[To read Part 1, click here. To read Part 2, click here. To read Part 3, click here. To read Part 4, click here. To read Part 5, click here.]
Why is this book important?
Because reading books like Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang, reminds us that we are all people, that we have a shared humanity, and that understanding and kindness should always be the most important things. It warns us that war and dictators take a devastating toll on that humanity.
Why did I read this book?
Where Rivers Part is the One Book Northland 2025 selection for the area where I live, so I decided to buy Yang’s book and read it. Yang came to the Northland to talk about her book, and I’m sorry I missed a chance to hear her speak in person. But I did listen to Kerri Miller from Minnesota Public Radio interview Yang. You can listen here: Big Books & Bold Ideas.
What is this book about?
Where Rivers Part is really two stories bound together. First, it’s the story of Tswb, an ordinary Hmong girl, who is born in 1961 to parents living in the lush mountainous region of Laos. Everything in Tswb’s life is plentiful: her large extended family, the love that nurtures her, and the bountiful food that nourishes her. She attends school and excels; she wants to be a teacher. She experiences the loss of her beloved father. She grows up and falls in love. Leaving her mother and family behind, she begins a new life with her husband, Npis, and his family. She has children. She experiences the ups and downs of marriage and parenthood and aging.
But the story of Tswb’s ordinary life is overshadowed by another story: the war in Vietnam, which escalates as she grows up. Laos and Vietnam share a border that is 1,343 miles long, and after the U.S. pulls out of Vietnam, the communists enter Laos to hunt down and kill Hmong people as traitors because many of them helped the U.S. during the war. Tswb is a young teenager when her family leaves their mountain village home and hides in the jungle. At seventeen Tswb falls in love with Npis, a young Hmong man who comes from another village, and she marries him. As is the custom, she leaves her family and becomes part of Npis’s family. They continue to hide in the jungles of Laos from the Vietnamese soldiers. Finally, because the Vietnamese are closing in, Npis’s family decides to escape to Thailand, where they live in a refugee camp before immigrating to America.
In the United States, Tswb and Npis work jobs that take a toll on their bodies. They live in neighborhoods that are dangerous, in homes that are dilapidated and filled with lead and mold. They face racism and discrimination because they are Hmong and immigrants, but they work hard to improve their lives and to give their children a brighter future.
What makes this book so good?
Yang’s writing is beautiful, compelling, and detailed. As the story shifts from place to place, Yang brings the lush mountain village of her mother’s youth and the dense jungles of her mother’s teen years to life. She captures the hopelessness, filth, and stagnation of the refugee camp in Thailand. And once her family has immigrated to the U.S., Yang captures the hope, fear, joy, and frustration as her parents move from home to home and from job to job, inching their way up the ladder of the American dream.
When Yang asked her mother if she could write the story of her remarkable life, her mother replied that she didn’t think her story was remarkable, and that no one would be interested in reading about her life. I imagine that is because Tswb’s life was filled with many people who lived lives similar to hers. Lives interrupted by war, time spent in refugee camps, separations from family, and emigration from their homelands. But to Yang, her mother’s story is extraordinary. And readers will agree, the story of Tswb’s life is a story worth telling.
From the standpoint of craft . . . Yang’s book uses an interesting point of view.
Yang’s book is a biography of her mother’s life. However, Yang has written her mother’s biography in the form of a first-person point of view memoir. So, when we read Yang’s book, we must remember that she has adopted her mother’s voice and she is telling the story as if she were her mother. In the prologue of her book, Yang carefully explains how and why she has done this. If you like to skip prologues, this is one you should not gloss over.
Yang tried to write the story of her mother’s life in third-person point of view like a biography, and she tried to write it in second-person point of view. Both of those attempts felt awkward to her. Yang kept returning to the idea of using first-person point of view because as strange as it seemed to write her mother’s life story that way, Yang believed it worked. She wanted her mother’s “strong and certain voice” to rise up off the page. And it does.
There’s probably a general rule against this technique, but like so many writing rules, there comes a time when it’s okay to break one. It works for Yang for several reasons. First, before she began the book, she was intimately familiar with her mother’s way of speaking and her stories. Second, Yang’s mother was an enthusiastic participant in the telling of her story. Third, as Yang wrote the book, she spent hours and hours interviewing her mother. Finally, Yang had her mother read the finished draft for accuracy.
And so, I took a leap of faith with Yang. After I turned the last page of the prologue, I put aside the idea of Yang as the narrator. As I began the first chapter in the book, I listened to Tswb tell her story through her daughter. For the first few pages, it was a little disorienting, but I quickly found myself immersed in Tswb’s life. Yang’s book is wonderful and her bold move works. I can’t imagine Yang writing her mother’s story in any other way.
Writing Near the Lake 