Minnesota-based author, speaker, and educator Kao Kalia Yang has written three memoirs about her experience as a Hmong American, as well as creating four children’s books and editing an anthology about miscarriage and infant loss. And now, she is branching out into opera as a librettist, adapting her memoir The Song Poet in collaboration with the Minnesota Opera.
The Song Poet focuses on Yang’s father, Bee Yang, who spent many years in Laos as a song poet, collecting the words of his neighbors and shaping them into songs. But with the American war’s spillover effects into Laos, Bee Yang fled to a Thai refugee camp and eventually to a Minneapolis housing project, which had detrimental effects on his ability to sing.
His song poetry had been compelling for Yang even at a young age. “Crowds gathered around my father at community events,” she recalled. “Always, they asked him to sing. He’d say no. They’d plead. He’d relent.”
The songs always evoked emotion. “I remember the audience crying at his songs at the annual Hmong New Year celebrations, at the summertime soccer tournaments, and clan gatherings,” Yang said. “I remember the first time I actually listened to his songs and how I felt a hot explosion in my own chest.”
She wrote her three memoirs in the same vein as her father created his songs. “I’m not a singer,” she said, “but what I do with words aligns closely with how my father weaved his songs together and sang them to bring our community together so we can remember, feel, and salvage from the despair and heartache of history.”
Yang’s operatic adaptation of her father’s story draws upon themes and moments in her book, but with a different tone. “The book was written for an adult audience,” Yang said. “This libretto began as a youth opera and as a mainstage production was carefully imagined as a family experience, an intergenerational experience of Bee Yang’s life as a Hmong song poet and a refugee, a factory worker, and a man who is looking to be the father he imagined for himself.”
Bee Yang himself participated in Yang’s collaboration with composer Jocelyn Hagen and director Rick Shiomi. “It was such a gift to have my father sing the Hmong lines from the libretto and have Jocelyn notate it,” Yang said. “It feels like we were documenting something special.”
This documentation process is critical because the Hmong song poetry tradition has always been an oral one. “As a form, my generation is less familiar than the one before, and certainly I can imagine how my own children will be less familiar with it in time,” Yang said. “It was an incredibly moving experience for me, but I also understand its potential impact on future generations.”
But Yang’s libretto didn’t just focus on her father. “I wrote the libretto knowing I would have a chorus that could raise the questions and realities of not only my father’s life but every person’s experience of love and loss,” she said. “What would the mountains of Phou Bia, the most heavily bombed mountains in the world, sing if they could?”
In her lyrics, Yang took many diverse creatures into account. “Those dogs, all the pets that refugees could not take with them, how would those songs of parting go?” she asked. “It was a gift to have a chorus be the mountains, the winds, the machines at the factory, each time speaking to the further reaches of history across the Asian American experience.”
The Song Poet will be sung in Hmong and English, and Lee Pao Xiong, director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University, worked with the cast on their pronunciation of Hmong words, as well as with the 12-member Minnesota Opera Chorus, who are Asian or Asian American.
All of this sprung from a proposal five years ago by Jamie Andrews, then Chief Learning Officer at the Minneapolis Opera, to develop The Song Poet into a youth opera. “I was elated at the prospect,” Yang said. “I had no idea how the idea would shift and grow.”
Initially, Yang was less involved in the artistic process, but that soon changed. “As things evolved and I knew I would be writing the libretto, I thought immediately of Rick Shiomi as director,” she said. “Conductor Tiffany Chang came in later in the journey, but has been an incredible leader and asset to the team with her passion, her artistry, and her commitment to excellence.”
Yang credits the team’s collaborative success with being based in good listening. “We are keenly aware of the dangers of cultural appropriation, the importance of AAPI representation, and the necessity of having Hmong people be present in the process,” she said. “Each of us understands the historical nature of this work and also of its relevance to not only the Hmong story but of refugees and immigrants from everywhere.”
These sensitivities also serve Yang well in her other work. “As a public speaker, I never write my speeches down,” she said. “I am not interested in speaking to my audiences. I want to be in conversation with them.”
This shared dialogue includes a focus on her audience’s own stories. “I see my public talks as an opportunity to present myself as transparently as possible so that we might engage in the things that matter to all of us, our shared humanity, our histories of displacement, of war, the tragedies and triumphs that have brought us together in space and time,” Yang said. “Each is a love letter to place and time, to the individuals who make our journeys valuable and meaningful, despite the systemic and individual barriers that we face.”
Yang uses the concept of the story in her teaching as well. “Each time I teach, I’m aware I get the opportunity to be a character in the book of a student’s life, and I get to work in service of their story,” she said. “I want to model for them what it is like to care deeply about the trajectory of another human being, to offer to them what you’ve learned on the altar of generosity, of knowledge, of service.”
In 2019, Yang began writing children’s books, and she plans to add three more next year to the five she has already published. “I write books for people who need them, including young Kalia, who grew up in a world where there were no picture books about little girls like her, about the people who loved and believed in her,” she said of her younger self. “My goal with each is tell a child, a family, a person somewhere that they matter, that they are seen, and that their stories are gifts to others.”
But three more children’s books are not all that Yang sees in her upcoming year or two. ”I understand that there is a future for The Song Poet opera,” she said. “I’ve already gotten inquiries from California. Ryan Taylor, the president and general director of the Minnesota Opera, has stated that the Minnesota Opera will feature it again but has not announced dates.”
She also hopes to travel to the Pacific Northwest. “In 2018, I was in Seattle for a talk for HealthPoint Kaleidoscope, where I toured a clinic and met lots of people providing care to the different communities in Seattle,” she said. “In 2024, I will have four or five new books coming, and it will be lovely to share those stories in Washington state.”
And, more broadly, she hopes that The Song Poet will influence opera nationwide, by highlighting the lack of operas by and for Asian Americans. “I want to change this fact,” Yang said. “I believe that The Song Poet opera can begin a movement to change this reality for us, and others who’ve been waiting a long time to see their stories represented with love and dignity on the operatic stage.”
