Episode 15: Crafting a Legacy: Kao Kalia Yang on Literature, Culture, and Community

Hi friends welcome back to another episode of Monwomen Thariving. I'm Ariel your host and I'm so excited for you to be here today Hello, everyone welcome back to another episode of Monwomen Thariving You guys I am so excited for today's episode It's been a long time coming, but I'm just so excited today I'm so honored to be speaking with the renown author and artist Kyle Kalia Yang about her journey as an author Her sources of inspiration and her experiences as one of the very first Published mom authors in the United States. Oh my gosh that intro is so crazy And I just can't believe that you've set some time today to have this conversation with me to take alia So thank you so much for for coming on and having this conversation I'd love if you can introduce yourself to the listeners I'm sure many of them already know who you are, but if you could introduce yourself that would be great No, no, I'm Kalia. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me Ariel. I am excited to engage with you Yes, yes, I'm so excited to I'd love if you could just jump right in so this first section. I want to talk about I Won't talk about you Kalia. I won't talk about your journey into writing and really finding your voice And identity so this first question. I have for you. I'd love if you could share with us You know your journey into the world of writing and storytelling like what inspired you to become an author I'm a fan of books. I've always loved them. We know growing up. We were poor We didn't have VCRs and in the era of VCRs You know before the move into our DVDs and other things And so my sister and I would go to the public library She would check out books and then she would make incredible stories come alive from the images in the books No, and I just I've always helped books from my friend If you know anything about me, you know that I grew up not talking in English What's a hello mom? I was learning English just fine, but I became a selective mute shortly after starting school in English And so my friends from the St. Pop public schools. They won't remember a talkative Kalia They perhaps might remember her whispering once in a while, but I didn't talk in English The words had to go somewhere because I was still just a child and so for me that becomes the page Because I wasn't talking my mother saw an Oprah that if you have a kid who won't talk at school Sometimes if you buy them a diary with a lock, then maybe they can express themselves there and so she bought me this tiny little teddy bear diary with a lock on it And that of course becomes the gift of a lifetime You know now I think I have the 11 boxes of journals in my attic just things that I've written across the years But I became a voracious writer in that way and in the beginning the journals are just those diaries were just Ways of making do ways of uploading my emotions and my thoughts and my ideas my loneliness Eventually they became something more there were moments when I wasn't just talking about my life when my life becomes A way of seeing the bigger world. So something was changing all along the way But for me the idea that I would become a writer didn't It didn't realize until I was in college my grandmother as well Lee was dying Her biggest fear was that she would be forgotten because grandma didn't know how to read or write She had never been to school Despite the fact that my grandma was Ithunia nang She was a medicine woman. She was a healer She couldn't read or write so her fear was always that she would be forgotten My grandma died my senior year of college aerial And in the wake of her death my mom and my aunts went through all of her suitcases. She had 13 In the last one they saw that it was just full of letters love letters that my older sister and I had been her All of the years when we were apart We knew that she couldn't read the letters But we thought we pressed really hard as she could feel our love and that was the only thing we were ever communicating and so I decided that I would write my grandma a love letter to find a way To live in a world without her. I was I was 22 I was on page 37 because there was a lot of things to say and my grandma was a pretty cool old woman You know she had escaped from a tiger as a girl So one of her earlobes was torn through because she was wearing hoops and it her bun through the jungle There was just so much to say My daddy said to me when I go at a Chi what are you doing and I said to him I'm writing my final love letter to grandma. I was so young. I thought that if I put everything down And somehow somehow I would be able to live with her grandma. I Didn't know that the letters that I would write my grandma. I would continue to write even today Um, but my dad said worse that changed the course of my life He said a few dream in the right direction The dreamer never wakes the dream never dies. It grows bigger and bigger And so an idea was born What if I turned this book this love letter into a book What if the world would remember truly along with me What if one day when I become an old woman myself That my memories grow wings and they start flying away One of these things will anchor me to the earth somehow To the people who love me to the people who I love And so at the age of 22 area, I sought out to become a writer except I didn't have much experience I didn't have very many models at all um My name was beginning to work. She was working on uh, bamboo among the oaths and anthology I heard that gava this other person was perhaps writing But I didn't have very many models in my life And so I looked for graduate programs and of course the The MFA degree made sense. It's a terminal degree in the arts I could focus on doing you know, not just the deconstruction part but the creative components And so I applied and that was the beginning of my journey Within two years I graduated from Columbia's program and I came back home to Minnesota Because I wanted my story as a writer to emerge from here for the biggest From the biggest urban mall population in the country I thought that that made sense. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. That's so beautiful and I You know, it's it's so interesting for for me to hear as you mentioned growing up yours elective mute But good girl. Yeah, just the way that you speak. It's so beautiful and it's so Mesmerizing like I I feel like you have such a beautiful Way of Conversing it's just as you were speaking, you know to me. I was just like wow like I could listen to you all day You just have such a beautiful voice and thank you so much for sharing You know your journey and your story as well as your your grandma's your grandma's a bit in pieces of your grandma's story too, right That's just it's so beautiful and I I agree with you 100% you know as someone who's very close to my grandma to you She's mentioned bits and pieces about you know one day yet you motai like, you know, how are we ever going to remember grandma and so You're you that it's just so inspiring to me and and I hope one day I'll be with you Be a great advocate for her to just as you've been for your for your grandma as well This next question, you know, I want to talk about how do you navigate the balance between Preserving culture and sharing universal themes in your writing for me. There is no need to balance a real I understand that we are part of the family of humanity and our stories are as humane as important as universal as any others You know As as an average reader I understand from the work of Morrison