The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

Written by Kao Kalia Yang

Narrated by Kao Yang

In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. #160;

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781681681634

Kao Kalia Yang

Kao Kalia Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to America at the age of six. She is the author of The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, Yang Warriors, and most recently, Where Rivers Part. She also coedited What God Is Honored Here? and is the author of a collective memoir about refugee lives called Somewhere in the Unknown World. Find out more at KaoKaliaYang.com.

Reviews for The Song Poet

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

nonfiction/lyrical memoir (Hmong Americans). This book got very good reviews so if you are interested in the topic give it a try.
It is possible that I just can't read books about poets of any sort, but may try to locate a copy of the author's first memoir to read instead.

[st5croixsue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a beautifully written biography of Kao Kalia Yang’s father who was driven from the mountains of Laos to become a refugee and immigrant in Minnesota. A remarkable work that has the ability to transport you into the lives and hearts of a close immigrant Hmong family in Minnesota. It also fills in the story of Kao and her immediate and extended family. This would make a great book club selection.

[mdbrady_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lyrical account by a Hmong woman of her father who was a traditional “song poet” who told the stories of his people’s joy and pain in his songs.Kao Kalia Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to the United States with her parents as an infant. She has written her own prize-winning memoir, The Late Homecomer. Now she tells her father’s story, sometimes in his words and sometimes in her own.Bee Yang was born in a mountain village in Laos at the beginning of the Laotian Civil War. His father died when he was two and he grew up fatherless. He was a lonely child who would “go from the house of one neighbor to the next collecting beautiful things people had to say to each other. By myself, I whispered the words to comfort my heart. One day, the words escaped in a sigh and a song was born.”First soldiers and then bombs came to the village, leaving the people grieving. “The only way I could meet their pain was to take it inside of me, into my flesh, and feel the pain of the Hmong blood pulse through my veins, fill my heart, and overflow.” Trying to escape the fighting proved futile. As a young man, Bee Yang married and the couple was held in a refugee camp in Thailand. Finally they were able to come to the United States where they settled in Minnesota. He took a job as a machinist in order to fulfill his duty to protect and provide for his growing family. He rarely performed his song poems before the job ruined his health and his voice. By then he had provided his children with the good father he had never had, and he insured that they in turn could sing.Kao Kalia Yang has reconstructed her father’s life and songs as if they were recordings on a tape. In doing so, she creates a beautiful and powerful tribute to him. She not only gives readers a rarely told piece of migration history; she also provides us with warm and loving images of him and of the pain of her people.I recommend this book to all interested in immigration and cultural change and to all who are sensitive to the beauty of words.

[streamsong_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hmong song poets tell the stories of their lives, their people and their countries in song. This is a love letter from the author telling of her father, Bee Yang's, life.Bee was a farmer in a small Hmong village in Laos. Unfortunately the Hmong were seldom left undisturbed. When the communists moved out, the Americans moved in and built a secret prison there. When the Americans moved out, the Laotians began an extermination of anyone having anything to do with the Americans. Since for many Hmong, there was no choice except to cooperate with the Americans, a genocide began. Bee, his wife, mother, and several small children made it to Thailand, running and hiding in the jungle, seeing friends and families killed before their eyes.From the Thai refugee camp, the Yang's eventually made their journey to America. But America has not been overly welcoming to the Hmong. Bee Yang found work as a machinist in a factory, doing the dirtiest sort of manual labor amidst noise that left him deafened.And the culture itself became undercut by the very American dream that he instilled in his children:”No one had told us that education would change the way you felt about the world and the people in it, that it could give you words to use; and actions to take, not in support of those who love you but as a response to them, that education in America would make our father and mother less educated in our eyes.” p 186Gradually Bee lost his songs. After his mother's death, he sang his poetry no more.This is a wonderful book, beautifully written from the heart. I learned so much about the Hmong people and about their immigration experience in America.

