighting the same fight only to sleep that night in the same

bed beside the same person because long ago, when you were

younger and you did not see so clearly, you had chosen them.

       I wrote that we’ll never know if Romeo and Juliet really

loved because they never had the chance. I asserted that love

only happened in life, not in literature, because life is more

complex. As soon as I wrote the essay, I started worrying

about it—what if she didn’t like it, what if she didn’t agree,

what if I had it all wrong. That was my first understanding of

how writing worked, how it mattered to the writer, personally

and profoundly.

       I had written the essay out by hand first. I stayed up all

night typing the essay on our gray typewriter at the dining

table (it was the only surface in our house that was steady

enough for us to really spread out our books and papers),

slowly, with my index fingers (mistakes were costly). The

sound of slow keys being clicked, first the right and then the

left, eyes looking from keyboard to the page. Flexing careful

fingers every few minutes. Trying to find a rhythm and a beat

in the clicking of the keys, the mechanical whirl at the end

of each line, the changing of paper. It took me a long time to

think it through and follow the letters to the words, but the

writing calmed something inside of me, it cooled my head:

like water over a small burn in the pit of my mind. I watched

eagerly as the third then fourth then fifth page filled with

typed letters.

       My mother and father came home early in the morning.

They had changed their work schedules entirely to the

graveyard shift (the nominal increase in their wages was

necessary to maintain the new house). They saw my eyes

closing over my work and became convinced that I was their

hardest working daughter. My heavy eyes followed the way

they walked so tired around the kitchen, and I grew confident

that I really did know love—that I had always known it. By

morning, the exhausting work of writing was done. I turned it

in to Mrs. Gallentin.

       Mrs. Gallentin caught me in the hall later that day and said

that my essay was beautiful. She said that I wrote more than

an answer to the question; I was telling her the ways in which

questions come from life and end in life. I had never thought

of myself as a good writer. I liked stories, and in elementary

school I had written gory tales about intestines coming out. I

thought I was good at math and science (what my junior high

school had been good at), but Mrs. Gallentin said that I had

talent for literature. I didn’t see it, but it pleased me to hear

her say this. In the course of a semester, she opened up a real

possibility that I could excel in high school and college because

they were all about good reading and good writing.

       I began to see a truth that my father had been asserting

for a long time, long before America. In Ban Vinai Refugee

Camp, I had sat on my father’s shoulders, my hands secured in

his hair, and I listened to him talk about how we might have

a brother, how we would become educated, and how our lives

would go places far beyond the horizons we saw—in America.

I looked at our lives, and how could I not believe? Beyond all

the spoken wishes, a dream had even come true: eight years

into America and we owned a house of our own. I wanted to

recap this journey with Grandma. I waited enthusiastically for

her summer visit.

       She didn’t come.

       In 1996, welfare reform was in the news. The program was

ending. Families living on welfare had to learn how to work

“within the system.” This meant that my uncles in California

could no longer farm on the side and raise their families with

the help of the government. This meant that my grandma’s

sons were in danger. What’s more, she herself could be at risk.

She was not a citizen; there was no way she could pass the

citizenship test or speak enough English to prove her loyalty,

to pledge, “I will fight for America if it were ever in danger.”

It was fighting that all the Hmong in America had done with

the lives that had fallen to the jungle floor, the spirits that had

flown high into the clouds again, that had fled life and refused

to return—despite all the urgings, the pleas, the crying. But

we were refugees in this country, not citizens. It was not our

home, only an asylum. All this came crashing down.

       In American history we learned of the Vietnam War. We

read about guerilla warfare and the Vietcong. The Ho Chi

Minh Trail and communism and democracy and Americans

and Vietnamese. There were no Hmong—as if we hadn’t

existed at all in America’s eyes.[1 And yet Hmong were all over

America. An exodus from

California began. Minnesota was softer in the process of

change. Welfare programs would not be terminated as quickly.

Measures would be taken to ensure that old people received

their benefits. A bill was being considered that would allow

veterans of the Vietnam War, Hmong with documents, to

apply for citizenship, and take the examination in Hmong.

There was crazy studying everywhere. Aunt and Uncle Chue

hovered over pages that he read with his French accent as she

tried to make out the letters of the alphabet one at a time,

through her thick reading glasses.