and both when tan and Kingston all of them Vietnam when um I understand that It's important to preserve our humanity as it is not to try to fit into some idea or some role And so when I started writing I understood fundamental facts. I'm among writer. I will always be Some people will see my picture. They'll see my name on a cover of a book and they won't want to read it They'll say what does she have to say anyway, but more does she have to add to the world And those are not the readers that I'm going for. That's not the reason why I do what I do. It's not how I can do what I do I'm writing for the people who will say oh, I recognize, you know Among people I recognize my mother my father myself. I recognize our shared humanity And so for me I'm not trying to balance You know some idea of what is universal with the lives that I know the lives that we live at the same time as an artist I understand that we live in the matrix of a bigger world That there are things that are happening around us all the time and my job is to pay attention to those things Whether I'm responding directly to them in my work or not. I am writing through them And that is the only way to grow on the page and off of it. You go through something. You don't escape it You don't you don't go around it. You don't dig underneath it You go through it and so For me it's always about being transparent being authentic And looking for a meaning where I know meaning exist Our stories our truths have a lot to offer In terms of world knowledge in terms of what it means to be human to be human from our perspective You know, in our positionality is very, I think, is really complicated and very critical at this time. As it has always been, when ethnic minority, we have no country, and yet we remain a people. We live in a world that loves the idea of the nation state, of boundaries and barriers, of who belongs and who does not. We've never had that privilege. We've never been the mainstream, the mainstream, power source, anywhere we've ever been. We've had to navigate and live through these political systems, these power structures. And I think inherent in that narrative is a story very much about survival, but also about ingenuity, about creativity, about art history. Well, that's such a beautiful answer. And I think that's so genuinely beautiful in terms of just your mindset in being an artist. And I think that's something that we can all learn from, right? Because I think, you know, in mainstream, you want to be everybody's favorite, right? And you want everybody to like you and all the things, right? But to come from a place where you know that not everybody is going to like you, and I'm only going to be able to do what I do to support the people who will find me and enjoy everything that I do. I think that's such a beautiful take on not necessarily feeling like you aren't enough, but you are already enough, and that the people who, you know, will want to be around you, or will want to read your stuff, watch your videos, you know, listen to who you are, they will find you eventually. So I think that's, that's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. This next question that I have in this section here, I want to talk about, you know, what roles does storytelling play in preserving heritage and really empowering, empowering marginalized communities, particularly to mong women. You know, if you look at our history, we are an oral tradition for the last several hundred years, especially as the mong in America. We've had to rely on the power of our words spoken to write on memory. It wasn't until the 1950s that the French missionaries came to the high mountains of Laos to devise a written script for the mong. And for, for many, many of us refugees, America is the first place where we really get to put our words on paper in a substantial way. Growing up where I did in the refugee camps in Thailand, where I was born, where I lived with the first six years of my life, I couldn't go to school area. At the schools are crowded. I was six, but I couldn't go to school. And so I spent a lot of time listening to the stories at the feet of my elders. And maybe that is how you train a writer, you know, Colombia did their part in terms of allowing me space and room to arrive and to learn about the canon of American literature. But long before that, it was with the words of my uncle Chu who used to hold out his arm and say, "Manai, every piece of hair here is a tree." "My knuckles, these are the mountains that we came from. My veins, these are the rivers of my youth." A whole world would emerge on the stretch of an arm. Creatures like the tiger who I could never meet and by midnight refugee camp suddenly were bouncing, flying through the air, falling in love and breaking hearts. Incredible worlds stood forth from the stretch of an arm. I've watched that arm sag with time, how the skin is pulled away from the bone, how it was once, you know, just a forest on the stretch of his arm is now dotted with age and time, pools and ponds, oceans of water, or once it was firm ground. I feel a great need and I speak here very much, to preserve the richness of that tradition, to make worlds come alive, to open and explode possibility in the hearts and the minds of readers and listeners. So much of why I am, you reference my speaking, I think comes from the incredible oral tradition that we come from. My dad is a beautiful song poet in the mountain tradition, Guzizetzai Guzizetzai, so beautiful language has always been there for me. When I was a kid, my dad would say to me, "What is that tree want to be in its next life?" And the tree would be a tree about over the sidewalk, and all my siblings and I would try to say whatever we thought that tree was. And my dad would say, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're gala, you are wrong, that tree wants to be a rainbow in its next life." Look at how it curves from one end to the other. Look at how it frames the sky. Oh, with training like that, you have a kid who suddenly starts to find and look for those things in the world, the sensibility of an artist emerges from that. And then the women in my life, particularly my mother, who I just wrote a book about, where Gerva is part, she, unlike my dad, she doesn't wax poetics about our life. You know, we are poor, and we're in America, and we're trying to survive, and these are the things that I would do so that you can survive, because I love you more than I love myself. That kind of engine, and the beauty of language and the kind of engine that is my mother, that is so many mom mothers and grandmothers in our community. In the end, you forge a writer like me, the words have to go to work in the world, the words have to build something in the world, something beyond me. I'm 43, maybe I have 20, 30 years to do good work left, but these hands are arthritic, we don't know how long they will hold. You know, when I'm gone, I hope to leave a body of work that pays homage to the incredible people that we come from, the incredible people that we are with, that we are part of, the incredible legacy of people who are not only surviving, but who are creating possibilities. And that makes me so proud, Ariel, I'm so honored that I get to do this work, to live in this tradition, to be able to translate not only between languages, but mediums. But an incredible gift. And so every single day I wake up and I'm a writer and I tell myself, what do I have to do today? Oh yes, at 10, there is this interview with this young mom woman who is super smart and trying to build something. So yes, I have