[kjmcpheeters · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kao Kalia Yang's The Song Poet is a cleverly structured memoir of a girl and her father whose upbringings are worlds apart. The use of tracks instead of chapters and sides A and B instead of parts were endearing and remind the reader of the pervasiveness of music in the lives of the two narrators, even when the songs are no longer sung out loud. The characters of Kalia and her father, Bee, develop well over the course of the book, giving the reader additional insight and weaving their lives together in a way that feels complete at the end. The book's first side starts slow, in keeping with the peaceful beginnings for Bee that are quickly cracked and begin to shatter as his story progresses, and it builds in character depth and becomes more of a page turner as it continues. While I enjoyed the book, there was one element that gave me pause. The first has to do with character voice. The voices of Bee and Kalia are strikingly similar--to the point where they sound too close to being the same person instead of father and daughter. I was provided a printed copy in return for an honest review.

[reallifereading · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have so much love for this book that I don’t know how to write about it. Will you just bypass it because, it’s a book that you haven’t heard of? Or maybe you don’t read memoirs? Or non-fiction? Why am I being so negative? Maybe instead you are excited because it is a book you’ve not heard much of! Maybe it’s interesting because it is memoir! Non-fiction! Hurrah!Amazingly, I won The Song Poet from a Library Thing giveaway. (I seriously have the worst of luck when it comes to book giveaways). And what is perhaps more amazing is that I picked up the book and read it, within a few weeks of receiving it. I am a bit of a hoarder when it comes to physical books. I buy them and then, save them for the end of the world or something.Anyway, the book must have called out to me. It was meant to be. And it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. A book that sings and cries, a book that laughs and shudders. A book I brought along on a Bart ride to the city to pick up my passport from the Singapore consulate. It sat with me on the crowded train, it rocketed up many storeys up to the consulate building, then it basked in the sunlight at Ferry Building where I sipped a tiny and expensive mocha and watched the traffic on the Bay Bridge.This may sound silly but I first learnt of the Hmong on the TV series Grey’s Anatomy. Grey’s Anatomy may be overdramatic and too many ridiculous things happen to one doctor at one hospital (she puts her hand in a body with a bomb, she steps in front of a gunman etc). But it was also one of the very very few popular primetime TV series to have a lead Asian character, and it wasn’t about Christina Yang being Korean. Or Asian. She was just a doctor. A friend. A crazy, intense, very intelligent person. But still. She was a person. But this episode has nothing to do with Yang. An episode in Season Two featured a patient, a young woman, who needed surgery but because she is Hmong, her father refuses. They decide to call in a shaman before surgery. I hadn’t the faintest idea if this was a good portrayal of the Hmong culture or not (the blog Petite Hmong Mommy found it kinda ridiculous) but it made me wonder about the Hmong culture. I later learnt more by reading Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, published in 1997, a work of non-fiction about a young Hmong girl living in Merced, California, who suffers from epilepsy. It is a moving, tragic book, in case you haven’t yet read it. But it is not by a Hmong so it’s still from the point of view of an outsider looking in.The Song Poet seemed to me like your typical refugee in America kind of memoir at first. But the prologue opens with ‘Album Notes’, in which Yang writes about calling her father, Bee, a poet.“I grew up hearing my father digging into words for images that will stretch the limits of life for my siblings and me. In my father’s mouth, bitter, rigid words become sweet and elastic like taffy candy. His poetry shields us from the poverty of our lives.”His song poetry is hard to explain, and Yang describes it as such:“The only way I know how to describe it as a form in English is to say: my father raps, jazzes, and sings the blues when he dwells in the landscape of traditional Hmong song poetry.”It sounds fascinating.The Song Poet is a story of struggle, of hardship, of determination, and quite simply of back-breaking, hardworking parents trying to make enough money to put a roof over their family’s heads, to put food in their kids’ mouths. This is a story that moves from Laos, to Thailand, to Minneapolis. And it is so very very difficult, to read of all the pain that other people put this family through, because they are different, because they are Hmong. They were driven from the Laos because of war and communism. In Thailand they lived in refugee camps, where the author was born. Then wanting to be more than just refugees, the family traveled to America. But in America, their lives are still difficult – Bee takes on backbreaking, dangerous work at a factory in order to make ends meet. His wife works the morning shift, he works the night shift. Just so that there is a parent around for their children.Yang’s voice is just beautiful. My favourite part of the book is ‘Side A, Track 4: Love Song’, where she writes from her father’s perspective of his love for his wife Chue Moua, and all the many things that they have gone through, many miscarriages, across countries. I read and reread that chapter, trying to find something to quote here, but it is a chapter to be read as a whole. A few sentences, a paragraph, wouldn’t do justice to this emotional chapter.Instead, I will leave you here with a quote from another part of the book. Equally unforgettable.“In America, my voice is only powerful within our home. The moment I exit our front door and enter the paved roads, my deep voice loses its volume and its strength. When I speak English, I become like a leaf in the wind. I cannot control the direction my words will fly in the ear of the other person. I try to soften my landing in the language by leaving pauses between each word. I wrestle my accent until it is a line of breath in the tightness of my throat. I greet people. I ask for directions. I say thank you. I say goodbye. I only speak English at work when it is necessary. I don’t like the weakness of my voice in English, but what I struggle with most is the weakness of my words.”

