Review by Booklist Review
Award-winning journalist Hamilton crafts a radiant work of compelling portraiture in this deep exploration of one woman's lifelong passion for farming despite the most trying of circumstances. From a wartime childhood in Laos to a Thai refugee camp, then immigration to the U.S., Ia Moua exhibits a nearly uncanny ability to survive and thrive. Her dedication to the cultivation of rice, whether in her beloved childhood village or the far less fertile soil of Fresno, California, is evident as she suffers through repeated trials often dictated by Hmong traditions that usually ignore, if not oppose, the ambitions of women. Ia's turbulent relationship with her husband, the trials of her son and his distant fiancée, the loss of her parents, and the pressures from a far-away brother all fold into a story about the significance and joy Laotian people traditionally find in rice. Hamilton spent hundreds of hours with her subject, and the result is a brilliant narrative that blends an intimate story into the larger cultural, political, and agricultural history of Laos and the Hmong people. Comparisons to Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) are certainly apt, and book clubs will quickly embrace the stark humanity in this unforgettable title.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A deeply reported story of aspiration and desperation among an immigrant Hmong community in California's Central Valley. Agricultural journalist and photographer Hamilton's protagonist, Ia, was born with the name Ai, meaning small, in 1964, when Laos was descending into civil war. An aid worker decided that "what sounded like 'I' couldn't possibly be a person's name," rendering her name as the Hmong word meaning bitterness. When the Communists seized power in 1975, most of her Hmong community fled to Thailand. The Hmong remained in a refugee camp for years, long enough to experience what Hamilton calls "an additional layer of punishment"--namely, the loss of their self-reliant lives as farmers. Their economy was converted to artisanal craftwork in which the women, now doing needlework, were the breadwinners while the men were barely employed and "no longer essential." Ia, now a mother several times over, took her chances and traveled to America, settling in Fresno in a time when "Americans' sympathy for those displaced by the wars in Southeast Asia grew thinner by the year." While navigating a corrupt system of patronage, Ia did something marvelous: She planted a kind of rice highly prized by Southeast Asian connoisseurs as well as Hmong people, selling it for many times the price of ordinary varieties, and created a small agricultural economy that reached back to the old country. "The rice was a medium for memory," writes the author, "a spiritual bridge on which her heart could walk across all that longing and return to when she was with them both in person." Though it brought money and self-sufficiency, Ia's small--and, given climate change, always endangered--farm could not always lift her from the spiritual malaise of exile, even with her mother's encouraging admonition in the face of hardship: "Next year you can start all over again." A sensitive and carefully written story that sympathetically depicts the hard lives of refugees in a strange land. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