to make time for, and then after that, I have to write a story for the United Nations, to write a story about climate change. And then I'm like, and then after that, oh yes, I have to do edits for my young adult manuscript that's coming out next year, you know, a story of our own. But I mean, everything that I'm doing, I'm doing for something I value and something I love, and that is the biggest gift and everything I do in the life of a writer, the life of an artist. My time is my own and I can give it to the things that I believe in. I don't know of a more privileged position to take, to wake up with a dawn and to know. Wow, that's so beautiful. And I go there, you are the perfect person, you know, and and I love, I love so much that it wasn't just, you know, your parents, but the, the extending parts of your family too, that really helped you become who you are, right? And I think that's so beautiful. And it just, it's so inspiring to me. And I was like getting chills as you were speaking about it. And I think it's so true that we are such a, a community of listeners, right? And for you to be able to turn that into something where not just my generation, but, you know, the next generations and the generations to come will be so inspired. And we can, and hopefully, like fingers crossed, we'll continue to, to, to go on this journey as well, right? Because there are so many stories untold and, and yeah, it's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing. In this next section, I want to talk about, you know, your inspiration, right? So drawing inspiration, stories that that really shaped lives. So where do you draw inspiration from for your stories and characters? And, and are there any specific experiences or people in your life that influence your writing? I know we kind of mentioned bits and pieces about this too, but I'd love if you could kind of dive in into this question as well. This question of inspiration is something that I've been thinking a lot about as I'm transitioning into fiction. You know, I build my home first in adult memoir and then I stretch into children's literature. My debut middle grade fiction comes out in September, the Diamond Explorer, because every time I visit a middle school, they're like, when are you going to write for us? So finally, this thing is done. And their only ask was that I make it scary. So it is. It's a little bit scary. But I'm working on a longer fiction piece called When We Are Goals, and it takes place in a moment in our home. And I'm thinking a lot about what it means for my career that I'm adventuring here, but also the fact that I have three family memoirs out and a collective refugee memoir. I've told the story of my grandma, Julie, the story of my father, the story of my mother, the story of like other refugees from around the world, all living here in the American Midwest. And I can tell you honestly, I can feel like a lifting of like the weight off of my shoulders. I'm the kind of person who always wants to do the hard thing first. Ever since I was a kid, you know, if you're going to give me a shot, just go ahead. You know, if you're going to rip a band-aid off, do as quickly as you can. That's my personality. I was born this way. And so I did the hardest stories, I think, that I had to do first. And now I can begin to stretch and grow. different ways. Now when you look at a mainstream writer, most of the time it takes them. They're coming from the margins and then they'll slowly move into the more personal. But I explode it in the center and I'm moving out. So it's a little bit of a different journey that I'm on. But I am inspired by, I've always loved ghost stories. The fact that we live in a world where there's other possibilities that we cannot see that can interplay and alter the ways in which we understand ourselves and each other. It's been profoundly inspiring for me, endlessly so. And so the stories of course, of hauntings and as refugees, as poor people, we're haunted by so many things anyway already. You know, structure of racism, I can talk about capitalism, the labor of a factory, all of these things, but also the people who died when they should still be here. You know, police brutality. I took my kids to play at a sidewalk recently and I saw them in the sidewalk. In this neighborhood, I didn't even know if there were more people and there was fun Lee was here. And I know fun Lee was murdered in these cities. You know, and it's a haunt like suddenly the ghost of this boy who I've never met emerges around me as my children are laughing and playing. I'm inspired by, of course, the stories that I read in books as well because I've had so widely across the years. And that is literature predominantly by women. I've been very deliberate. I was taught a lot about the male writers, particularly white male writers. And then maybe the black male writers and then other male writers, you know, but I've consciously created for me an independent, but I think incredibly sustaining a reading list of women of color from here in the U.S. and around the world, I love to translate it works. I watch broadly and so I'll watch Bollywood. I'll watch, you know, Nollywood. I'll watch Hollywood. I'll watch across the spectrum. And then I love all kinds of art, all forms of art. And so I'm always engaging in that way. And then I think that is the purpose of art for us to be in conversation with each other across mediums, across times. And it's sometimes across dimensions. And so I'm always looking in that way for artistic representation. I want to see what's out there. But more than anything else, my inspiration comes from the people I love. The people I want to spend more time with on the page. The people who I'm intrigued by, who I can't quite readily wrap my head around, even as my whole heart is wrapped around them. My head is confused by certain factors. And this project, that is the human project, that is the life project, that is in Gokaliaya. How many people, stories do I get to be a part of on a given day? For example, today, Ariel, you and I were a part of each other's stories. You know, whether we like it or not. And I get to ask myself, what kind of character do I want to be in the book of Ariel? I get to think about what kind of character do I want to be in the book of Gokaliaya today. And that guides me who I am, how I conduct myself and how I interact with others, but also how I engage on the page. You know? So you inspire me, a young woman trying to build something to engage her people in a broader conversation, not about our smallest bubble, our potential. That's inspiring to me. So that's where it comes from. Okay, I'm so inspired by young women like you, right? And that's really the whole reason why the podcast even became a podcast. And I love, this is why I love talking to folks who are artistic. When you're stuck in a corporate 9 to 5 and just a very structured mindset, like there's only black and white. But when I have these conversations with particularly young women, right? And we're having these open and honest conversations. My mind is just so blown by how big the universe is and how much opportunity and potential there is. And I'm so excited for your for your new books. And I love that you're venturing off because and I have siblings who are in middle school age. And honestly, that's all they talk about, you know, like ghost stories. And I think it's so funny that that's where it's, I feel like as I was growing up, that's all we wanted to listen to, right? That's all we wanted to watch. That's all we wanted to listen to. And so I think where