Somewhere in the Unknown World Read online

The days passed slowly without the Minnesota contingent. I started thinking that perhaps everybody had gone to Mexico for a last visit before the return to Minnesota. Maybe Auntie and Uncle wanted to take Grandma out of the country so she could say “I’m finally seeing the world” a few more times. If that was where they were, I was thankful they hadn’t taken me with them. I didn’t know if I could have done another stint under the blanket. Then the days piled up, and I grew uneasy. I tried to move my feet, harder than I’ve ever tried to before, but to no avail. I couldn’t move away from my place by the window.

  The routines of the new house grew familiar to me. California Aunt earned a living by taking in sewing from a lady in the neighborhood, sweatshop style. Throughout the day, I could hear the sewing machine go on and off, on and off. In between the run of the machine, she visited me and offered me sweets and little toys she’d purchased from the Asian stores, things for me to hold as I waited for the Minnesota family to return for me. She offered me my favorite food, yutiao, crunchy, savory fried donuts shaped like fat, uneven chopsticks. Each time I said, “Thank you for being kind to me,” she petted me on the head gently. California Uncle got up early and did not come home until before dinnertime. It became his habit, also, to come and pet me gently on the head like everybody in the house handled the dog.

  Within two weeks, a moving van came to the house. On that day, California Uncle had not gone to work. I watched as he opened the door for the men carrying my things: my bed, my other wheelchair, the possessions I had left behind in my room in Minnesota. I stopped being a chill kid that day. I stopped thanking California Aunt and California Uncle, like a guest, for their kindness. I became a refugee, sent far from home.

  Later that night, I had California Aunt call my father for me. Our conversation was short.

  My father said, “How are you, son?”

  I said, “I miss you.”

  He sobbed. “I miss you, too.”

  I wanted to lash out at him but I could not.

  I had been in this situation before. When I was a kid, my father used to take me to specialists all over the Twin Cities to try to treat my dystrophy. At one place, they gave me electroshock therapy. I remember lying in the bed with electrodes and crying with every shock the doctors administered. One time, I heard my brother, Sam, outside the room talking with our father. Sam asked him, “Why is Tommy crying? What’s wrong?” Our father answered in a sobbing voice, “It’s to help him. It is not bad. It is to help him.” I remember that after I heard the cry in my father’s voice, I quieted my own.

  I said, “I’ll see you soon.”

  He sobbed once again. “I miss you.”

  I heard everything I needed in those words, his love, always his love, his optimistic love, a belief that one day we would be reunited. Perhaps when that day came, I could be the astronaut of our dreams and not just the disabled son of a Cambodian refugee struggling to make a normal life for himself and his family in Minnesota. I accepted that we couldn’t help what we were, him and me, and that neither of us was ever going to go home again, that we would never return to our favorite seasons.

  —TOMMY SAR

  15

  For My Children

  IT STORMED THROUGH the night. Our house shook with the force of the wind. I woke up afraid for the three of you, asleep in your room on the other side of the wall. I got up and walked on creaking floorboards to our bedroom door. In a flash of lightning, I watched your father sleep, an arm raised over his head, neck turned far to the side, a hand on his chest. In the hallway, the door to your room, kept ajar, swung on quiet hinges. The display of lightning outside the hallway window flickered like the start of a movie.

  You three slept in your usual line, horizontal on the bed, each on your own pillow, legs and arms tangling with one another’s. Yuepheng was at the foot of the bed, close to its edge. He hugged the body pillow that we’d gotten during my first pregnancy—not with you three, but with Baby Jules, the little brother who died inside me at nineteen weeks. Thayeng was in the middle, turned toward Shengyeng, an arm flung across her chest. Shengyeng was at the head of the bed, turned toward the smooth, aged wood. I stood by your bed in the dark, listening to the rhythms of your breathing, holding my own.

  In the hallway again, I paused at the window. The string of lights your father hung in the backyard, behind the garage, between the slate patio that separates the foliage of our yard from our neighbor’s, shone in the dark, a swaying series of orbs, miniature planets blazing in a line. In their glow I saw the two metal chairs that your father and I had sat on on our wedding day, the aged ribbons tied to the backs flying in the fierce wind.

  The forecast predicted severe thunderstorms on the day of our wedding, August 6, 2011. In fact, storms raged around the Twin Cities except for the small pocket of Phalen Lake Park where we gathered before some five hundred friends and family beneath the trees. The air was thick with moisture, and the sun, peeking between sheets of gray clouds, was hot, but it did not rain. The people drank bottles of water, ate cups of sliced watermelon, and sat in lines or gathered in groups on colorful plastic-woven mats on the hills of green grass around the amphitheater. They all looked down at us sitting on our wedding chairs on the circle of cement. We wore traditional Hmong clothes as your Mimi presided over the Christian portion of our wedding. Mitch, a dear friend, interpreted the scripture your grandmother read from English into Hmong, the language that I want to leave you as a gift but which you are not keen on receiving, at least not yet. The flower bouquet of Oriental hybrid lilies I carried, the most flamboyant among the lilies for their blooms, their colors, and their scents, drew the tears from my eyes, and I cried the whole day, sniffling and blowing my nose, soaking the napkins that friends and family handed me.

