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The NEA Big Read: Fox Cities Reads 2020 selection is The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang.

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir  is the first memoir written by a Hmong-American to be published with national distribution. Driven to tell her family’s story—and the story of the Hmong people—Yang wrote it as a “love letter” to her grandmother whose spirit held her family together through their imprisonment in Laos, their harrowing escape across the Mekong River and into a refugee camp in Thailand, their immigration to Minnesota when Yang was only six years old, and their transition to a hard life in America. “Yang has performed an important service in bringing readers the stories of a people whose history has been shamefully neglected,” writes KIRKUS.

Kao Kalia Yang was born in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand and moved when she was six with her family to St. Paul, Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Hmong in the country. They began their life in the U.S. living on welfare in public housing until her parents took on multiple jobs to feed their family. To fill her time, especially during the long winters and because she couldn’t afford to attend movies or concerts, Yang would read. While she loved books like the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Yang recalls asking the librarian for books about people like her. “She gave me a book about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, but she couldn’t give me a book about Hmong kids.” That was one of her first callings to write, which was easier for her than speaking English.

Since the publication of her first memoir, Yang has been an avid public speaker on such topics as literacy and education; race, class, and gender; and the refugee and immigrant experiences. She has made a deep impact on the lives of, among others, Hmong readers and American Vietnam war veterans who have come to her readings.