My Father Is Not a Powerful Man: Lessons from My Refugee Father

BY (@KAOKALIAYANG), CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

My father is unemployed. His paperwork says that he is 61 years old. His only source of income is social security. He has a few chickens, some healthy, others not so much. He lives on a stretch of land in cold Minnesota, feet to the ground, eyes to the sky. He takes the weather in the ache of his bones, the burn in his back. My father spends a lot of time looking out the windows when he is not outside, walking along the tree line. There are many men like my father the world over. They give birth to daughters like me. My father is not a powerful man.

When I was young, I believed that my father was powerful.

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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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