Politics, Refugee Camps, and Inhumanity Theme Analysis

The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir of her family’s lives as Hmong refugees, questions the inhumane experiences that refugees are subjected to in today’s world. Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1980, a few years after her family fled the Hmong genocide in Laos in the wake of the Vietnam War. Although Yang’s family knows that being alive in a Thai refugee camp is better than being dead in Laos, their experiences in several camps are nonetheless utterly dehumanizing. Yang grows up malnourished, living in squalor, and surrounded by sickness and death. Moreover, her parents (Chue and Bee) and grandmother (Youa) suffer the humiliation of losing their freedom and being treated like they’re less than human. In exposing the dire conditions that refugees face, Yang questions the cruelty of a world that punishes people for being stateless, especially when their statelessness is forced upon them by wars and politics that have little to do with their own communities.   

Throughout the story, Yang highlights the physical squalor, starvation, sickness, and death in refugee camps to underscore the inhumane conditions in which most refugees are often forced to live. Many camps don’t have toilets, and people are forced to sleep on platforms above their own excrement, surrounded by a “stream of urine and diluted feces.” Yang’s mother, Chue, becomes obsessed with keeping her children clean, and her family suffers deeply from the “stench and humiliation of human waste,” all of which emphasizes that being forced to live in such squalid conditions is utterly inhumane. The refugees subsist on meager, rotten soup rations, which cause widespread malnourishment and sickness. Yang notes that sometimes, soldiers squirt food at refugees out of a hose—much like the way farmers feed animals—highlighting further daily humiliations that refugees must face to access basic human needs like food.

Yang also emphasizes the emotional anguish of being treated as less than human and feeling perpetually caged, underscoring the cruel mental suffering that refugees must endure. When Yang’s parents are herded into a refugee camp, a soldier knocks her father, Bee, down for fun. Bee wonders why the soldier doesn’t see that Bee is “a man too,” showing that he feels dehumanized by the experience. Yang’s parents wake up after their first night of being fenced in at a camp to find the local community staring and pointing at them, emphasizing once more that they’re treated more like animals in a zoo than like human beings. Many of the Hmong refugees also feel trapped in their state of perpetual waiting—they’re unable to go back home, and they’re unable to move forward in their lives until the authorities let them, which feels disheartening and adds to their mental suffering.

Yang stresses throughout the book that the Hmong people are forced into statelessness by international political forces outside their community, showing how war refugees often find themselves stateless through no fault of their own, which makes their poor treatment in refugee camps seem exceptionally cruel. Yang explains that the Hmong people became political targets after American soldiers forced over 30,000 young Hmong men into helping the United States in their war against the Vietnamese. When the Americans left, Laotian and North Vietnamese governments began a genocide against the Hmong for their “support” of the United States military efforts. Both sides in the Vietnam War, thus, targeted the Hmong, who were caught up in a dispute that had nothing to do with their community. Yang implies that it’s ultimately cruel to punish stateless refugees, because such people—like the Hmong—often find themselves stateless for reasons that are beyond their control. Yang thus motivates her readers to understand that refugees are human beings too, and she concludes that they deserve to be treated with more dignity, especially given the suffering they’ve already endured.