The Immigrant Experience Theme Analysis

The Latehomecomer explores Kao Kalia Yang’s family’s experiences as Hmong immigrants in the United States in the 1980s after fleeing genocide in Laos in the wake of the Vietnam War. Despite their profound gratitude for the promise of new opportunities that living in the United States brings, Yang’s family finds that the immigrant experience is bittersweet and fraught with hardships. Yang’s family suffers from poverty and struggles with language barriers, which limit their opportunities and force them into exhausting lives as industrial factory workers. Immigrant children must also grapple with the anxiety of growing up bicultural, the labor of taking care of parents who struggle with language barriers, and the pressure to succeed and live out their parents’ dreams. Yang stresses, in all this, that immigrant life is far from easy. Yang highlights that the immigrant experience is difficult no matter what, but that immigrant parents and immigrant children each face a unique set of challenges: for parents, financial strain and language barriers are most troublesome, while immigrant children tend to struggle with supporting their parents and navigating their bicultural identity.

Although Yang’s parents are profoundly grateful for being able to resettle in the United States, they struggle with poverty and their language barrier, showing that immigrants suffer substantive hardships because they have to adapt in environments for which they are unprepared. In recounting her family’s story, Yang exposes the undue financial hardships that immigrants face when trying to begin their lives anew. Because the Hmong people’s homes and villages were massacred by war, they have nothing to start their new lives with when they arrive in the United States. Moreover, Yang’s family enter the United States saddled with debt: they owe the government thousands of dollars for their flights from a Thai refugee camp to the United States, which takes them years to pay off. Yang thus shows how immigrant families often start out at a gross financial disadvantage, which limits their possibilities and chances of success. Yang also highlights how language barriers limits her family’s options, making it even harder to gain the footing they need to build a new life. Because Yang’s parents (Bee and Chue) struggle with English, it takes years for them to gain basic qualifications like high school equivalency certificates, which they need to find work. At best, their efforts give allow them to work as manual laborers—jobs that are time-consuming, exhausting, and poorly paid. This takes a tremendous toll on them over the years and drives them into poor health, showing how profoundly language barriers can set people back when they try to adapt in a foreign country. Yang’s parents also often feel inadequate and ashamed because of their poor English skills, and they face constant pressure to be exceptionally polite and express gratitude to non-immigrant Americans at all times—even when they face prejudice and hostility. This adds to their emotional burden as they try to establish themselves in the United States. 

Yang stresses that immigrant children face heavy burdens in helping their parents cope with the challenges of immigrant life, while trying to find their own bicultural footing at the same time. Immigrant children often have to put in extra time and effort to help their families fit in to a new culture. Yang (Kao) and her sister Dawb have to step in and manage many aspects of daily life for their parents, who struggle with English, highlighting the time-consuming and laborious nature of being a bilingual immigrant child. Kao and Dawb’s cousins also feel tremendous pressure to succeed in school, find careers, and support their families, which adds an emotional burden their childhoods as well. Yang also stresses how difficult it can be for immigrant children attempting to fit in to two cultures at once. Kao develops crippling anxiety from trying to become American while also trying to hold on to her Hmong culture, emphasizing how emotionally taxing it can be for immigrant children to grow up in multiple cultures at once. Yang’s cousins also struggle with meeting the social demands of American childhood (such as socializing with their non-Hmong friends out of their homes) while trying to keep their traditionally minded parents (who would prefer their children to stay at home and socialize within the family unit) happy, which also emphasizes the emotional stress of trying to fit into two cultures at once.

Yang thus highlights the unique challenges that immigrant families face to enjoy everyday things like access to homes, education, family, friends, and careers. Yang ultimately argues that the burdens of language barriers and financial strain (for immigrant parents), as well as navigating family dynamics and bicultural identity (for immigrant children) limit people’s ability to fit in somewhere new.