Death, Spirituality, and Home Theme Analysis

In The Latehomecomer, author Kao Kalia Yang shows that Hmong spirituality is closely connected to physical places and objects. According to the Hmong, when a person dies, their spirit must travel back to their ancestral lands and reunite with their ancestors. The Hmong also believe that objects from a person’s life guide their spirits through this post-death journey. Yang emphasizes that it’s deeply important to Hmong communities that they live physically close to their ancestral lands and retain their possessions. She explains that those who die without proper funerals, far away from their ancestors’ homelands, or without symbolic possessions to guide them after death, risk wandering forever as lost, suffering spirits in the afterlife. Yang thus highlights that war and exile make it harder for the Hmong to honor such traditions, which causes them deep spiritual anxieties. Yang ultimately stresses that the physical loss of their possessions and homeland is doubly painful for the Hmong—they believe that this loss causes lasting damage, not only in life, but also in death.

Hmong spirituality is deeply tied to physical objects, which the Hmong believe are important for their post-death journeys to reunite with their ancestor’s spirits. Yang shows that the Hmong thus experience deep spiritual anxiety from being separated from their possessions. When Yang’s grandmother Youa dies in exile in Minnesota, the funeral guide places Youa’s social security card in her body’s hand, saying that she’ll need it for her post-death journey back to her ancestral lands in Laos. With this, he reveals that ordinary objects from a person’s life hold deep spiritual significance for the Hmong. Yang also explains that an important part of marriage ceremonies is gift giving, as the Hmong believe that objects passed down from older to younger people enable them to reconnect after death. Being parted from such possessions is deeply distressing for the Hmong, because they believe such losses will make them suffer after death. When Yang’s mother, Chue, has to cross the Mekong River while fleeing Laos, she can’t take her family photos and wedding presents with her, so she buries them in a place she’ll remember. Having to part with the objects causes Chue deep anxiety, as she worries about her spirit not finding her family after death without such objects. Chue’s actions show that the Hmong believe physical objects are important in Hmong spirituality, and that being separated from those objects by events like war and genocide is thus doubly stressful.

Hmong spirituality is also connected to the community’s ancestral homelands, and living and dying so far away—because of war and exile—causes deep worry for the Hmong, who believe their spirits will suffer if they cannot find their way back to their ancestral lands after death. When Yang’s grandmother Youa dies, the funeral guide gives Youa’s spirit explicit directions to retrace her steps back from the United States to her homeland in Laos, via all the places she’s lived (including several refugee camps in Thailand). The guide even directs Youa to a specific bridge where her spirit can cross the Mekong River from Thailand into Laos, because he knows that Youa couldn’t swim when she was alive. The level of detail that the guide goes into shows that the Hmong believe their spirits travel just like a living person would, which explains why they have so much anxiety about dying so far away from home—the distance makes the post-death journey even more arduous. Yang also explains that part of her community’s grief for people who died in the war without proper funeral rituals (which give their spirits the directions they need to return home) centers on the fear that those people’s spirits will get lost, which adds to her community’s suffering. Similarly, When Yang’s family are preparing to emigrate from a Thai refugee camp to the United States, Youa worries that “my spirit would not be able to find its way across the ocean,” showing that she’s terrified of  moving so far away from her ancestral lands because she worries her spirit will not be able to find its way back to her ancestral lands after death. Yang’s father, Bee, also has a nightmare about dying in the United States. He imagines his spirit wandering around “big American cities with loud cars and bright lights […] in lonely circles,” unable to find its way home to “the land of our ancestors.” Like Youa, Bee worries about life in exile because he thinks living so far away from his ancestral home will doom his spirit to suffer after death. Yang thus shows, through her exploration of Hmong spirituality and death rituals, that being separated from their ancestral homeland and their family possessions compounds the Hmong community’s anxieties—beyond the hardships that such events cause in their lives, the Hmong also fear the suffering it will cause them after death.