The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang

Author:Kao Kalia Yang
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781566892629
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2010-03-09T21:00:00+00:00

Love Your Granddaughter,

Kao Kalia Yang

I knew that Grandma did not know English, so I didn’t expect her to write back, but I believed that wherever California was, my letter would reach her, and she would know that I had not forgotten her in America, despite all the new things that I had to remember in school.

I sat with my father (my mother was at night school) at the parent-teacher conferences and listened as my teachers talked and my cousin translated. My handwriting was sloppy. I had not even learned how to form the printed letters well but already I was trailing my letters together in cursive. I rushed through my math. I rushed through all my work. I had to color better. I colored as if I did not see the black lines on the page. My teachers could not pinpoint how much I was learning of English; they knew I had responses but I never shared them. In my head, I answered their commentaries with my own: My handwriting was sloppy because I wanted to make it beautiful to look at, not easy to read; I liked to rush through the numbers because I knew what to do with them—never mind that I made mistakes along the way; I saw no point in coloring: the pictures were already drawn and our coloring was not helping very much anyway. I listened as my teachers diagnosed my biggest problem in school: my silence. Did I talk at home? Could my parents make me talk? Inside myself, I had no answers.

Because I had always been a talkative child, my parents didn’t understand my silence. The problem at home was never that I didn’t talk enough, but that I talked too much. They asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know. They said I could tell them anything and that they would try to help me. I told them that I had no voice in English. I said sometimes when I wanted to talk, I couldn’t find my voice, and then when I did—the person, a kid or a teacher—would already be gone.

My whole family worked to help me.

When my mother came home from school late at night, we read my library books, sounding out letters together. In the beginning, we were equally good. Gradually, I became better than her. I explained the stories on the pages, “It’s about a beautiful princess and a prince that was a toad. Yes, like a frog but uglier.”

My father tried to help me with math. He did it the way he had learned it in Laos. Even the way he wrote his numbers was too curvy to be American. I tried to understand the way he wrote more than what he was writing. He lost patience with me.

He said in a voice that left no room for answering, “Do you want to learn or not?”

Each night, he returned home and we tried again, as we had the night before, going in circles.

Dawb tried to help me, too.

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