On Being: New Essay by Kao Kalia

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Everything Prepares Us for Something in the End

My host drove me around the outskirts of Dallas, Texas in his clean car. It was bright and hot outside, a stark contrast to the cold of Minnesota I had just left behind. The late afternoon sun reflected off the front windshield. He was giving me a small tour of Dallas, the city where John F. Kennedy had been murdered.

We were in a poor neighborhood with small one-story houses falling apart. The main business corridor held auto repair garages, restaurants, and pawn shops. All the signs were in Spanish. He turned toward the side streets. In the yards, empty of people, there were big dogs with sharp teeth.

In front of each front window, there was a grove of banana trees growing wild. The trees were healthy. They grew tall. I imagined little light could penetrate into those windows.

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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:

album-art

Bee Yang: Hmong Song Poetry

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