How We Nourished Each Other When the Fridge Was Empty

How We Nourished Each Other When the Fridge Was Empty

The gray was around us. The sun was not yet present in the sky. The clouds of morning misted the world we lived in. My grandmother and mother moved quietly on the padded carpet of grass, still wet with dew. They brought to mind ninjas, but neither of them clad in black, slim of figure, or that fleet of foot. Instead, they stood two short Hmong women, one heavy with age, and the other still young, but wearied by life.

We lived in the McDonough Housing Project. Most of the windows of the townhouses were still dark, holding away the light of day, so that their tired inhabitants could continue their night’s rest. But we were up, and we were about to harvest our morning greens from the city’s ash trees.

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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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