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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Latehomecomer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Politics, Refugee Camps, and Inhumanity
The Immigrant Experience
Death, Spirituality, and Home
Love and Family
Gender
Summary
Analysis
Kao Kalia Yang thinks about her time at the In Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand from 1980 to 1987. Her parents taught her that she is Hmong, which she thinks means being “contained” by Thai men with guns. In 1987, when Thailand wants to close its refugee camps and send the Hmong to the United States, Kao notices her parents trying to stop longing for their old lives and prepare for their new one. She knows that the Hmong don’t have a country—the Chinese didn’t want the Hmong people on their lands, so they fled to Laos. Then, they fought the French in Laos and lost.
For Yang, refugee life revolves around the physical hardships of living in squalid conditions and the mental anguish of feeling imprisoned (or “contained”). She also touches on how the Hmong lost access to their ancestral lands because of political events beyond their control. This surely left Hmong refugees feeling disoriented—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Indeed, Yang’s parents seem to be mourning their country and their heritage, unable to feign excitement about emigrating to the U.S. even though their living conditions there will almost certainly be an improvement than on the Thai refugee camp.
Themes
When American pilots dropped into Hmong villages in Laos during the Vietnam War, they made some Hmong people believe in democracy—but they took those people and made them die in the war. A third of the Hmong people died in that war, and another third were killed in the war’s aftermath. The rest fled into the jungle and were left to fend for themselves. Kao has been in St. Paul, Minnesota since 1987. People ask her where she’s from all the time, and she’s learned to say that she’s an ethnic minority without a home. After many years in the United States, she began reconnecting with her heritage.
Yang continues laying out the broader social history of when her story is set. She notes here that, during the Vietnam War, Americans and Vietnamese forces alike coerced the Hmong into fighting for their respective sides. Yang emphasizes that the Hmong’s plight of statelessness is not their fault, as it was caused by an international conflict that was beyond their control. Meanwhile, she alludes to the fact that living as a refugee the U.S. distances her from her identity as a Hmong person, since people are often critical about who Yang is and where she’s from.
Themes
