Review: "Where Rivers Part" by Kao Kalia Yang

Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang
Published March 2024 via Atria
★★★★

Yang was six when she came with her family to the US. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand—where her parents lived for almost a decade—she did not know her family's native Laos, but she is clearly determined to not let her family's Hmong history be forgotten. She's previously told her father's story and more broadly her family's (as well as other books about refugee and immigrant life); now, in Where Rivers Part, Yang turns her lens to her mother, Tswb's, story.

My mom is afraid that no one will be interested in a story about her life. She and my father tell me that just because they have lived hard lives doesn't mean they are incredible; they both remind me that the hardness in their lives is nothing more than the sorrow they share with those who have been through wars, who know poverty, who understand what it's like to live without power or belonging on your side. My mom is afraid that I have wasted my time in writing the story of her life. (loc. 28*)

And, well. I'm glad Yang didn't listen. Her mother's story might be similar to that of other refugees, but if anything that makes it more powerful rather than less. It's a hell of a book, with a hell of a through-line: in the wilds of Laos, fleeing the violence that had turned their quiet lives upside-down, Tswb made the decision to marry, to leave her family for another. The act of leaving her mother would haunt her for decades to come.

By the light of the moon, I [Tswb] dug a hole big enough to bury the photographs I had kept with me of my mother, my father, myself, my sisters, and my brothers. I wished I had a plastic bag to keep the photographs in. One day, I wanted to return for the photographs, old black-and-white images that blossomed and bloomed with color in my memories of what we had shared. (loc. 1679)

Either Yang and her mother had some incredibly detailed conversations and interviews about Tswb's life, or Yang has an incredibly empathetic imagination; either way, the complexity of emotion and experience that Tswb goes through in the course of this book is devastating. (I'd love to know more about the process of writing the book, because even if Tswb didn't think her story worth telling, she clearly trusted her daughter to do it right.) It's not just the obvious losses—home and homeland, deaths, loss of a known or at least expected future—but things like having to leave behind the graves of loved ones; having to leave behind the only pictures you have of those loved ones; not knowing when or if you'll ever see any of those people and things again. And: the moment Twsb says I had known your [her children's] father's mother for longer than I had known mine. (loc. 3575) There are moments of beauty in here too, and of joy, but it's the wrestling with loss and grief that hits the hardest.

The Latehomecomer was already on my TBR, but I'm even more eager to read it now...and then I may have to add The Song Poet to the mix as well.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.