       My own mother and father questioned themselves out

loud, “What if we try to become Americans and fail?”

       On the phone, Grandma said, “Lasting change cannot be

forced, only inspired.”

       For the Hmong, inspiration came in those that were born

in this country, the ready-made Americans in our arms,

the little faces of boys and girls who spoke Hmong with

American stiffness.

       We could not remain just Hmong any longer. For our

children, we could not fail. We had to try, no matter what.

Even if it meant moving. Thousands of Hmong families

moved from the farming lands of California to the job possibilities

in Minnesota companies and factories. Aunt

and Uncle Chue, despite their lack of English, studied for

the citizenship exam, took it, failed, despaired, studied some

more, and tried again. Eventually they succeeded, and they

inspired my parents to try for citizenship, too. We had no

more lands to return to. After nearly fifteen years, my family

knew this. The camps in Thailand had closed. Hmong people

there were repatriated, sometimes without knowledge, back

into Laos. Families went missing in the process. Lives were

lost. Children were killed. Ours were only beginning to raise

their eyes to a country of peace, where guns at least were

hidden and death did not occur in the scalding of grass or

rains that drizzled death. We could not handle any more

death. In wanting to live, we were willing to try becoming

Hmong Americans.

       A new chapter of our lives unfolded as we strived to

become Americans. We sank our roots deep into the land,

took stake in the ground, and prayed to the moon that one day

the wind would carry us away from our old moldy house, into

a new stronger home that could not be taken away, that would

not fall down on us, that would hold us safe and warm.

       Grandma and the uncles from California came to live with

us in Minnesota. I felt caught in the larger context of being

Hmong. We were only one family in the over two hundred

thousand that lived in America. We all came from the same

history. I burned for our stories, our poverty, and our cause.

I was only in high school, and there was very little I could do.

My father chided my impatient heart.

       He said, “Patience is the slow road to success.”

       My father was a poet, and had a poet’s heart. He carried

love songs about the falling apart of a country. He made music

of the loneliness in Thailand. He sang traditional song poetry

about the earth grumbling and the sky crumbling, the leaves

of the human heart fluttering all the while. I was his daughter,

and I could not see poetry in the mold that grew wild on our

walls—no matter how much my mother, Dawb, or I scrubbed,

it never stopped, no matter how many layers of paint we

applied. I couldn’t understand why the Hmong people had

to run for their children, how their children had to make

lives, again and again, in different soils, to know belonging.

Why it was that our house, so cute on the outside, rotted on

the inside. Why couldn’t Grandma live with us now that we were

all in one state? Why couldn’t she live with any of her sons

permanently? Because their homes were small. Because at one

home, her heart yearned for another, and because all their

homes together could never be like the country of her home

in Laos, in the imagination and the stories she told all of us.

In the world we lived in, our grandma carried her bags from

one house to the next, sharing all our beds.

       All this made me sick. My stomach cramped, and I could

no longer eat. My bones hurt. I was tired. In the night, my

heart squeezed itself, and I woke up incapable of crying the

pain away. I remember one night, falling asleep looking at

how the car lights from the street reflected on my wall. I could

hear the pounding of my heart in my ears, very loud and

deep, like a hollow cry from my chest. I felt like needles were

twisting their way into my chest. I remember thinking that

the pain was teasing me but realizing soon that it wasn’t a

joke. The air in my lungs caught in my throat. I struggled for

escape, my hands reaching for my heart, beating frantically

within me. I remember trying to cry out but finding a lack

of air, a thickening tongue. I kicked desperately on the hard

wall. First one, then a sad two, a final three: thinking in

red: Mom and Dad, help me, I’m dying. I’m Hmong and I’m

your daughter and I’m dying in the room beside yours. The

thoughts were on repeat. Sweat. I could feel it breaking out on

my forehead. Skin: I could feel the cold settling in. Heaving

inside of myself. My eyes growing tight in the darkness, light

streaming in. The door opened, slamming with force against

the wall. My mom and dad rushed to my side, and I remember

seeing myself twisting and turning, all out of color and out

of breath, but still moving with nervous life. My father tried

to hold me and I could hear my mom’s voice panicking and

Dawb running for the phone, and then I felt expiration come.

I stilled. Air flowed in. My vision cleared. It was slowly over.