  Eight years ago, your father and I brought the circles of our lives together for a moment to celebrate our union. The most popular question of the day was, “How did you two meet?”

  There was the easy answer. I had just published my first book, The Latehomecomer. I had been invited to give a keynote at a Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference at Augsburg University and your father had been advised by his faculty mentors to come and see me, a young Hmong American author. The moment of our meeting is captured on a DVD your father purchased after my talk: I’m standing at the front of the chapel on a stage. Ahead of me, coming up the aisles between the pews of the church, are lines of people, your father among them. Once the people are seated, the camera pans across the crowd and we see the figure of your father slouching in his plaid shirt, rolled to the elbows, a notebook and a pen in his hands. He is frowning, looking at the stage with a furrowed brow. The camera focuses on me. I’m standing as tall as my four feet, ten inches will allow in a white button-up shirt tucked into black pants, long hair pulled back in a loose braid. Halfway through my talk, the camera pans over the crowd again and this time your father is sitting up straight, smiling, eyes sparkling. Your father met me that day, but I didn’t meet him until weeks later when he wrote to tell me that what I had said was what he needed to hear, and asked if I would meet with him for coffee. I didn’t drink coffee so we met up for lunch. This was the answer we both gave to the most popular question of the day.

  The answer neither of us was prepared to give that day is the reason why I am writing these words to you, my children. How did your father and I meet?

  Your father and I met because in the late 1950s, long before either of us was born, America entered a war in Southeast Asia, in Laos, a country you know as the birthplace of your Tais Tais and Yawm Txiv. During the war, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States recruited Hmong people to fight and to die on America’s behalf. The Hmong were farmers from the high mountains, trained to tend to the earth. We could not win the fight against the communist soldiers. When Laos fell to communist rule, the Americans left the war with the highest-ranking Hmong military families. They abandoned hundreds of thousands of surviving Hmong to an incoming government that saw them
as enemies. My family was one of the families left behind to face genocide. To escape death, your Tais Tais and Yawm Txiv fled across the Mekong River into the refugee camps of Thailand. I was born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. I was born with no memories of the war, but stories of how we came to be in this place we couldn’t leave, waiting for food to come to us in huge trucks.

  Your father and I met because when the Americans left behind what would be called the Indochina Wars, they left millions of refugees in its aftermath. In South Vietnam alone, there were six million refugees, all fleeing persecution. Although most Americans did not know who the Hmong were or that the Americans had been involved in a war in Laos at all, President Gerald Ford signed into law the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975. This act allowed for the resettlement of refugees from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In 1987, my family was able to register as refugees of America’s Secret War in Laos through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and apply for resettlement to America. I was six years old. Your father was eight at the time, living a life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his mother and father, their friends and neighbors. Neither of us could have imagined that our futures would be shared.

  Your father and I met because against tremendous odds, some Hmong people survived that war; against incredible odds, some of us resettled to America. I, a refugee child, became a Hmong American girl who became a writer to tell the life story of a wondrous old woman. That writer was invited to give a talk at a conference. Your father, a young scholar, had been in that room and he heard me and wanted to hear more from me.

  Because your father and I met, you three are possible. Shengyeng first, with her eyes the color of seagrass. I held her little feet tight in my hand and felt the beat of her heart and my understanding of strength and fragility shifted forever. Thayeng and Yuepheng came together next, one possibility dividing into two, two little boys with matching eyes and noses and mouths, two little ones who came into the world with big voices although their bodies were small. Their cries were like sirens across the quiet landscape of my being and I ran from one to the other, pushed beyond the limits of what I believed my body could deliver. Before your father and I met, all three of you were unimaginable.

  My children, you have inherited a world full of war, a world that has always been full of war. You are the children of a refugee. Do not forget this fact.

  * * *

  The people in this book are people from your lives. Fong is an uncle of mine. Siah is a receptionist at the hospital where you were all born. Yara goes to the college we pass every day when I drop you off at school, on the edge of the highway, perched over downtown St. Paul. Kaw’s son and daughter go to school with you. Awo works at the college perched on the other side of the city, overlooking downtown. Afghanizada is a Lyft driver who stops for coffee at the café blocks from your school. Tommy is my dear friend. Chue is Tais Tais. Majra went to the college I would have gone to if I’d stayed in the Twin Cities. Mr. Michael’s daughter went to the college I ended up attending away from the Cities. Saymoukda’s picture book rests on your bedroom shelves. Every time we go to Big Daddy’s BBQ, we pass by Hai and Khanh’s restaurant. Irene sings her songs across these cities. The people in this book are people going through this storm with us all on this very night.

  When I was a teenager, reeling beneath the weight of my life and responsibilities, yearning to know the insides of a movie theater, exhausted from imagining what it was like, I told your Yawm Txiv that I didn’t want the life I had been granted. I wanted something better. I wanted something more. Your Yawm Txiv told me, “Life will teach you the strength of the human heart, not of its weakness or fragility.” His words have stayed with me and fortified my heart in many different moments of hardship. I hope that the stories in this book will do that for you and children everywhere: teach you the incredible strength of the human heart.

