The land we came from: The river of tears and sadness

For those of us born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, that river was a source of flow in lives caught in waiting.

In this series “The land we came from”, we asked writers to reflect on the environment they grew up in and how it has shaped their lives. Here, author Kao Kalia Yang remembers the river of “tears and sadness” she grew up around in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand, where tens of thousands of Hmong people fled after the Americans withdrew their troops from Laos and the Hmong were sentenced to what survivors describe as genocide by the incoming communist government in 1975. The water smelled of growing things. The tiny rocks underneath its surface were murky and grey. The little tadpoles that swam along its banks were shaped like the surface of my nails, they gathered in groups, their little black tails moving behind them swiftly. Every night, it was my job to go and call my older sister Dawb from the river for dinner and our bath time. Dawb, along with the mid-sized cousins, gathered along the river’s edge. It snaked near the lower part of our side of the compound, beside the bathing well with its broken concrete base. The children spent long hours, bare feet in the water, close to the banks catching tadpoles, looking for snails, and other living things. On the hottest days, the water was particularly putrid but they had long gotten used to the smell.