How to tell bedtime stories in the age of coronavirus

I tell stories for a living. I look at the faces of my audience. I register the silence in a room and then call on the forces that inspire me to tell the stories I have been waiting my whole life to hear. Stories about the old who somehow survive the wars that decimate their young. Stories about farmers who chase mystical chickens into caves, come upon chests of treasures buried long ago. Stories about fatherless boys who become the fathers they imagined for themselves and motherless girls who birth daughters born as mothers. All the stories I love in the lives around me and within. I began professionally telling stories 16 years ago.

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Bee Yang

Hmong song poetry | kwv txhiaj hmoob

Thaum Hluas Txog Hnub Laus: When the Days of Youth are Gone (Bee Yang, 2014)

This is an album of Hmong song poetry, kwv txhiaj hmoob, composed and sung by Bee Yang, Kao Kalia Yang’s father. The album notes and English translation of one of the songs are by Kao Kalia Yang.

Kwv txhiaj is, in the words of Ralph Ellison on the American Blues, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-cosmic lyricism. As a form, the blues [and kwv txhiaj] is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

NOTE:  The duration of the songs do not reflect the actual song length.  Please consider ordering the CD for the full songs.  Thank you.

*This CD is available for purchase for $15.  Click below to order:

Bee Yang: Hmong Song Poetry

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