you're going in this next direction is perfect. So I'm so excited for for your new releases. I think it's going to be so amazing. Thank you. This next segment or this next question, I want to talk about how do you approach the process of crafting narratives that resonate with readers, you know, across cultures and in backgrounds? Because I write for a variety of audiences, right? From the picture books to the chapter books, to the adult works, ideal with a broad swath of society. And you know, and I think the reality is the simple, simple, a good story must begin with a rich character, you know, a rich voice on the page. And that voice must be authentic and true and trustworthy in order to lead you across the landscape of the story, the trajectory of a life or an event. For me, I'm not, I don't make, I don't make outlines, they box me and they don't free me up. But sometimes you have to, especially if you're dealing with creative nonfiction, that's how you get paid. You submit a book proposal with outlines. And for me, I'm always looking and saying, how can I be as broad as possible and still be powerful so that I don't not boxed in by the expectations of some editor who's paid good money for this thing, right? So I'm always playing a game then with myself and with the editors. On the page, I think my love of story just comes through and the richness of the folklore tradition that we come from really has inspired me at points. At other points, it's been watching my children play, you know, in the inner children's book, with a flip of a page, anything can happen. This kid is at the table eating. I flip the page, okay, this kid is suddenly in space flying. That's completely okay in the problem of children's literature, right? All I need is a really good illustrator on the other side to bring that to life. That imaginative richness, the landscape. In the realm of adult literature, I'm taking you and I'm guiding you from page to page to page to page. There is no illustrator to put those images to life. I'm expecting your brain to do it for you, you know? And so it has to be really rich since we're early. I have to make you feel the texture of the of the air around you. The room is dark and I get to control the lights and turn on the music and I get to make that dance floor as rocky as possible, or as smooth. That kind of world building is really important in writing and for me it's really fun. I'm not a gamer. I don't play video games, but my brother does, my little brother does, and he's always swept up by the art and the landscapes that are created. And so even in conversations with how I find inspiration, there is in writing a big element of world building. And then there is, on the other hands of characters, the world has to be feel real, but what's really important to use emotional truth. It's more important for me to get it, they will share truth of something than it is to make the sentence fly off the page, which my young writers, what I teach are always struggling with. They want to make the language beautiful. And of course that's the pull, the beauty of language is the pull, but it only has power if it's really meaningful. And so emotional truth is something that I chase on the page. I never write toward a conclusion. I write always toward a sense of discovery. I don't mind what I know. I write the things I am interested in. The job of the writer is not to solve the problems of a real world, it's to engage with them as honestly as possible to make transparent what it means like, what it is like to live in these times and sometime elsewhere. Thanks for sharing that. That's so beautiful. This next question, you know, I want to talk about if you could share any memorable moments, you know, where your writing has touched the lives of readers, especially within, you know, our mon community. And I want to say firsthand, I've been very touched by everything that I've read by you. And I used to be a really big reader, but now I love listening to audiobooks. And so I've tuned in to a lot of your books on Audible. And I just, yeah, it's so amazing to me every time. So I'd love if you could share maybe like a story or two about anything that you've heard from our community. So last week I was in a book group with two different, a virtual book group on the same night with two different groups. And one of them was the Mon Women's Association of North Carolina, the head right where Rivers part. And so to be in that conversation was incredibly moving. You know, so many of us are the daughters of women who come from humble realities, humble circumstances, who've no reason to think their stories would be of interest to anyone else. So many of us as daughters were afraid of the day when our mothers will leave us, As their mothers oftentimes many times have left them, due to to to the fact the wall mortals due to the fact of war and poverty, all of these other things, but it was such a moving conversation. I received as a gift for this conversation, a collection of letters written by the women, an aerial of the things that they had to say, "I didn't know my heart needed to hear." You know, when you write a book and where were first parties knew, it just came my march. You know, it's getting reviewed by all the trade publications, it's getting responses by a lot of other women around the world, but to to being conversation with a group of more women, that was really beautifully moving for me. And then the other group right after that group is this group of elderly white women who had gone to this tiny little college and now they live on either coasts and they realized several years ago that they were all dying. And so they made a commitment to themselves to each other that they would come together twice a month and partake in these conversations. For my conversation, many of them head right through most of the body of my adult work, but it was also really moving to see how much they saw themselves and their parents, the women and their lives in the things that are written. You know, unless you're a Native American, we all came from somewhere to call this place home. And while that reminder shouldn't be necessary, it is in a country that is very white supremacist. You know, so it's humbling to be reminded. Oh yes, it wasn't so many generations ago that might that my elders spoke with thick accents too. But both of those conversations, I think they happening beside each other right after really helped me understand who my readers are and who I'm writing for. But one of the one of the most I think most moving things that happened to me this year was I delivered the Carlton College commencement this year. I was the first small person to take that stage. I believe in the first small woman in America to receive an honorary doctorate by by any American institution. But my commencement speech was 30 minutes. And it was tricky because we know you and I know across college campuses, there's been so much protesting what is happening in Israel and in Gaza, the Palestinians as among American women as somebody whose people have also faced genocide. I had to take a stage at this time. And so the stakes were high, Ariel. And I didn't just want to say a few nice words. I wanted to be authentic and honest. So I delivered a 30 minute speech. It's been viewed 60,000 times. And that's just off Carlton platform. This is not on social media. It's not a social media like sensation or anything. But it was really moving to see the students rising up at the end of it. I'm now older than my mother was when I graduated from Carlton 23 years ago, Ariel. I'm now older