Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life by Kao Kalia Yang
Never forget. No one understands this imperative better than the members of a persecuted ethnic minority. Kao Kalia Yang, who was born in a Thai refugee camp to Hmong parents from the mountains of Laos, has made it her mission to inscribe her people’s identity and fate in the consciousness of readers everywhere.
To date, the best known of Yang’s prizewinning books has been The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, which in 2022 was included in Esquire’s list of the greatest biographies of all time, and last year was adapted into an opera, with music by Jocelyn Hagen and a libretto by Yang. Now comes Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life, a companion volume on the diaspora of the Hmong in the wake of the Vietnam War.
