Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life - Hardcover

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Kao Kalia Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to America at the age of six. She is the author of The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, Yang Warriors, and most recently, Where Rivers Part. She also coedited What God Is Honored Here? and is the author of a collective memoir about refugee lives called Somewhere in the Unknown World. Find out more at KaoKaliaYang.com.

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Chapter 1: Bad Luck Woman

CHAPTER 1 Bad Luck Woman

When Mother married Father he took her home to a house full of people. He had been married twice before her. His first wife, the true love of his life, had given him five children, four boys and a girl, but he had not been faithful to her. As a provincial leader, he traveled frequently across the mountainous villages of Xieng Khouang Province. In his travels, he’d met another woman, gotten her pregnant, and made the decision to take a second wife despite the protests of his first. His second wife gave him two more daughters but could not give him the rest of her life. She divorced Father shortly after her second child was born. She left both girls with him. After her departure, he remembered his love for his first wife, but by then the heartache had taken over her body. She lost her appetite, grew frail, turned away from his offerings of rice and soup. She lost her ability to pull her children in her arms and hold them close to her beating heart. That heart, which had been loyal and true, torn asunder. She died on a quiet morning, surrounded by my weeping father and his children. After her death, Father was full of sorrow and remorse. But his feelings of loss, as strong as they were, could not bring her back to life nor could they attend to the house filled with children. His oldest sons were already married at the time. His youngest ones still cried for a mother’s breasts. A year after her death, Father decided he would marry again. He was in his early forties by then. Mother was seventeen.

Mother, like Father, had been married twice before. Her first husband, in a practice of old, had kidnapped her against her will to be his bride. He was the son of a relative. They had played together as children. In their early teenage years, he’d professed his love. She’d denied it. In a fit of frustration, he’d gathered his family and clan. They caught her alone on her way down to a village stream and carried her home, like a pig to the slaughter. By the time her parents were informed, there was little to be done. The sacred chicken had been flung above their heads, her spirit had been severed from her ancestral home and welcomed into his. Mother fought him for four months, turning away from him in their marriage bed, sitting as far as she could from him at the dinner table. In a fit of despair, the young, unwanted husband left the mountain village where his family lived to go buy salt from the lowlands. There, he contracted a sickness and died upon his return. She was a fifteen-year-old widow.

Her circumstances were not unique. It was 1932. Laos was a French protectorate. Mother and Father and their families lived in the high villages surrounding the peak of Phou Bia Mountain. Once a year the French levied taxes on the farming families. In order to pay the high taxes, the families worked hard, tilling the land. Numbers mattered profoundly. Young girls and young boys married in the name of love and in the name of family, but more often than both, they married in the name of survival. Fate was in the hands of the rich and powerful. Widows abounded, and there were practices that had been created to continue the possibilities of life.

When the young man died, his family decided to marry Mother off to another of their sons. In the time she’d spent with them, they had learned that she was not only beautiful but also a most determined and hardworking young woman. They believed that she would give the family strong children. She protested once again, but to no avail. In her heart, she was able to recuse her second husband of any personal wrongdoing. He had nothing to do with her first marriage. In fact, she wondered if he had any say in his own marriage to her. Despite the budding affection between the two, her second husband, a healthy young man with an easy laugh, fell suddenly ill after six months of marriage. He died quickly and painfully. She contracted whatever illness had befallen him but did not die. His family grew afraid of her: now a thin young woman full of sorrow and sickness. When news of her health and the family’s fear reached her father, he came to collect her, knowing his daughter was now considered a Bad Luck Woman.

Grandfather was not a typical man of his times. He was a humble man who had married an unexpectedly beautiful woman, a woman who was smart and able though rumored to be promiscuous. There were vicious suggestions that their oldest, my mother, was not his biological child. Village folk wondered out loud, close to his family and friends, how such a short man with no bridge on his nose to speak of could have conceived of a child as lovely as her? Her hair was the color of the winged birds that sat high on the tall trees, so black it appeared blue in the bright light of morning. She had eyes to match, deep and dark, open wide and unafraid. Her slender body was long and strong. There was a grace in the curve of her neck, a refinement in the turn of her head. The villagers worried that my mother looked more like the child of the village chief than the poor farmer who raised her with devotion. Grandfather didn’t care. He was committed to his daughter, his firstborn, his champion. From a young age, whenever Grandmother lost her patience with him, it’d always been their firstborn who would silence her: “Mother, do not speak to my father in that fashion.”

As a child, Mother often accompanied Grandfather into the fields when the striped-chested, yellow-beaked migratory birds flew into the mountain villages on the east wind, announcing, “Pob kws ua kauv kaus, pob kws ua kauv kaus.” She walked in front of her father, carrying a small woven bamboo basket that he’d fashioned just for her, marveling at how the birds were speaking in Hmong, letting all the farmers know that it was now corn planting season, singing, “The corn has rooted, the corn has rooted.” Mother had always been Grandfather’s dearest companion.

When Grandfather took his oldest child home by the hand, her few belongings in that same woven bamboo basket from her childhood, he did not stop to look at the villagers who gawked as he walked by with his daughter. Her feet meandered behind his own, her head bowed low. She who had always walked a straight line did not know where to place first one foot and then the other. She was not yet sixteen, and yet in the eyes of the villagers she was a full-grown woman, led home by her father, the weight of multiple tragedies on her shoulders. At home, he tucked her into the warm bed of her youth. He called shamans from far and near to find her frightened spirit and return it to her body.

Mother spent a year living happily with her parents and siblings in the house where she had been born. During the day, she tended to her younger brothers and sisters, helping with the hard work of subsistence farming, feeding the hungry pigs in their pen and giving corn and rice grains to the chickens in the yard. She had no desire to marry again. Neither her first nor her second marriage had been her choice. Being home with her family after the ordeal of both, hearing her mother’s sharp voice call with the rooster’s crow early each morning, was a comfort. At the family field, her father offered her the tenderest ends of the sweetest sugarcane stalks. Mouth full of fiber, throat sweetened with its juice, she told her mother and father that she would never marry again. The elderly couple accepted her words as a matter of course. Who would want to marry again after all that she had been through? Their love of her and support...