than my mother was. But to be back, am I alma mater to deliver that commencement address to see the students standing up at a time when our hearts are breaking everywhere? That was incredibly moving for me. That's so beautiful. Thank you. This next segment I want to talk about really pioneering pathways. Being a trailblazer in Mung literature. As one of the very first published Mung authors in the United States, how did it feel to break ground in Mung literature? I think it was very, I had to be young to do it. And I was Ariel. I was only 27 when my first book came out. 22 when I sought out to become a writer, 27 when the book comes out. I had a lot of energy in the beginning. People didn't want, they don't want to buy the book. It's one more story they say about the Vietnam more such a sad chapter in American history. Why would we want to read more about it? And then to have to be a writer from the American Midwest. As you may have realized, the coast are often known as sexier places, right? When we talk about immigrants and refugees who are talking California and New York, it hardly ever, you know, begins here in the American Midwest. And so there were these things against me. And so I knew that I had to work hard. And I did. In the first three years of publication, I did over 365 talks a year. There were days when I was at four or five different institutions. I remember one day was my birthday. And I ended in this Minneapolis, Minneapolis public school, but I've been gone all day doing different talks. And they had a big cake for me. And on the cake, there was my photo. And I had to slice my own neck to feed the kids, right? It was, and I thought, wow, like, this is the moment. I remember the first paid trip I got out of the state. And it was to the University of Wisconsin, Oshbash. And the honorarium was $250 only. But that was the first time I was paid to go anywhere to speak. And it was these moon kids. I remember thinking, because I don't fly well every time I fly, I have get fevers and whatnot. And so I didn't fly well, but I got there. And I saw how hungry they were to meet me. These moon kids. And I saw how, carefully, they were listening to me. And I saw then the responsibility that I had to be. I had to be good. I had to make it worth it. Fair or not, I had to be, I had to be the real thing. So there is a kind of pressure on being one of the first. And then in terms of just stamina, I couldn't do what I did then, Ariel. I'm now 43. It's been quite a while, you know, since I've made that kind of a run, I can't go back and present eight or nine or ten different times a day. That's something that youth afforded me. But because I did so much of that, I became a sought-after public speaker. And so then there's now a dimension to what I do. There are a lot of good writers, not a lot of good writers, nationally, or good speakers. But I become a public speaker, which I never expected, because I grew up as a selective mute. So I was a writer, a public speaker, and then I realized, oh, to pay the bills, I have to teach. And so I had to become a good teacher. Yet I don't think my career will be possible without these three elements, at least these three elements. But on the way, Ariel, I'll tell you, I became a court-qualified interpreter, because I wanted to understand the translation of language. I became of each and our blocks certified tax preparer, because I wanted, and I needed a way of preparing my own taxes, because it was not going to be a traditional life. I wasn't just going to get a W2 from any institution. And so I've had to acquire a lot of skills. To survive as a writer, you have to be a great businesswoman, which people won't think about when they think about me necessarily, right? But it is true. When you think about a leader in the arts, you're not thinking about a four-ton woman with a soft, tiny voice like me. You're not. It's not how it works, the world that we live in. And so everywhere I was going, I was getting this one thing. You are not what I expected. Make up, people were saying it to me. Cadu, people were saying it to me. Ca, people were saying it to me. And both people were saying it to me. You're not what I expected. And the question was then what were you expecting? When you opened up a book by me, when you come to one of my talks, what were you expecting? And I think, Ariel, I am where I am today because I'm not what people expected. I think that if we play the roles that are prescribed for us, we meet the expectations of those around us, we will fail ourselves. I've learned that what I'm worth is beyond what any institution can pay me. If I base my worth only on the good graces of institutions, I would be dead already. Sometimes, moment will come to me and they will say, so you're not married to a moment. Why not? Why not? And it's like a double sadness, right? One, because I had wanted to. I had wanted to. At some point in my life, I thought it was possible. But when I looked at myself, at the beginning of my career there, I was already 27 years old, traveling all around the country, doing this kind of work. Many of the moment, my age were already married. Many more, many more, you know. They wanted a taller woman, they say to me, you know, you're very cute, but you're not very tall. And, you know, I like taller women. I like this or I like that, you know, and then it's a silly, silly question. But, but I love them all language, you know. And I always thought that one day when I fell in love, I would marry a man who could say to me, "Go hookah." You know, and that's not my reality. I'm with, you know, Aaron Hockinson, you know, six feet tall. You find them all over Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, building lots of facial hair glasses. But he says to me, "I believe so much in the work that you're doing." I'm happy to lend my lifetime to your cause. Those are pretty both words, you know, words that you have to take seriously, words that make you reconsider and think about who you are and what you want to be and what you want to be to your people and your family. And so we make decisions and we live with them and we grow old with them. We grow wiser with them. So I can talk a lot about it. racial marriages, I can talk a lot about expectations either way, but the reality is that I've not been what people expected. Because whatever they were expecting, Ariel, it wouldn't allow me to live and do the work that I believe in, at the level that I believe in. And I'm always betting on myself, because nobody bets on me, you know, the University of Wisconsin early on, there was a job and, um, and they called my one of my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Claire, and they asked, "I was by then already a published writer," they said, "can Calculea gang even string a sentence?" You know, or another conference for diversity right here in the Midwest, I was invited to be the keynote, and then they decided that they found somebody who would be better than me, so they put me in a closet, a tiny little room, you know, and I had to fight to get in that tiny little room. They broke their own contract, so I can, I can be honest with you, it's been an incredibly hard road, but I think that I've learned a great deal from it, and somehow my heart is not broken yet, Ariel, somehow I still love the way the flowers bloom, and I still love talking, throwing ideas back and forth in a room full of students, and I still love being conversation with fellow artists. The world has not broken my heart, it has made it stronger. Thank you so much for sharing that. Side question, have