When your grandmother once outran a tiger, you know perseverance is in your blood. Meet the Yangs, a Hmong family who evaded Pathet Lao soldiers after the Vietnam War by crossing the Mekong River into Thailand, only to float between refugee camps for eight years. They found asylum in Minnesota, but lived on welfare. The toll all of this takes on readers is lightened by Kao Kalia Yang’s tranquil descriptions of the cultural divide — e.g., the smell of green parrot soap compared with Head & Shoulders shampoo — in The Latehomecomers [sic], a narrative packed with the stuff of life.
Why the book warrants a B+ is never explained, except in the mention of “the toll all of this takes on readers,” evidently alleviated by the “stuff of life.” The somewhat cryptic comments that accompany the grade are similar to what a college student might get on a midterm paper from an overworked professor. And while a B+ is a good grade, it is little comfort to those clamoring to get into medical or law school, or those striving to enter the MFA program, publish a book, win prizes, and earn recognition. The demands placed on artists by their aesthetic industries differ little from those placed on students. Once graduated, having learned by heart what it means to be graded, artists still strive for perfect grades, manifest in laudatory reviews, rich grants, dazzling awards, and so on. Aesthetic success as being akin to educational success — with the artist as a good student — is shown explicitly in the Entertainment Weekly review, as well as in the story The Latehomecomer tells. In both cases, making the grade covers up the opposite, the haunting possibility or even past reality of being degraded.
While The Latehomecomer is a history of Yang’s family and the Hmong people who sided with the United States, it is also a story of how a refugee became a writer. Yang, born in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, begins by tracing the history of her family and their struggle to reach a refugee camp across the border of Laos into Thailand. The exodus, by foot, takes four years. Once in the refugee camp, the Yangs are assigned numbers by the United Nations, which requires them to have birthdays. Since these are unknown for some, the Yangs make up dates. “For many of the Hmong,” Yang writes, “their lives on paper began on the day the UN registered them as refugees of war.”24 Yang alludes here to how the Hmong did not even have a written language until the 1950s. They were indeed undocumented, and paperless, until they entered Western bureaucracy. For Yang to write the first book in English by a Hmong author continues the transformation of Hmong people’s lives on paper. Her memoir signals that the Hmong have a representative who can speak for them, in all the complicated ways we have already seen:
For many years, the Hmong inside the little girl fell into silence … all the words had been stored inside her.… In the books on the American shelves, the young woman noticed how Hmong was not a footnote in the history of the world.… The young woman slowly unleashed the flood of Hmong into language, seeking refuge not for a name or a gender, but a people.25
The memoir is the documentary evidence of these Hmong refugees being transformed into ambivalent Westerners, of entering into a system that assesses both the weary, terrified refugee who supposedly has no voice and the writer who gives voice to the refugee in a language understood by the West.
Being a writer is one way the refugee sheds her inhumanity — the degraded “toll”—and becomes human, the higher-graded “stuff of life.” But this refugee who becomes a writer, who wishes to take the true war story away from those who insist that it belongs to men and soldiers, leaves one fraught territory to enter another one nearly as perilous. In the first instance, as a refugee, what Yang encounters in Ban Vinai is this: “the dominant feature of the camp was the stench of feces. There were toilets, but they were all flooded.”26 Seven years later, the Yang family is finally sent to the Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to the United States. “The building we were assigned smelled like the toilets that I had dreaded back in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp,” Yang recalls. “In fact, it had been used as a bathroom. There was always human waste between the buildings and amid the cement blocks and large rocks throughout the camp.”27 Filth, especially the untreated waste of human excrement, haunts other Hmong accounts of life in the camps, and many stories of other Southeast Asians in other camps.28 This is no surprise, since refugees are what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” or “naked life,” just alive enough to know they are human, close enough to death to know they are less than human. Confronting one’s own waste and the waste of others, living among it, smelling it, stepping in it, confirms for these refugees their inadequate humanity under bureaucratic eyes. Living in shit is a true war story and a traumatizing one. O’Brien conveys some sense of this when he writes about how the soldiers of The Things They Carried are ambushed in a “shit field,” used by villagers as a toilet. The Indian named Kiowa is killed, or, in GI slang, wasted.29 Kiowa sinks beneath the shit, waste beneath waste. But awful as it is, the field is a temporary stop for American soldiers who can go home after a year, if they live. For Yang’s refugees, the pervasive presence of shit is a part of everyday life that can go on for many years, even decades. That is one crucial difference between a soldier’s war story of his terminal tour of duty and a refugee’s war story of a possible life sentence.
One difficulty in writing a true war story is the aesthetic challenge of dealing with shit and waste, the unpleasant facts of death, neglect and inhumanity for both soldiers and civilians. One must write about the shit even as one wipes it off one’s shoes or feet, making the story aesthetically decent enough to be brought into someone’s house. Writing, or spilling one’s guts, is thus the second dangerous territory encountered by the refugee who wants to tell a true war story. Writers have to deal with shit if they spill their guts, which includes the figurative shit thrown their way by readers and critics such as myself. By learning to write at all, by learning to write in English, by earning degrees, by publishing, Yang and other Hmong American writers are judged by both the minority community they come from and by their national audience. Ha Jin, a Chinese writer living in America, describes this dilemma as the tension between “the spokesman and the tribe.”30 As Mai Neng Moua, editor of the first Hmong American literary collection, says of the Hmong in the United States, “this is a community that is very private … and may very well be threatened by the writings of its young people.”31 To tell a true war story is thus a risky enterprise, not least of all because it is inevitably a story not only about war and memory but also about identity. This is as true for soldiers as it is for refugees.
A true war story ultimately challenges identity because war radically challenges identity, from the soldier who must confront himself as well as the enemy on the battlefield to the civilian who discovers she is less than human when she becomes a refugee. Blown up, dismembered, wasted bodies on the battlefield also fundamentally disturb human identity for those who killed them, witnessed their demise, or buried them. Those bodies also unsettle national identity when a country divides itself over a controversial war, or when the body politic persuades soldiers to kill others even if in so doing they bring their own humanity into question. The false war story ignores this challenge to humanity by owing its allegiance to war and national identity. The false war story affirms in sentimental, selective, and dishonest ways the idea that “we”—its protagonists and its audience — are human, even though we might be more like chickens clucking our heads over the oh-so-sad loss of life we have just witnessed. A good or great true war story forcefully articulates war’s challenge to identity and humanity in content and form, balancing the tension between war’s degrading nature and the need to make the grade as a war story.