New Essay: Suffering Is Both a Barrier and a Bridge

Suffering Is Both a Barrier and a Bridge

One day my brother said his face felt heavy. His left eye started to water. He wiped away the liquid. He massaged his face. He went fishing with our cousins.

When he got home, it was late. The sky was dark. The house was dark. He was quiet coming into the house. He didn’t turn on lights until he got to the bathroom.

In the light of the bathroom, he could see that one side of his face looked strange. It appeared to be drooping. He tried to push it up: his eye lids, his cheek, his mouth, but to no avail. Nothing was working on the left side of his face.

Instead of waking up our parents or making a scene, he used his hand to help his mouth open, and he brushed his teeth and washed his face, and he went to bed.

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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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