you ever thought about, or I mean, I'm sure you've thought about this, or this is a silly question, but I'd love a book just about you, just about God, just about Galia, like a whole book, and yeah, I don't know, I feel like that would be such an important and profound piece in our community and in our culture, and I hope, I hope one day, that there will be just a book about Galia. Thank you, thank you. One day, every book has pieces of me all over it, but someday it will be fun. Yeah, I love that. This next question, I want to ask, what advice do you have for aspiring Hmong authors who may be navigating a similar path in writing and publishing? You have to love yourself, if you don't love yourself, you're gonna die, because writing shouldn't have to be, but it's such a competitive field. You know, there's awards used in every year, so this year I have four books out, and I know that the pressure starts building in November, and it's not gonna end until like May, and that's if you have a chance at the awards, right, if that's if you have a chance at the recognition. So you have to love yourself, otherwise you won't be able to do this, and then like everything else that is the arts in America, longevity matters, you have to persist, you have to last. I teach so many writers, and there's so many talented writers, and I think if we all stop through, wouldn't it be incredible, but I see my students changing their priorities and changing their interests along the way, and in the end maybe you have two or three standing, all of a given class. So longevity is game persistence matters, and then you have to be able to understand that you need many chances to succeed. You need many chances to succeed, and the thing about the world that we live in, especially if you're a woman, especially if you're a mom, is that the world would not give you those chances. You have to demand it, of yourself, and then the world. And so I have what 13 books out now, next year there'll be 14 or 15, the year after that will be closer to 20. I'm giving myself many different chances in many different arenas to play the games that I love, which is to say then that you have to be strategic, and above and beyond everything else you have to be willing to learn, and you cannot marry yourself to one notion of how to do something. The truth is that there's really been no career like yours, and you're going to make it what it is. What I look for models, and how to survive as a writer on the American landscape, no models exactly like mine cannot be. And yet at every turn, I've tried to open pathways in doorways to young among artists, among writers everywhere. We've introduced Billy Tao, C. Ryder, and Alcouville to in the world of American illustrators. Three is pretty good. We start out very few. And so I'm always open up opportunities, which is to say you have to build good relationships with people. There are other people like me now who are in positions where they they understand certain things about the landscape where they can open up certain doors and windows. And so you have to be open. You have to be open to those opportunities. Even if it's not exactly what you want, you have to understand what you need to grow from. If that makes sense, like I've never worked with the United Nations before, but why not? And so I'm growing a lot. I'm learning a lot. You know, I had never been a libretto before. I didn't grow up going to opera, certainly not. But I knew that if I didn't try it, if I didn't do it, then I would be saying to all of these other poor kids, that simply because we've never had the opportunity does not mean that we cannot do. And so you have to try. If you want to do it, you've got to try. Hmm, I love that. Yeah, I love that so much. In this next segment, I want to talk about reflecting on, on favorite works. You know, the heart of the writer, right? The heart of Gallia. You've written several clean books. Can you share which one has been your favorite to write so far and why? The one I'm editing right now is actually a lot of fun to write. It's a young adult memoir, called Story of Our Own. And it's the funnest to write so far. But I'm not, I'm intimidated by the editing process. So, so that's interesting. I'm a first draft, which is generally very messy. And that's just my first step. It's the second draft where really the artistry comes into play and threads start being woven across it. Um, so that one's really fun to write. The hardest book to write so far was actually the debut middle ray fiction. I've always wondered what happens when we die. Like, where do we go? How do we journey there? And who do we meet? I never thought I would try to answer that question in the realm of middle-grade fiction, but that's what I attempted. It's what I, it's what I, it was the great adventure before me. So that one was really hard to write. Took a long time. Sometimes I sit down in the middle, like my book, the rock in my throat, my picture book. I wrote that in like an hour, a real, an hour, and it hasn't changed much at all through the editing. And yet my other book from the tops of the trees took so long and so much tweaking. So each book has its own life, and each life teaches me new things about the world and about myself and about different readers. So I don't have a favorite, but I can tell you the silly home-commerce and national endowment big beats title, tell classics are made by the grace of what suddenly it is, right? And then the song poem, my most critically acclaimed title so far, people don't read it. People don't read it, but who could have foreseen that it will live as the first main stage production on an operatic stage? Wow, that's incredible, right? Somewhere in the Arnold World, a pandemic book, it's about, it's a collective refugee memoir, and the question is how can a memoir be collective? It is because it exists now. You know, it exists now. So it is. People don't know about it, but I think in terms of what I have to offer literary nonfiction as a craft, that book is an incredible study on craft, how you take on all of these stories and you somehow make meaning from it. And so I have no favorite, I will tell you this, I've not yet written a book that I didn't believe in. Trees don't deserve to die for the projects that we're just doing because we're doing it. So yeah, every single book that I've written I stand by, there are reasons why I've done it, and I hope that it becomes part of a body of work that will illustrate not only the range of Gokalia, but the depth of our artistry. This next question, you know, how does the process of writing and sharing your stories impact your own growth and understanding of yourself and the world around you? I think in many ways I've answered this question in different across across the whole interview, but more than anything, I think motherhood has really shifted my understanding of words. So it's a wound about way to answer the question. I always thought I knew whether we're fragile meant, but it wasn't until I held my daughter's feet, and I thought her beating heart, Ariel, that I understood that word. The same just happened with price to sell, right? So there are these words that I've met all of my life and I feel I've known, and there are these moments in my life that is really cemented for me, their meanings. Google, my grandma used to say that surrounded by wisdom without the experience to back it up, you don't know how to use it. She's been gone now for her 20 years, 21 years, and every year I understand those words better. A writer is somebody who can give themselves options on a page or