[susannapathak · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Told in voices of the father, the song poet, and his daughter, author Kao Kalia Yang, this memoir is brimming with tender and deeply felt moments of life and strife in a contemporary Hmong family. Recounting the lives of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren, the stories navigate the chasm between homeland and life in Minnesota, the pull of tradition and the experience of the migrant parents who labor in the depths of their souls to make way to a better life for the good of the family. The father, Bee, has carried poetry drawn from life including dark struggles in Laos. These songs were never written down, and the memoir prevents the potential loss of the songs which are so lyrical and spiritual that they are profound. The daughter’s lens on her father’s life and talent is at first that of a little girl, but powerful and filled with gestures of love and care as well as pain and loss in the family. There is a simple clarity in the writing that rises to the spiritual and at the same time sweeps to the very dirt on the path each member of the family takes registering the ties that bind them. The songs express these ties and these paths. Each reader will wish for more of Bee's songs and at the same time share his daughter’s abundant gratitude for the rich experience of life they express, with its range of joys and sorrows, harshness and sweetness. It is a compelling and a remarkable book of family and culture for those who seek to understand the immigrant experience of what endures and is carried from a homeland.

[mcdenis-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Words have a magic quality to call forth memories, hidden emotions, express anger or harmonize to poetic cadence. The Song Poet is such a book. Written with tender regard, the memories stir one’s emotions and remind us that our family journey, ordinary to us can be meaningful to others when we share the journey. This was a very special and touching read.I was provided with a printed copy in return for an honest review.

[tom471 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A "Song Poet" in Laos is a person who sings songs about his family, his village and his country. This is a story of a Hmong refugee living in Minnesota and the songs he sings from memory. He sings of Laos before "the iron birds that dropped balls of fire from the sky."This is a story of tragedy and loss. "I loved you during our sixth miscarriage..."(during an eleven year stay in a Thailand refugee camp).The author has written this book out of love for her father. This book started slow, but once I was a third of the way in, I was immersed in the stories and culture of the Hmong people and it went very fast. This book is a solid 4 out of 5 stars. I want to thank the publisher for sending me this book through LibraryThing in return for an honest review.