  * * *

  The storm that night did not cease; the lightning continued to flash and the sound of thunder echoed.

  Later, I dreamed that the creaking house we lived in was the house of our forever. I saw you three, your father, and me in the backyard, gathered around those wedding chairs, beneath the string of sparkling lights. Even in the dream, I knew that houses were not meant to last.

  When the paint of the metal chairs has chipped away and the ribbons at their backs have been torn into shreds by the storms of life, remember that somewhere in the unknown world, even without knowing who you would be, I was living for the day you would become, and even when I’m gone, I will look toward the edge of the horizon for your coming.

  —KAO KALIA YANG

  Logistics of Refugee Resettlement

  A refugee is a person outside of his or her own nationality, unwilling or unable to return to their home country because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. It is a legal status granted by state governments or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) after careful screening and vetting.

  Every October, the president of the United States, in consultation with Congress, sets a cap for the number of refugees we can take in as a country. The State Department is mandated with overseeing refugee resettlement. It works with nine national voluntary organizations that divvy up the humanitarian support for refugees with more than two hundred nonprofit organizations across the nation.

  Each refugee is expected to take out a no-interest loan for his or her own flight, with the first installment of the loan to be paid six months after the date of arrival.

  When a refugee arrives, each receives a onetime grant of $1,125 from the federal government to be issued by a refugee resettlement agency as it sees fit (generally $50 upon arrival, then $200 to $600 for food and other basic needs, and then the rest held in reserve for housing). Each resettlement agency gets $950 to help each refugee resettle. A refugee has the assistance of a refugee resettlement agency for some ninety days to set up the foundations of a life: secure housing, find jobs, address medical needs, navigate school enrollment, sign up for English-language courses, participate in cultural and safety orientation, and connect with community resources.

  Once the period is over, the refugee is expected to survive on his or her own.

  Perspectives from Refugee Resettlement Agencies

  Beyond headlines and political speeches, few know who refugees are or how we live. Fewer still gain access to our stories and our lives. We’ve lost much on our journeys, but the reality is that our stories continue upon our arrival or even as we wait for the possibility of resettlement somewhere.

  All of us within this book make our lives in Minnesota, a state that is not known for its diversity, but is thirteenth in the nation for refugee resettlement. Here in Minnesota, we have the highest concentration of Hmong and Tibetan refugees, the biggest Somali, Karen, Burmese, Eritrean, and Liberian refugee populations in the country. All of us live in a state that is predominantly white; non-Hispanic white Minnesotans represent 81 percent of the statewide population.

  There are few studies about the racial environment for refugee populations in the state, but Minnesota is one of the worst states in the nation in regard to racial inequality. Minnesota has the highest proportion of people of color, specifically black men, in our prison system; for every 100,000 Minnesotans, there are 1,219 black people incarcerated to 111 whites. Median household incomes for black families are not even half that of white families. The unemployment rate for black people is three times that of whites. Only 21.7 percent of black families own homes compared to 76 percent of white families. The racial environment here, like its climate, can be challenging and deadly.

  We also live in a state that has the most diverse neighborhood in the United States. The Phillips neighborhood in south Minneapolis speaks more than one hundred home languages. This state is home to the largest Cambodian Buddhist temple in the country and one of the largest Hindu temples in North America. The
University of Minnesota has more Chinese students than any other institution in North America. The Twin Cities has the largest number of Korean adoptees in the nation. We are the site of a $48 million, three-hundred-thousand-square-foot Muslim youth center mosque, the first of its kind in the nation and the largest Muslim mosque in America. The Twin Cities is the most literate city in the country. There are more volunteers to be found here for nonprofit causes than anywhere else. Minnesotans have the highest voting record of any state. We have a Muslim congresswoman and the first Hindu state representative. There are worlds within worlds in this place.

  For many of the refugees in this book, our lives here are possible because of the refugee resettlement agencies in the state. There were six in Minnesota: Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Catholic Charities of Southern Minnesota, International Institute of Minnesota, Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, Minnesota Council of Churches, and Arrive Ministries. In the course of the writing of this book, Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis has stopped its refugee resettlement work due to dwindling funds. Those that remain are just a few of the two hundred nonprofits across the country that handle the humanitarian work of resettling new refugees. Their perspectives are key in understanding the way refugees are welcomed and received across the nation.

  According to Ben Walen, division director of refugee services for Minnesota Council of Churches, who started on his professional journey as a young Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, once a refugee arrives, the process is “fast and furious.”

  He says, “Most refugees are in survival mode. They do not have time or energy to tell their stories; they are too busy learning the ropes: how to communicate, how to operate an American home, how to navigate public transport, feed their families, and stay calm. The first three months of a refugee’s life are a blur of new and challenging experiences. If a refugee suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, the signs don’t usually begin to show until after the first three months in America. Most refugee resettlement agencies do not have the funds or personnel to unravel the traumas of war with new refugees.”