a mid-sentence in the air. I can stop myself and I can say, do I want to end this with an exclamation point or the da-da-da or maybe I want to draw the breath out of my readers until they're completely breathless. with me, that I work them all the way through, poke so much out of them. And so in that way, I understand in my own relationships with human beings, in my life, not just readers, right? How much to draw, how much to ask, how much to give in different ways, which I never thought was possible in the beginning. But the danger every, all of my writing teacher says that when you live to write, when you live to write, your life becomes very dangerous. You have to write to live, right? And so that's something that I hold close. I write to live, I don't live to write. You mentioned earlier, you know, the late home comer. So in the late home comer, you share some deeply personal family stories. What was the most challenging part of writing this memoir? And what was the most rewarding part? The funeral part, I cried all the way through in the writing and the reading. And I still now, if I read it, you can hear the words or so to tears of heartache. The last part was really hard to write because it's the goodbye. So emotionally it was rough. Readers, sometimes writers can manipulate certain feelings from their readers. And I've never liked that, I've always hated that. And so instead of that, I want to feel my way through so the readers can feel with me, which means that the emotional punches that are coming unfailing, I'm like the first audience for my work. So emotionally that was really, really hard 'cause I loved my grandma deeply because she loved me too. And I used to say to my grandma all the time, Ariel, I love you and she would say, "Gubal, I know." Which is not the American response to love, right? But now that I'm 43, I understand. Again, gross, I understand. What a gift it is to say to somebody, I love you and for them to say, "I know." How many times, Ariel, in your life, when people say, "I love you," and we'll say, "Do you?" "You know, you'll wonder." Like, you know, but to say, "I love you," and for somebody to say, "I know." You know, even our own children, can they really say that to us, right? What a gift. So that part of it was very, very hard. The emotionality of that last part. In terms of the late homecomer, beginning a book before you're born, beginning a memory before you're born is a bold thing to do. What is even bolder? Memoir is generally the realm of the rich and the famous. So a lot of people live illustrious lives and the readers wanna read about their journeys. I'm writing memoir, I will literally know among people. I'm writing a memoir by an old woman who cannot read or write. So already, I'm thwarting the function of memoir and then to call it a family memoir. I'm exploding that run. Memoir tends to be a little bit narcissistic. Looks at itself. I'm thwarting those expectations from the very onset and I'm very open with it. It's called the late homecomer among family memoir. So these things, while to the average reader may not be bold choices from a literary perspective or what I'm doing to the genre, incredibly bold. And I continue that work in the song poem somewhere in the unknown world and wherever first part. I'm always pushing the edges of the genre to make more and more possible within it. I'm not simply writing because I have stories to tell. And I think that's something that that's something that you have to really love craft to think about. You really have to love literature to contend with. But these things are not easy things for somebody to say this is what I'm gonna do. And yet it is exactly what I've done. And what I will continue to do. I'm in it and I'm writing in English because I wanna make meaning possible here. I wanna push our edges of understanding. - Thank you for sharing that. I wanna talk about your book, where the river part, a story of your mother's life. So can you describe any specific challenges you faced while writing such a deeply personal and historical narrative? So what were some of the most surprising or enlightening stories your mother shared with you while you were writing this book? - The biggest challenge is that I can't include all of the stories that she shared with me. Not only in the process of working on the book, but even after she shared these stories. And I'm like, you know, but you can't go back. The book is done, right? The book is done for now anyway. So that part is really hard. Understanding that you're writing something and it's not the comprehensive thing because there are so many different elements and stories that don't make it into the book. Constraints of time and a host of other reasons. And so that part is hard to make peace with. Very hard to to say this is it. And I don't think I would be the only writer to say that because there's so much more. And it's not that they're a bad aerial. I could add a thousand more things that would make the book better. But I just can't because the book is not done. So that part is really challenging. And then the other part about writing where Rivers part is that it's the third and final. So I knew that I was going to close up the family memory trilogy. Anyway, maybe one day I'll write a story of my life, maybe one day I'll write other, you know, memoiristic pieces, creative nonfiction pieces. But this closes up the family trilogy. In between all of my books, there's my eight years. So the lay home camera comes out in 2008, the sound point in 2016 and where Rivers part comes out in 2024. I've needed that much time to recover the energy and the, really the energy, but also the creative capacity to tackle it entirely. The hardest, another heart element about where Rivers part is so much about the woman's body, what happens in that body through time? Which generally men find boring. You know, when you're writing about a woman's aging body, not just a sexy big breast, you know? And so I know already that there are things that I'm doing. It's the most feminist of the titles, although that's sometimes hard for white readers to see. 'Cause how would a young woman be feminist if she's had all these miscarriages and she has all these children? A white feminism can be narrow and it's understanding of women who are not white and whose circumstances are not within that range. And so understanding all of these things is hard, but I'm still gonna do it. So how am I gonna do it? And how am I gonna do in an interesting and creative way? And how am I gonna do it so that it allows my mother's voice 'cause it's not my mother writing it. I'm writing her story in the first person, allows her voice and her perspective, her worldview to come through. And so there's a part of the book where she writes letters to her children. And I asked my mom, "What do you wanna say to this one or that one or the other?" And for me, that's where creatively, it's very, very interesting. And I also want it time to stop. I want people to feel what is so present in so many women's lives. In those childhood rearing years, time becomes a jumbled thing. The progress as a setbacks happen in tandem. And so to replicate that process on the page for a patriarchal reader, like generally that's where the money is, it's tricky. You gotta be not only nuanced, you gotta be bold. And then to trust my readers will get it. And you and I know how racism works, how gender works in this country. And so some readers will say, "Kalyah just completely lost hold of time." And others will say, "Wait, isn't that what that feels like?" That the prose here is