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I chose Kao Kalia Yang to write about. Yang was born in December 1980 in a refugee camp in Thailand. She and her family moved to Minnesota in 1987. At first, she had a challenging time with language, but later she became very skilled at writing. She thanks her sister's creative stories and her high school English teacher for helping her. Yang's memoirs, like The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet, talk about family, strength, and the experiences of Hmong refugees. Her work is important because it keeps Hmong culture alive while also talking about common human experiences like feeling lost and finding out who they are. Yang writes to celebrate her background and share the unspoken stories of her community. She has a special talent for turning personal and shared heartache into beautiful stories, which is both touching and inspiring. As I read her writing, her clear pictures of loss, love, and survival make me feel sympathy and respect for the Hmong people's experiences with war and migration; she tells a cool story!!

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Macmillan PublishersKao Kalia Yang | Authors | Macmillan

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Local author releases collective memoir of refugee stories – The ...

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Burlee Vang is a Hmong American poet, filmmaker, and educator whose work explores the complexities of identity, memory, and the trauma of war and displacement. Born in central California to refugee parents who fled Laos after the Vietnam War, Vang writes to preserve the stories of his people and to give voice to the silenced experiences of the Hmong diaspora. His poetry is intimate and haunting, often grounded in nature and familial memory. What resonates most is his ability to transform grief into beauty. Each line feels like an act of cultural survival, a way to reclaim what history tried to erase.

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I chose to reflect on Andre Yang because his reflection and experience on the fire at the Nam Yo Refugee camp in 1980 is graphic yet intriguing. His work resonates with me because in his biography, he claims that writing is his best way to pay tribute, and as a historian, I feel like that is a good way to approach life when writing about traumatic events. But one quote from his poem that I thought was quite moving is when he says, "Did they not carry all they owned when fleeing the tyranny of Laos?" This is a common theme and misconception throughout history because when people are fleeing tyranny, sometimes they just don't have the time to take everything with them, and in some cases, they could only take the things in their pockets.

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The author I chose to write about is Khaty Xiong. Khaty Xiong is a professor who was inspired to write about her experiences and memories. Khaty wrote in poems which was a different writing path than she would normally take, and in her poetry, her mother was symbolized in some way. In her poem, "Journey of a Shaman", she reflects on her mother's experience and pain, "For weeks my mother mourned like fog, refusing eyes and flesh". Her mother had a lot of memories and wounds that are tied to her past and cruel experience, "I wondered about the red moles laced into her swollen arms, how they'd find their way to her plump cheeks, swimming in her blood". Overall what she wanted was to be free and let go of this trauma, "Niam, please, let us rest".

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I chose to write about Anthony Cody. His biography includes details about how he used to share stories with his grandmother about the future. His grandmother is now passed, but he explains "These moments are often overlooked because they are typical within our experience, but they are rich with the essence of our identity." Through his writing, he wishes to connect people all over the world with universal human experiences, things as simple as driving. In his poem "After Drowning: Turn Your Head When You Hear Your Name", he writes about a mother who holds her son in his last moments. He states "clutching her son who dangles, blue-lipped and lifeless among machines and antiseptic..." He writes this poem to remind people of the reality of life.

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I chose to reflect on May Lee Yang's poetry because I think it is important to create art for your own people. She talks about the popularized need to "educate the mainstream" instead of creating authentic art for her own people. In actuality, this creates a sense of agency and power within the Hmong people, knowing that their narritives are written for themselves. In her poem "Ending" she uses straightforward words to talk about how the ending words can be interpreted in many ways when they change. A word can mean one thing, and with a simple letter change, its meaning becomes another. In a way that is extremely culturally significant and beautiful,it also portrays the simpler parts of the Hmong language and culture, somewhat preserving it. "Screw up the last letter and fish turns into salt, horse into human".

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Ying Thao writes for the Hmong GLBT community, for the reasoning that neither of them have a voice. Thao wants to introduce the struggles of this community to the world, specifically through the lense of Non-fiction. Thao stands by his identity as Hmong, seeing this as his identity before anything else. I found this connection of two communities without voices to be profound.

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I think the reason Mai Der Vang wrote In the End is because of every culture's fear of becoming non-existent. Cultural writtings exist not only to educate its people, but to keep a record of the existence of that culture so that future generations can learn its history. I find this theme in the quote, "In the end, all we may be able to do is to present out very best. And let the next take over." Vang's message of how all things, even culture, will eventually come to an end resonates with me.

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I choose to use Xai Lee as I felt his story impactful in the way he portrayed his culture through use of words in a game of scrabble.

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This writer's intentions in his poems are in the intention of provoking the beauty of his families history through the use of simple stories to convey strong moral messages. The implications are to show the persecution of his people, through struggle, tragedy and triumph. The simplicity of the stories serve to strengthen the message by implicating the meaning of the story through the use of words, as shown by the game of scrabble. An excerpt: " I'm playing Scrabble, At the funeral on English Street, With Idle Children, Who already know: Death"

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I chose to write about Soul Vong. Soul Vang received an MFA from California State University, Fresno. He is the author of Song of the Cluster Bomblet (forthcoming from Blue Oak Press) and To Live Here(Imaginary Friend Press, 2014). A U.S. Army Veteran, Vang received the Fresno Arts Council’s Horizon Award and is an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC). He is very sweet and very thoughtful typing his experiences to thing others outside his ethnic group can understand.

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I chose to reflect and write about Yia Lee. What drew me to her is how her biography mentioned that she creates her art by identifying as an artist, rather than simply focusing on her identity to create meaningful art. As a Hmong American artist, she focuses her creations on her identity, culture, and the Hmong experience while also incorporating her own personal narratives to address social and political issues related to the Hmong community.

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May Lee Yang’s poetry catered to the Hmong people, after she recognized that there is a lack of resources for the people within her community and more of those that sacrificed its art to educate the mainstream. She wrote the poem “Endings”, playing with the Hmong words and how a single change in them could change their entire meaning. It ended with how a girl is called “ntxhais”, and without the s, she becomes water left over from cooking rice. I believe this implied the philosophy and cultural aspects of relating everyday objects to each other.

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I chose to write about Burlee Vang. After reflecting, I think that the reason Burlee Vang wrote the poem Slaughterhouse Dream was to deal with personal grief and/or trauma. The act of writing transforms grief into an outlet for art or creative expression. What resonated with me was the imagery, such as the "fluids & smells." Another thing that resonated with me was the connection between empath, as shown in the poem, and the potential empathy of identification that went into writing the poem. Overall, I think that Burlee Vang writes to express his trauma and to transform it into a work of art rather than a traumatic memory.