Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Edge of the Horizon”

Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary: “A Burial and a Birth”

Sanouthith Vongsay enters into hospice care at the home of her daughter, Saymoukda. In the days before her death, Sanouthith’s memories take her across time and space. The daughter of a provincial governor, she had grown up wealthy in Laos, but had worked hard on pine farms and in vegetable fields to provide for their growing family in America. The narrative voice changes to first-person, and Sanouthith remembers how she had remained in Laos after her father fled the country. After the revolution in 1975, family members of the old regime were persecuted, and she was forced to flee with her husband and new baby. Saymoukda was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1981. Sanouthith also had a son, Nok, who died at just six months old.

The narrative voice shifts again to Saymoukda’s first-person perspective. Her primary memory of childhood is her mother’s sadness. In one memory, Sanouthith runs to the top of a hill and makes Saymoukda promise to bury her there. Another time, she threatens to leave Saymoukda’s father in the middle of the night. Saymoukda had been a good student, and attended the University of Minnesota, where she got involved in Southeast Asian student politics. She remembers meeting her husband, Akiem, in Minneapolis. In 2015, shortly after learning she is pregnant, Saymoukda has a miscarriage. She gets pregnant again in 2017, and her parents, traveling in Laos, visit a temple and pray for the baby. As they do, a leaf falls into Saymoukda’s father’s hand: They interpret this as a sign that the baby will be born in fall to a loving family, and give the baby the name Akara. The baby is born on the day Saymoukda and Akiem buy their first house. Two years later, Sanouthith dies at Saymoukda’s home, surrounded by her family.

Part 4, Chapter 13 Summary: “Revival”

In the early 1980s, Vietnamese immigrant Mr. Truong buys a dilapidated building on University Avenue in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The once-prestigious street is now filled with sex shops and seedy theaters, and many in the community are unhoused and have substance abuse disorders. Despite the dangers, Mr. Truong believes that the neighborhood has potential. His is the first in a wave of immigrant-owned family businesses: soon the avenue is filled with car repair shops, restaurants, groceries, and offices owned by immigrants. Like many of the business owners, Mr. Truong puts his family to work, including his son, Hai. The restaurant, called the Caravelle opens in 1984 and serves traditional dishes such as bun noodle bowls and pho. The Caravelle and other shops on University Avenue bring about a revitalization of the neighborhood. Mr. Truong is able to send his children to college.

After college, Hai takes a corporate job and quickly grows depressed. Hai realizes that he misses the rush of working in a restaurant, and decides to open a restaurant of his own. He wants the restaurant to give back to the community, and to use the freshest, most local ingredients he can find. Most importantly, he wants to cater to the rich customers that now frequent University Avenue. Mr. Truong suggests that Hai purchase the Caravelle from his aunt, who recently took it over and is struggling. Hai reopens the restaurant as Ngon Bistro, and is nominated for the prestigious James Beard award. He reflects on the struggles of his childhood: Although he worked at the restaurant, he did not live with his family, but with his grandmother. He faced racism and bullies at school, and fears the same for his newborn daughter. Nevertheless, he believes the restaurant is a symbol of hope for what immigrants can achieve in the United States.

Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary: “Never Going Home Again”

Tommy Tars is a Khmer boy born in Minnesota to Cambodian refugee parents and diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age three. One day, when Tommy is seven, his father tells him that he is going on vacation with his grandma, auntie, uncle, and cousins. Tommy is thrilled: For years he has been told his wheelchair and medications make it too difficult for him to travel. Tommy’s mother says nothing, and refuses to look at him. Tommy thinks that his life would have been easier if he had been born in Cambodia and his disability was caused by the war: As it is, he feels like a reminder of all that can go wrong in the world.

The drive to California takes three days. The family packs all their food for the trip, and only stops to use the restroom and refuel. Although Tommy enjoys it at first, he is frustrated and lonely by the time they arrive in California. He remembers a drive he took with his father in Minnesota. Tommy told his father he loved fall, and his father told him about the end of the monsoon season in Cambodia. In California, the family is staying with Tommy’s paternal uncle and aunt, who share their house with another Khmer refugee. Tommy enjoys the stay, and grows close to his California aunt and uncle. The family decide to visit Mexico, and are forced to smuggle Tommy across the border when they realize he doesn’t have a passport.

On the second week of the trip, Tommy’s Minnesota family leaves early in the morning before he wakes. His California aunt and uncle say they don’t know when they will return. Tommy soon realizes that they are not returning. When he calls his father, the family admits he is not coming back to Minnesota. Tommy feels like a refugee in California, and becomes hardened. He remains in California for years.