replicating these years. So lots of little things that people don't think about what they think about just the story. It's a story of a young, long girl who becomes a literate before many long women would become like literate. Sorry, my mother's father could afford it, you know? But she falls in love and makes decisions. She leaves her mother at the age of 16 and she never sees her again. She never sees her again. And that is the dream and the nightmare that she rises from everyday of her life. Oh my gosh. We're at the end of the episode already. But I feel like we could go on and I can have this conversation with you forever. The next question I have for you, Kalyah, how can storytelling and literature be used as tools for empowerment and social change, especially within marginalized communities like arts? - For me, storytelling is how you build relationships whether it is a friendship you're talking about or a sisterhood. You know, sisterhoods are connected by stories. The thick fabric of where we come from, where we are and where we're going. Storytelling for me is an incredible vehicle of pathway, not only to get closer to one other human being to build bridges right across different sectors, but it is a way of understanding that we're very rich in a world that sees us so often as poor. If you look at the census, for example, you know, we're incredibly rich. We have in each of our hearts, you know, oceans of stories to share and to tell. And so many of us along the way have been gifted with so many stories. We sometimes don't realize in our everyday lives unless you're like a professional writer like me and it's what you think about. But we're an incredibly rich people. We come from people. people who have crossed oceans and rivers to get here mountains where people who are blessed, blessed so often with strong families, strong women who love us and believe in us and we were as far into the future as they were going to get and they knew it and they knew it. And I think in every single woman's life it takes a long time for you to realize that fact. The somewhere in time there was somebody and you were their dream of a future and so that's what I that's such a how incredible is that. And then I think for me I've always used memoir to correct history. When I in the history books you know we're not taught in schools but my books are now taught in schools across the country. Institutions large and small. That's so me one it is so important because the next generation gets to see a reflection of themselves but also they have a tool that they can use to build their different structures with. So really what I'm giving out through these books is like a resource. Right? And we need resources to build. Not a lot of people know how to use it yet but more and more people are learning how. You know there are more American professors across the country and whether they like my work or not they have to reckon with it. I think that's powerful. Yeah very very powerful. The last question so in closing what message would you like to share with our listeners you know particularly spying aspiring writers and storytellers. First and foremost thank you for giving us an hour for giving me an hour an hour to listen to like our voices talking and thinking about the things that matter to us. My father has always said that our tears in our words are our gifts to each other and so as a writer this is my big gift so thank you for accepting. The the thing that I want I think listeners to understand is that I'm 43 but in terms of my American literature I am one of the first or one of the oldest to be working actively in this field. In that way times a collapsible thing. We look at our lives and we think oh maybe I've lived this long already where I've done this much and we forget that time is a collapsible thing. We're not just you know our leaves floating on the currents of a river. Things really important for us to understand that and then we'll one leaves sticks to a tree branch the others we know what we halted in their flow as well. You change the flow of that river forever. In the beginning of wherever's part I begin with a quote by the Renaissance writer Dorothy West there is no life that does not contribute to history. There is no life that does not contribute to history. I think that is so important for us to remember. I'm 43 but I've really been a part of so many historical acts. Then you have two you have two. So hold that close and let that guide you in the legacy that is your life. That is our life together. Kelly thank you so much for spending this hour with me and having this conversation with me. I feel like I've learned so much just within the hour and and I'm so excited for the listeners to tune in and listen to your journey and in your story as well. So at the end of every episode I have these three key questions that I like to ask all of the Hmong women that come on on my podcast. You know I ask guests to share a quote that has personally inspired them through whatever they are in their life right. So would you be able to share that quote today? I was in a bathroom in Iowa somewhere and I heard scratching on the bathroom wall so I waited because I was curious. I could I could hear that somebody was riding on the wall with like a metal object and when they left I went in and I peaked in and somebody wrote on the wall I would not be divorced to him now if I had their how to marry myself first. Those words have stayed with me across across the years. What would our relationships be with the people in our lives if we had their how to marry ourselves first? Well that's so powerful. And my next question, what does being a Hmong woman mean to you? Being a Hmong woman means that I'm a part of legacy of women who have been incredibly powerful in their trajectory through history whether documented or not. My last question for you, where can listeners find you? If they're curious about your work or or anything about you, where can they find Galia? I have a website www.caliayang.com. I'm on social media so Twitter, Instagram a little bit. But mostly my books, you find me in the library, you find me in the bookstores. If you like to listen to me talk, I'm sure you can YouTube me too. Awesome guys I will be linking Galia's social media handles and all the things in the description below. So please feel free to check her out and all her books out as well. You won't want to miss out on everything that Galia has written. So thank you so much Galia for your time today and your energy. I am so appreciative and I'm just so excited for the listeners to hear this episode today. What's your Ariel? Thank you all. Friends, that brings us to the end of this very inspiring episode here on Long Woman Thriving. Thank you so much for joining the amazing Galia Yang and I today. I hope that you were inspired by her incredible journey and passion for books and everything that has to do with who she is and her journey into becoming a world-renowned author. As always your support means the world to me. So if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to follow the podcast on all of the podcast platforms. Leave me a review and share it with your friends and family. Follow Long Woman Thriving on all social media platforms to stay updated on upcoming episodes and connect with other amazing women who are making a difference in our community. Let's continue to build a community that celebrates Mo woman Thriving together as I close this episode. Remember that your story is part of this vibrant narrative. Keep Thriving, keep inspiring and until next time take care.