Memories of a Girlhood Among the Snow
Illustration by Billy Thao
Born beneath the blazing sun among the clouds of orange dust that shifted across the dry land in Thailand’s northeastern region, in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, I knew little of cold, let alone of snow. We were a family of four because my mother had six miscarriages in the camp after I was born unable to feed the babies inside of her because she made the decision to feed the two in front of her. At the age of six and half, with nowhere to turn, my Hmong family registered to come to America as refugees of America’s Secret War in Laos.
We arrived in Minnesota on July 27, 1987. It was nighttime. The sky was dark, the highway from the airport to my cousin’s townhouse in the projects was lit only by the light of the tall poles on either side. Back in the camp, my older cousins had warned me of the tremendous cold in this new country. Sitting in the front of my cousin’s gray two-door Subaru between the legs of my cousin’s wife, I felt only the drag of the heat from the past on me. It was not until they opened the windows, when the wind of America entered into the fast moving car, that I felt I could breathe in the possibility of cool.
That autumn, when the weather started to turn, I climbed up the grass hill behind our dark little apartment, the two bedroom we shared with uncle, his wife, their three young children. Tired from another day at school, of sitting on the old carpet that reeked of old cigarettes, staring into the box of black and white television set, I snuck outside. The hill behind the communal yard was a steep run of uncut prairie grass. At its base was a tangle of old oak trees and the apartment building. I held the strands of long grass in my hands and I pulled myself up bit by bit. At the top of the hill, I stood facing the tops of the tall buildings of downtown St. Paul. I surveyed the America before me, one preparing itself for the coming cold.
“This boy, and this moment, becomes my understanding of courage in this new country: to be young, to be brave, to move fearlessly among the trash cans filled to the brim, enjoying a gray day.”
The day was gray. The autumn rains were gathering far from my gaze. All around me I saw the rooftops of two-story prairie-styled homes, their paint peeling to show the gray wood underneath. The sound of a child’s open laughter drew my eyes toward a small alley behind the hill.
A little boy about four years old, rode his red tricycle, no shoes on his feet, only a t-shirt and an underwear on. This little boy, unaccompanied, is laughing mouth wide open, dark hair flying behind his shoulders. He’s moving to the left and the right, avoiding the potholes in the alley, filled still with the rain from the night before.
This boy, and this moment, becomes my understanding of courage in this new country: to be young, to be brave, to move fearlessly among the trash cans filled to the brim, enjoying a gray day.
Across the different seasons of our first year in America, I climbed that hill in search of that little boy.
In deep winter, I saw him again. He ran outside on a bright day. The icicles gleamed from the corners of the houses, glinting in the sun, thick as my arm, sharp as the fangs of the vampires I saw on our black and white screen. The boy, bright with his red hat, his blue and yellow jacket, ran into the alley, threw himself promptly into the piles of dirty snow between the driveways. The hardened snow piles did not give but it unleashed that familiar laugh from the boy, that open mouth joy. He stepped back. Chipped off balls of snow. And threw it at the impenetrable piles before him. He gave them names. He yelled out at each as if they were an enemy. He played far longer than I could stand on that hill to watch.
The boy, unknowingly, becomes for me the entry point into wintry play. For years, long after our uncle and auntie moved to California with their children, long after we moved away from that dark apartment and that hill that allowed me a look into a dirty alley and a boy brimming with joy, I carried his happy with me. Each time, I went outside, I opened my mouth wide, not to laugh as he had done, but to swallow the wind. Each winter, I’d go outside, fierce and unafraid, ready to tangle with the things I imagined existed in the whiteness around me. Unlike his, mine was not a fighting game.
“I built the world of my past with the snow before me so that we could be together in the space of America. I made flowers of snow, a big ball in the middle, little ones all around. I placed them in a garden of my creation.”
Instead, I built the world of my past with the snow before me so that we could be together in the space of America. I made flowers of snow, a big ball in the middle, little ones all around. I placed them in a garden of my creation. I planted green onions and cilantro, Hmong mustard greens, and pumpkins. I made finger-sized white chili and pretended they were red and ripe and spicy. In a snow mortar and with an icicle pestle, I made papaya salad that I served on a sheet of ice. My world of snow made possible all the things I missed from faraway Thailand. The cold snow gave me space to warm up my freezing heart, trying to find a way to survive in America with my family and our English limited, our pockets thin and unlined.
Beneath a tall tree with empty branches, a cluster of leaves I knew to be a squirrel’s nest, I sat on top of a perfect circle, a snow ball I had rolled until I ran out of strength. With a twig I’d found, I’d drawn into the surface of the snow ball. I’d turned it into a globe. I made houses all around the belly of the snow ball. Inside each house, I imagined a girl like me, sitting with their family, eating dinner, talking quietly, telling stories. Outside, each house, I drew a hill, a mountain, the curve of a river, clouds floating high. I made a world where children are born and they got to grow up without threat of war, of death, of despair, and I imagined the boy laughing at my world of snow and I sat myself on top of it, so that I might see better, further into the possibilities of winter.
Even after all these years, the memories remain. My experience of winter, so heavily built on that long ago boy’s venture into fun. Even after all these years and all these wintry months, I feel in the bright cold the place where I had been born long ago and faraway, a place that no longer exists, the places I’ve gotten to know and love, where lilac bushes bloom in springtime before dandelions pop across the green, the places I want to go, still—green pastures along the sides of wind-blown oceans, waves crashing, foaming white as fresh fallen snow.
Kao Kalia Yang is an award-winning Hmong-American writer. She is the author of the memoirs The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet, and Somewhere in the Unknown World. Yang is also the author of the children’s books, A Map Into the World, The Shared Room, and The Most Beautiful Thing. She co-edited the ground-breaking collection What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Indigenous Women and Women of Color. Yang’s literary nonfiction work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN USA literary awards, the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize, and garnered three Minnesota Book awards. Her children’s books have been listed as an American Library Association Notable Book, a Zolotow Honor, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, winner of a Minnesota Book Award in Children’s Literature and the Heartland Bookseller’s Award. Kao Kalia Yang is a recipient of the McKnight Fellowship in Prose, the International Institute of Minnesota’s Olga Zoltai Award for her community leadership and service to New Americans, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts’ 2019 Sally Award for Social Impact.