Kao Kalia Yang’s Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life is told so empathetically that it is as if the story is told by her mother herself.
This memoir opens from “Twsb” (pronounced “Chew”)’s perspective. Her mother was twice divorced by the time she married her much-older husband. She was 17, and he was 40. She was the daughter of subsistence farmers. He was a merchant who spoke four languages: Hmong, Lao, Mien, and Mandarin Chinese. He already had seven children from his two prior wives, the first of whom had passed on, and the second of whom had left him.
The life in Laos was somewhat touch-and-go, in a pre-modern, developing world, with limited hygiene, reliance on shamans, and folk medicine. In this male dominant world, women could be kidnapped and forced into marriages, and if their coercive husbands died, they could be forced to marry his brother—as happened to Twsb’s mother. She was considered “bad luck” given the deaths of both of her husbands. A man could have multiple wives. A man who came courting for a woman’s hand in marriage would negotiate with her father and brothers. Her preference generally did not matter.
Yang’s mother was born in 1961 in Laos as Tswb Muas. She was the child of Ntshuab Thoj (the author’s maternal grandmother). She was born into a time of strife, in which the U.S.’s CIA recruited from among the Hmong and other ethnic minorities. When Laos fell to the communists, they committed genocide against the Hmong and other minorities. Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and traveled to the U.S. at age 6.
In the author’s Prologue, she writes:
In my late twenties, I met a man, felt comforted by his presence and sleepy by his side, and so in the run of my life, I thought I should find a reasonable way of resting beside him. We agreed to marriage.
Intriguingly, the thinking and the phraseology evoke attitudes of her own Laotian mother. During a weeding session alongside her mother, when the author was 30 and newly married, her mother’s story emerged. The author recalls her mother’s dedication to her during some difficult births that the author experienced and evokes a sense of human connections in ways that are supernatural. Yang writes of a Buddhist idea: ”Niam, in all the lifetimes to come, if I get to choose, let me be your daughter again.”
What follows then is a powerfully evoked memoir. When Tswb was a child, during a heavy rain, she disappeared from the family home. She was dressed by her mother in the jacket of a sibling, Little Cucumber, who had died young. Tswb was found far from the family home playing in water. She explained her disappearance—without leaving behind footprints—by evoking the dead girl’s name. In the lives of the Hmong, the spirit world is ever close. A shaman was brought in to protect Tswb from evil spirits, and she was given the name “bell” (Tswb) as a way to trick the spirits.
She was 9 when her father died, leaving her feeling hopeless and depressed. Tswb grew up to be a beautiful young woman in her teens when Laos fell to the Communists in the mid-1970s. Her clan decided to leave their village behind and hide in the jungles to avoid the new regime, which was capturing and re-educating the Hmong, but also committing genocide against them in many cases.
The Hmong families did not have much to pack or bring—perhaps a hoe, perhaps a cooking pot. Already impoverished and needful, the Hmong scavenged for vegetables in the jungles and in burned out villages, with the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao tracking them and conducting raids and attacks.
Even as a young person, Twsb was self-possessed and literate. She declined the romantic attentions of a childhood friend. At one point, a year into their jungle period, a Chinese shop owner proposed to Twsb’s brothers that he marry Twsb and take care of her. He offered a bag of gems for her, but she declined him outright. The man trailed after the family for days to ply his case. If he had offered to take in the whole nuclear family, Twsb might have considered his proposal.
She had internalized wisdoms about marriage: a woman kidnapped into marriage will likely never forgive her husband sufficiently to love him even if they share children. Her mother advised her not to marry a man too thin because he would age into being skin and bones. Avoid men who laugh too easily as they are not committed to their judgments. And a man who has a bad smell in youth will smell worse as he gets older. Love matches are rare, and they do not necessarily guarantee a happy union. Twsb’s was a progressive family in terms of the encouragement of women’s selection of a marriage partner.
At 16, Twsb met Npis (pronounced “Bee”) of the Yang clan. In the narrative, Twsb thinks:
How could I know then, in that jungle, on that narrow trail full of thorns, that this person would be the one I would leave my mother for? That the Chinese man, with his velvet bag of jewelry, his promise of an education, his careful talk, would be little compared to the forces now swirling inside me. The heat erupting in the heart of who I was and would be?
One man is the safer path, and the other one is much riskier but her own choice. She realized at one point that she would never get tired of looking at him—he was so handsome. But she also knew early on that his poverty would be a sore point in their union. His proposal was:
I want to marry you. I have nothing to offer you. I am the youngest son of a family on the brink of starvation…All I have is me.
Later, Twsb shows the fragility of the decision. Npis had a soft spot for a chicken as a pet:
If Npis had told me, I would not have married him. His actions were not sensible. Why save a chicken when your family was starving? If he had told me, I would have known that here was a man whose dreams were too close to the ground, afraid to take flight like my own. Plus, it would have clued me in on the sacrifices he would make for the animals in his life, even when our jackets had been worn thin by the hard seasons of our life together. His commitment to the animals, especially the chickens, would be a continual source of sacrifice in my life with him.
Both Twsb and Npis, 16 and 19 when they eloped, had their own opinions and stances that they committed to. The two would have major fights, even in the jungle. They were in good company as many of the young spouses would clash around differences.
Twsb also had a vanity that was an inherent part of her person:
I despise women who display their feelings unnecessarily for a man. I’ve seen it before in the village. The older village girls volunteering to wash the clothes of young men they like or saving a sweet yam from the fire to give to a lover on the cooler nights. Even as a girl I knew I would never become this type of woman. And I am not. If Npis needs to go home, he should go. I won’t ask for him to linger or stay. I won’t say, I’ll look forward to the next time you visit. I won’t ever tell him that as I fall asleep, it is often his voice and his words that accompany me into the dark of my slumber—where once it was the spell of exhaustion, the struggle of trying to survive for another day.
Yang writes of harrowing (but funny) moments:
In moments of danger, any adult with a free hand selected a child, threw them onto their backs, and ran—regardless of parentage. Though of course there were preferences and nicknames. Sticky was a girl of four. She was thin and wiry and clung to the different bodies that carried her easily. Floppy was a challenge because although she too was four, she had no ability to cling or duck from the swaying tree branches; her body sagged in one direction and then the other. Little was short and stocky, older and heavier but helpful in that he could assist the individual who carried him by looking back and around and shout out reports of dangers.
The adults and children lived in mortal danger, but they also could share a laugh about the differences between the children.
What follows are harrowing days of starvation in the jungle, the experiences of being hunted, many years in a refugee camp (Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand), and a move to the U.S. and more struggles there.
Kao Kalia Yang’s Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life is a powerfully written memoir written in the voice of her mother and addressed to various individuals important to her life. The marriage between Twsb and Npis is an important one in the book but also precarious in unexpected ways. Yang it the author of other books, including The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, Yang Warriors, and Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
