I learn most when I’m reading the work of my students because I think if it is the work of the artist to harvest from the garden of humanity, you want to be as close to the ground as possible.”

Kao Kalia Yang

Hastings Art Center
216 4th St. E.
Hastings, MN 55033
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“Everything I write is a love letter to someone somewhere,” said Kao Kalia Yang at the Hastings Reads author visit on Tuesday, Feb. 18 at the Hastings Arts Center.
Despite the frigid cold residents filled the arts center to hear Yang speak about her books A Map into the World, The Diamond Explorer, and Where Rivers Part, the books chosen this year by the Hastings Reads program.
“A Map of the World made a picture book author out of me,” said Yang as she spoke first about her children’s book.
A picture book was a departure from her previous writing, which ranged from memoirs to nonfiction, but were all for an adult audience.
The book is about Yang’s neighbors, a couple named Bob and Ruth Schally. Bob and Ruth would sit outside on a bench outside of their St. Paul home, which is how Yang and her family got to know them.
Yang read an excerpt from the book following the death of Ruth and how Yang’s daughter, from whose perspective the book is told, drew Bob “a map into the world, in case you need it,” connecting his bench to the trees and the houses and garden of the surrounding neighborhood.
The Schally’s bench, which was given to Yang after Bob’s death in 2021, can now be found at the East Side Freedom Library where Yang described readers sitting on it, reading her book, and only then realizing they were sitting on the very same bench.
“I’m so thankful the story lives on,” said Yang.
Yang then spoke about her first middle grade book The Diamond Explorer. Despite the book being for middle schoolers, Yang’s intent was always to make it scary, with the book attempting to answer the question “where do we go after we die?” said Yang.
The book follows an 11-year-old boy named Malcolm who struggles to discover his own story in a world where everyone around him already knows it for him. This journey of self-discovery leads Malcolm to speak with the dead, including his grandmother, which is the passage Yang read from the book.
When discussing the pivot into picture books and middle grade fiction, Yang spoke to “pushing always for our possibilities,” a goal well-known to the many teachers attending the event. This goal of pushing herself into new genres is exemplified by her work as librettist for the operatic adaptation of her 2016 book The Song Poet: A Memoir of my Father.
The opera, which broke records as not only the first mainstage production of a Hmong story, but also as the first production to sell out six months before opening, opened in March 2023 to critical success. According to Yang, though she isn’t a musician, can’t sing, and has fallen asleep at productions from the Ordway to the Lincoln Center in New York, she felt she needed to work on the production to show that even those who grew up without the privilege of going to them could participate in their creation.
Yang’s final reading was from Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. The book is named for the island village where Yang’s mother, Tswb, was born that was surrounded by two rivers.
“As I was writing this book, I thought it was quite incredible that after all this time, after journeying across so many borders across the ocean, she ends up, of all places, at another confluence of rivers: what the native folk call Bdote, the confluences of the Minnesota and the mighty Mississippi,” said Yang.
While Yang’s mother agreed to let the book be written, she never wanted it to be in the room when it was read because “I would cry too much and then you would cry too much,” she told Yang.
The night ended with a brief Q&A where Yang fielded questions on her inspirations to her writing style. As to what inspired her, Yang spoke to how her answer to that question has changed over the years. Where years ago she might have said Robert Frost or referenced the great Chinese poets, today “I learn most when I’m reading the work of my students,” said Yang, continuing, “because I think if it is the work of the artist to harvest from the garden of humanity, you want to be as close to the ground as possible.”
Yang contrasted her writing to the book she is currently reading: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz.
“I love the attention to the words, to the sentence on that level. When I’m writing, because I’m a mother of three, because like a lot of working mothers, I’m being pulled in many directions all at the same time; I don’t have that kind of time and luxury to really look on the page word-by-word. I’m running by the sentence,” she said.
That style of “running by the sentence: for Yang was not only an effect of time, but purposeful choice: “I’m not chasing perfection on the page. Art, for me, is the clearest translation of the human being, the human heart, human relationships at work, and so I’m searching for that clarity.”