BookDragon Blog

“The people in this book are people from your lives,” Kao Kalia Yang writes to her three sleeping children in the final chapter of her affecting hybrid nonfiction collection, Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir. Minnesota – where Yang has lived for 32-plus years, since landing as a six-year-old Hmong refugee via Thailand – is the state with the most refugees per capita, with significant populations of Hmong, Tibetan, Somali, Karen, Burmese, Eritrean, and Liberian transplants. “This much is known, but few know who we are or how we live.” In response, Yang presents 14 individuals’ stories here; rather than full histories, her chapters offer glimpses of lives before, of escapes, of stopovers, of arrivals, of transformation.

She begins with the voices of children who miraculously survived the destruction in their native countries: Irina escaped Belarus; Awo, Somalia; Bayan, Syria. Majra, from Bosnia, grows up to work with the American Refugee Committee to “help rebuild what wars had broken.” Adult refugees are forced to make unbearable choices in seeking a better future, like Kaw Thaw, who abandons his Karen parents, partner, and their three children in Myanmar for new love on the other side of the world, and Afghanzada, who flees the Taliban at the cost of his father’s disappearance. While physical safety becomes possible, devastating memories linger for Chue Moua, who suffers post-traumatic depression, and for Fong Lee – his story is the collection’s most haunting – who can never forget the young sisters he couldn’t save. As refugee families settle, generations pass and begin anew: Saymoukda examines her relationship with her dying Laotian mother; Mr. Truong enables his son Hai to reinvent the family’s Vietnamese restaurant.

Following the award-winning success of her memoirs, The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet, “Other refugees asked me to tell their stories, but I wasn’t ready.” The past few years changed that: “I could not fail to see an America … that seeks to define itself by casting its vulnerable immigrants and incoming refugees to the margins of society.” While personal experiences cannot be judged, narratively, as literature, some stories prove stronger and more affecting than others. An epilogue would have strengthened the work, providing a fuller overview for readers to further invest in each of the family and friends Yang introduces. That said, these voices are here, their stories are here, to provide an intimate window into once faraway lives, now intertwined together in a community they call home.

Shelf Talker: Award-winning memoirist Kao Kalia Yang gives intimate voice to 14 refugees from around the world who, like Yang, call Minnesota home.

Review: Shelf Awareness Pro, September 17, 2020

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2020