Part 4, Chapter 15 Summary: “For My Children”

On a stormy night in Minnesota, Kao Kalia Yang watches her three children sleep. The children—a girl and twin boys—sleep tangled up on one bed. She remembers the storms predicted on the day of her wedding to the children’s father: Although it stormed across the city, the park where they married was sunny and warm. Five hundred friends and family had gathered together to celebrate a ceremony delivered in English and Hmong. The most popular question asked that day was about how the couple met.

The easy answer is that Kao had published a book, and the children’s father came to see her speak about it. Film of the talk shows his eyes lighting up as Kao speaks. Several weeks after the talk, he reached out and asked her to lunch. The real answer, Kao reflects, is more complicated. They couple met as a result of American interference in Laos, the country of their parents’ birth. In the late 1950s, the American CIA recruited Hmong people to fight in the war against communism. When the Americans left, the Hmong who had helped them were directly persecuted by the new communist government. Acknowledging this debt, Gerald Ford signed a law allowing for the resettlement of refugees from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This law allowed the families of Kao and her husband to settle in Minnesota, where they eventually met.

Kao reveals that each of the refugees featured in this book is known to her children. For instance, Chue Moua is their grandmother, Fong Lee is their great uncle, and Kaw Thaw’s children go to their school. Kao hopes that the stories in this book teach her children about the strength of the human heart. She reminds them that her whole life has been leading toward their life in America.

Part 4 Analysis

In the final section, the stories Yang relates center the experiences of children of refugees resettled in the United States who live very different lives than those of their parents and grandparents, but also carry the weight of their families’ dreams and ambitions for a new beginning. The tensions highlighted in this section speak to the novel’s interest in The Unique Challenges of Displacement for Women and Children.

In Chapter 12, Yang uses multiple narrative points of view to parallel the experiences of Sanouthith Vongsay, a Laotian refugee, and her daughter, Saymoukda Vongsay. In Sanouthith’s account of her life, she mourns the loss of her son Nok, “who was only six months old when he died in the refugee camp” (188). She imagines Nok, whose name means little bird, as a “bird chirping across the still […] calling for [her]” (188). The text suggests that Sanouthith feels responsible for his death, saying, “I gave him a name with wings and he flew away from me, from us, all of us” (188). Nok’s name highlights his vulnerability, and emphasizes the unique helplessness of children experiencing the turmoil and violence of war and displacement. Like her mother, Saymoukda also loses a child, although under very different circumstances. Saymoukda is three and a half months pregnant when she miscarries at home—a peaceful setting compared to the refugee camp when her brother died: “[T]he summer sun filtered into their warehouse and dust motes floated in the streams of light around” (198) Saymoukda and her husband. Like her mother, Saymoukda blames herself for the miscarriage, reflecting that “it took her body all afternoon to realize what was happening” (198). As the title suggests, “A Burial and a Birth” is anchored by these two depictions of child loss, highlighting both their shared grief and casting the differences of their circumstances into sharp relief. Saymoukda and Sanouthith are connected by their trauma. The sacrifices and suffering Sanouthith experienced were not enough to protect her daughter from repeating those painful experiences in America.

The story of Tommy Sar in Chapter 14 points to the cyclical nature of intergenerational trauma. Tommy is the son of Khmer Cambodian refugees, who were forced to flee during the reign of the Cambodia dictator Pol Pot. He is diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age three, and is largely treated like an outcast: “I was a pity. Everyone in the community, my aunts, my uncles, and my cousins, all felt this way” (220). Tommy’s disability is a challenge for his refugee father, who is “struggling to make a normal life for himself and his family in Minnesota” (234). Tommy’s father inadvertently perpetuates the isolation and othering he experienced as a refugee by sending his son to live with relatives in California. Like his father, Tommy feels like a refugee, “someone who can’t return home because [he is] understood as a threat to who the locals are and want to be” (219). Tommy understands that his father is acting out of “his optimistic love, a belief that one day [they will] be reunited” under better circumstances (234). However, he also recognizes that his experiences in California are a traumatic echo of his father’s own pain: “[N]either of [them] was ever going to go home again” (234).

The varied accounts in Yang’s collection speak to the complexity and rich specificity of the refugee and immigrant experience in the United States as well as the universal threads that tie their stories together. Chapter 12 highlights The Importance of Community in Times of War or Displacement in Saymoukda’s descriptions of the tight-knit groups of refugee and immigrant children in Minneapolis—“lots of Hmong kids and some Vietnamese kids, the other poor kids of color who lived in the houses with peeling paint” (192). Saymoukda and her friends “[trade] their [food pantry] foods for the things their families liked best” and “[walk] home to their families full of pride” (193)—a poignant picture of children finding solidarity in their shared experiences. Similarly, Chapter 13 describes the relationship between refugee and restaurant owner Mr. Truong and his son, Hai. The resilience and work ethic Hai develops as a child allows him to buy his father’s restaurant as an adult and reopen it as his own. Hai’s restaurant is a powerful symbol of his father’s realized dreams in the United States—a legacy carried on by his son.