Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from a Minneapolis High School

Thirty immigrant and refugee students at a Minneapolis high school, from thirteen countries, writing their own arrival stories. It is shelved here as diaspora experience rather than as a Hmong-authored title, and the distinction is worth being clear about: the essays are the students' own, and Kao Kalia Yang — the most prominent Hmong writer in this catalog — contributed to the book without being its author, though Open Library and Google Books both credit her as one. What earns it the shelf is the experience it records. Arriving, starting school in a language you do not yet have, holding a family together across two countries and translating for your parents at the doctor's office is the Hmong American story of the 1980s and 1990s, told here by the students who are living the same passage now, in the city more Hmong refugees were resettled in than any other. Read it beside The Latehomecomer and Green Card Voices reads as its sequel by other hands. A hundred and seventy-six pages, 2016. For high schoolers, teachers, and anyone who wants the arrival story in the present tense.