Dia's Story Cloth

Dia Cha was a girl when her family fled Laos, and the story cloth at the center of this book, stitched by her aunt and uncle Chue and Nhia Thao Cha in a refugee camp, records that journey panel by panel. The book photographs the cloth and lets Cha narrate it, so children follow a real family out of the mountains, across the Mekong, and on to America through the very object the family made to remember it. Published with the Denver Museum of Natural History, it has been the classroom introduction to paj ntaub story cloths for a generation, and it is still the best one, because the artifact does the teaching. For elementary classrooms, libraries, and any family with a story cloth on the wall that the children have not yet learned to read.