       No ambulance was called. It was too fast. What seemed

like forever was little more than five minutes on a dark

Minnesota night. No one knew what happened. In the doctor’s

office, days later, I said: perhaps it was a heart attack. The

doctor didn’t think so: I was too young for a heart attack.

My mom and dad were eager to believe the doctor. We didn’t

want to pursue the idea, and so we came home happy that it

was all over. In the month that followed, I lost twenty pounds.

The doctors didn’t know what was wrong. My mother and

father hovered over me. My siblings watched me grow pale

and weak; the bones on my hips jutted out, and the bags under

my eyes took permanent residence.

       Was I making myself sick? Looking for fundamental

changes in my life? I loved the children, and I was happy to

take care of them after school. All this time, I had been feeling

like I was pushing against my skin: was it possible that I was

pushing against my very own heart? The idea was a little

preposterous. I didn’t really believe it, but it nudged at me.

But if indeed my heart did need changing, then what part of

it? There was a clear division: the Hmong heart (the part that

held the hands of my mom and dad and grandma protectively

every time we encountered the outside world, the part that

cried because Hmong people didn’t have a home, the part

that listened to Hmong songs and fluttered about looking for

clean air and crisp mountains in flat St. Paul, the part that

quickly and effectively forgot all my school friends in the heat

of summer) or the American heart (the part that was lonely

for the outside world, that stood by and watched the fluency of

other parents with their boys and girls—children who lingered

in the clubs and sports teams after school waiting to be picked

up later by parents who could—the part that wondered if

forgetting my best friends to life was normal and necessary).

My body was surely whole. The doctors said so. What was

broken in me must be something doctors couldn’t see.

I worried. The more I thought about it, the sicker I became:

how does one change what one is becoming?

       My grandma worried over me. She tried calling my spirit

home. My rebellious, independent spirit hated the moldy

house and refused to return. She tried her healing herbs.

Their smell and taste took my soul far away to Thailand, to

other times and places, but could not locate me in the present.

Grandma grew despondent.

       Something was wrong inside me, and its location was

murky, like the origins of the Hmong home long, long ago and

far, far away. One day, I lay on the sofa—another day absent from school

(my grades were dropping slowly)—looking up at the wall.

Grandma and Dawb had gone shopping. My mother was in

the kitchen preparing rice porridge for me. I heard the key

in the lock. I heard them come in. I turned and saw that my

grandmother had a gift for me.

       There was something glittery in her hands. Her uneven

gait came closer. She presented a thin silver bracelet made of

elephants, bigger mother ones and smaller baby ones, circling

together, tusks entwined. It was the most beautiful gift anyone

had ever gotten me. She told me that the man at the store had

taken off a few of the elephants to fit my small wrist. Grandma

put the bracelet on me and said, “Elephants protect their

babies by forming a circle around them. You are sick, and

I cannot protect you. I bought this for you so that the power of

the elephants will protect you and make you well again.”

       I wore the bracelet every day. I started to eat a little bit

of food and took the medicines the doctors gave me (after

all of the tests and retests, the doctors said that baby lupus

would explain my symptoms). I wore the bracelet and grew

stronger in its hold. The idea of a divided heart slowly lost

merit: if there was no resolution that I could willingly and

happily pick, then why not just live with it? Isn’t this how all of

life happens anyway? I looked at the glittering bracelet

on my wrist and decided that a divided heart can be a good

thing. One side can help the other. Why couldn’t my chest

expand to hold my heart? My father was always telling me that

I needed to stiffen the walls of my heart, so it would not waver

after the passage of people and places in my life. Maybe the

softness of my heart, which I thought would cushion whatever

may come, had been my biggest weakness. I had the help of

elephants. I wore the bracelet every day and felt better.

       One day, the tusks of two elephants lost their hold on each

other. I placed the bracelet in a small bag, and I promised

myself that I would eventually put the tusks back together

again. Or, if that was impossible, I would have another one

made, just like it.

       I grew well again, but I understood that my body, like

every other body in the world, could die. It could be healthy or

not. If it carried life, then it could lose it. I was a child of war,

and I should have known that we have no choice about when

and where we die. When we do, we simply comply as bravely

as we can. Getting up in the morning became harder than

it had been. But each day, I did get up. That was the point.

That had always been the point in the Hmong life, and even

the American one. I grew satisfied with myself. Slowly, the

sickness eased away.