[banjo123 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

[[Kao Kalia Yang]]’s first book [The Latecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir] was a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.] She is a beautiful writer, and it turns out that she comes by her way with words honestly. Her father, Bee Yang, was a song poet in the Hmong tradition. [[Kao Kalia Yang]] used tapes of her fathers work in order to write his story in [The Song Poet]. [[Kalia Yang]] describes the watching her father perform at a Hmong New Year celebration when she was a girl in Minnesota: “When my father began to sing, I watched him as a stranger would. I saw a man standing still, his left hand holding a microphone, his right smoothing the side of his suit jacket. There was a firmness to the set of his jaw, and appearance of reckoning in his straight stance. The steadiness of my father’s voice reached out to me. His “Niajya” the preamble to the form called out across the crowd. He looked at the people, from one side of the arena to the other. He trained his gaze high over us, at the people sitting up in the stands. As he sang, it seemed he saw through the steel beams and cement walls that surrounded us and out into the world we had ventured from. It was a song of grieving. The song was a cry for a New Year that once was a time for rest after the bountiful harvest, for the old to call upon the young, for all to walk together toward the future of a sun on the rise. There was a moment of transition, and then my father sang “The flash of light that turned the world dark, the sounds of exploding suns across the sky, the cries that rang forth in the place of laughter.” A new quiet entered into the arena; his voice softened, his tones lengthened. “Lost are the ones who run through jungles without shoes, the young screaming for their elders to run faster, a giant moon on the other side of a river, the glittering water a mirror for what will come.” People started weeping. Men and women reached into pockets and purses and came forth with folded pieces of wrinkled napkins’ they tore up the napkins to share; those with nothing in hand began wiping away their tears on their sleeves.”The book is told alternately in Bee and Kalia’s voices. Through a series of short pieces, focusing on different family members, we hear the story of Bee’s childhood in Laos, his marriage, escape to a refugee camp in Thailand (where Kalia was born), eventual move to St. Paul, Minnesota, and life as a menial worker, struggling to get by and make a better life for his children. Bee Yang, and his wife Chue became US citizens just in time to vote for Barack Obama. I loved the way the book gave me new insights into the refugee and immigrant experience and how it impacts parents. The book is very sweet in its descriptions of family relations. At times it is a bit too sentimental, but especially in the second half, there are some very honest descriptions of difficult family relations

[bayleaf_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father is one of the most beautiful and insightful books I have read in a long time. At its heart author Kao Kalia Yang has written a loving tribute to her father Bee Yang. Bee is a song poet, a man who with his family escaped war-torn Laos, survived a refugee camp in Thailand, and landed in Minnesota, to share his words of loss and longing with others like him who find themselves in a place not only cold in climate, but often cold at heart. I lived in the Twin Cities in the 70s when many Hmong were relocated there from the camps. I would see the women on the streets in their native dress covered by Goodwill coats to keep out the winter chill. I worked at a college where first-generation American-born Hmong students worked hard at their studies, did not live in the residence halls, and left each day to go home to their families in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It took this book to make me see what they were going home to. They were helping younger family members with homework, explaining paperwork to older family members with no understanding of the endless bureaucracy that can frustrate even those of us who trace our families back several generations, and driving parents to doctors’ appointments to translate symptoms and remedies. Bee Yang and his wife Chue worked in factories so their children could have a better life. They suffered indignities and work-related ill health, but kept the mountains of Laos and those they left behind in their hearts. While reading The Song Poet, I could not help but think of today’s refugee/migrant situation in Europe. If it weren’t for the Vietnam War and the situation the Yangs and others found themselves in in Laos, they would not have chosen to leave their homes, spend eight years in horrible conditions in refugee camps in Thailand, and then move to a country foreign to them in climate and culture, where they were often unwanted and ill treated. I think that is the same now. It is not by choice that people leave their homes and sometimes family. It is because hostile forces tear them from them. Unfortunately, as Bee Yang says in The Song Poet, “Now, in America, he had accepted that there was no such thing as a safe country, and that he was destined to live and to die a poor man. In each country he has lost something of himself. “ I learned a lot from the Yangs.

[diannebottinelli · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kao kalia Yang tells the true story of her father, Bee Yang, a Hmong refugee, and his journey to escape war . He lives in a refugee camp in Thailand for eight years, and then is allowed to come to the USA, and then is placed in Minnesota to work and live. Before this, in his childhood, Bee would wander from one place to the next collecting stories of his people, whispering the things said to each other, until one day a song was born.This is the story of hardship, love of family, discrimination, and strength. The songs become a beacon of hope when life has become almost unbearable for this family.. This is a must read as the challenges are current for all the displaced people seeking freedom from war today.