Where Rivers Part
A Story of My Mother's Life
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This powerful memoir about a Hmong family’s epic journey to safety is a profound “testament to the miraculous strength of women and the indomitable resolve of the human spirit” (Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans).
Born in 1961 in war-torn Laos, Tswb’s childhood was marked by the violence of America’s Secret War and the CIA recruitment of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities into the lost cause. By the time Tswb was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were labeled as traitors. Fearing for their lives, Tswb and her family left everything they knew behind and fled their village for the jungle.
Perpetually on the run and on the brink of starvation, Tswb eventually crossed paths with the man who would become her future husband. Leaving her own mother behind, she joined his family at a refugee camp, a choice that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Eventually becoming a mother herself, Tswb raised her daughters in a state of constant fear and hunger until they were able to emigrate to the US, where the determined couple enrolled in high school even though they were both nearly thirty and worked grueling jobs to provide for their children.
Now, her daughter, Kao Kalia Yang, reveals her mother’s astonishing saga with tenderness and clarity, giving voice to the countless resilient refugees who are often overlooked as one of the essential foundations of this country. “Haunting and painfully relevant” (Booklist), Where Rivers Part is destined to become a classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I wanted to claim the legacy of the woman I came from," Yang (Somewhere in the Unknown World) writes in the introduction to this gripping and compassionate account of her mother's escape from war-torn Laos. Her mother, Tswb, was born to a Hmong family in Laos in 1961. In 1975, after the end of the Vietnam War, communist forces began hunting down Hmong families because some had been recruited by the CIA to fight alongside American forces during the war. A teenage Tswb and her family first sought safety in Laotian jungles, then in Thai refugee camps. By 1980, Tswb had resettled in Bangkok, where Yang was born. In its second half, the narrative shifts to Minnesota, where Yang and her parents relocated in 1987. Living in a housing project, working in factories, and attending school at night, Tswb felt "rendered invisible" by her inability to provide more than the basic necessities for Yang and her five siblings. When Tswb's mother died in Laos circa 2020, Tswb returned to reconnect with the land and people she left behind. Yang writes much of the account from Tswb's perspective, giving tender voice to her struggles with the competing demands of family duty and personal fulfillment. The results are illuminating, uplifting, and difficult to forget.
Customer Reviews
Much of the book is awe inspiring
I’m so impressed with Tswb and the challenges she faced. She is a remarkable woman who was able to inspire her children to become educated and have careers. Truly a success story. But I couldn’t finish the last couple of chapters because she goes on and on about the whole country being racist. And that is not fair. To label over 300 million people that way is wrong. She never has anything good to say about America. That wasn’t fair of her. But I admire what she was able to do with her life and I wish her peace.