Carolrhoda Books | 978-1541561915

by Kao Kalia Yan, illustrated by Khoa Le

“My grandmother is so old, no one knows how old she is.

Not me, not my big sister Dawb, not our older cousin, Lei.

My father waits patiently when we try to guess her age.

He is my grandma’s ninth and youngest child, and even

he does not know how old she is.”

The book begins and already we can tell this will be a powerful story. There will be the young girl, Kalia, her grandma – “born on the other side of the world, across a wide ocean,” – and the extended family. Though they are poor in possessions, they are rich in the most important things.

The luckiest of the children take care of Grandma: one washes her clothes, another scrubs her soft brown back, and Kalia clips grandma’s nails while she “sits on her favorite stool in the light from the window.” Grandma’s feet are rough and calloused, “filled with dirt from long ago and far away.”

CLICK TO ENLARGE    © illustration by Khoa Le

Grandma tells the girls about the time, years before, when she was still a child and had to care for her two younger brothers and baby sister after both her parents died. There was never enough food. “We lived always with hunger eating us on the inside.” Kalia thinks about how “even with just her one tooth, Grandma never said no when we offered her something to eat.”

As Kalia grows older, money is still tight and because the price of meat is expensive, all she can offer her grandma at dinner is a thick chunk of bone on her spoon. Kalia grows tired of the family’s struggles. There is never enough money, not even for a new dress on the first day of school.

One evening, Kalia asks her parents for braces even though she knows the answer.  But what will Grandma say?

This richly textured story, drawn from author Kao Kalia Yan‘s childhood experiences as a Hmong refugee, is stunningly illustrated by Khoa Le.

CLICK TO ENLARGE    © illustration by Khoa Le