Reprinted on Sept. 11, 2006

By LAURA YUEN
St. Paul Pioneer Press

It takes a dozen bends in the road and a final turn onto a gravel path to reach the headstone of Nao Tou Yang and See Lytongpao.

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Family members buried the couple about a year apart in Oakland Cemetery on St. Paul's North End. As the first generation of Americans in their family, Nao Tou and See were not known to wave the Stars and Stripes from their doorstep. They did not learn the words to the national anthem, or more than a handful of English phrases.

They rarely spoke of what America meant to them. But in the couple's final years, the new world reversed their family's fortunes in a way Nao Tou and See could have never dreamed.

On their grave marker, their arrival date in the United States has been inscribed between life's bookends of birth and death.

This is their journey.

Their son Blong Yang, a schoolteacher, and his sister Bao, were the first to flee Laos after the country fell to communist rule. Before their 1975 escape, Blong left his parents a note urging them to meet him in Thailand.

Nao Tou and See and their two youngest children left behind their Laotian village and started inching toward the Thai border. They settled and farmed new plots of land, sometimes staying for a year at a time, as they advanced toward the Mekong River.

But when they finally crossed into Thailand four years later, they learned Blong had already left for the United States.

Border guards took all Nao Tou and See's money and possessions. On audiocassettes that Nao Tou would mail to Blong in Milwaukee, he spoke of nights sleeping in the jungle, their only comfort a campfire.

Blong, a young father struggling to raise a family in a strange land, wept when he listened to his father's tapes. As part of the first wave of the Hmong exodus to reach America, Blong cried as he told his father of his guilt over leaving his parents and siblings behind.

On recordings he'd send back to the Ban Vinai refugee camp, he pleaded with his parents to join him in the United States.

It's a good country, but it's hard, and I really need you here, he would say into his cassette player.

But life in a cramped shantytown without enough food to feed his family broke his father's spirit.

When Nao Tou recorded his next tape in 1979, he told Blong he should have taken his own life instead of moving his family to the camp. In his despair, Nao Tou denied Blong was his son. It was his way of shutting out hope.

When Blong heard his father's words, he hugged the cassette player, retreated to a closet and wept. His young children heard his sobs but didn't know what had caused them.

Blong vowed he would do everything to get the rest of his family back, even if it meant writing letters to every humanitarian agency and old acquaintance he could think of. After years of foiled plots of trying to bring his parents to safety, these last attempts worked.

Within a year, he sponsored his family's arrival in Minnesota.

Nao Tou and See stepped off the plane during the brunt of a Minnesota winter. When father glimpsed son for the first time in five years, he brought his hand to his mouth, as if in shock. At 67, the old man spilled waves of anguish as he embraced his son. The family cried so hard, Nao Tou couldn't stand or walk.

It was "the most happiness in the whole world," Blong recalled.

He took them home to the McDonough Homes on St. Paul's North End, where he and his family had resettled in 1978.

When one of Blong's daughters, MayKao, saw her grandparents for the first time, she couldn't help but notice the difference in their sizes. He was nearly 6 feet tall – a head taller than any other Hmong man she knew. See stood 4 feet 10 inches. She was "the smart one in the relationship," Nao Tou liked to say.

They were master storytellers, punctuating every tale of ghosts and Hmong folk tales with fluttering hands and booming voices. They'd gather grandchildren around them as they regaled them with stories of their homeland, tag-team style.

Although Nao Tou and See became U.S. citizens in the late '90s, they knew their future in this country held little promise of great success. Nao Tou often told his son that he, as an old man, could get only so far in America. It was up to future generations to take up where he left off.

In the twilight of their lives in their mid-80s, Nao Tou and See lived largely isolated from American culture. They never held jobs in the U.S. or learned how to drive. Five of their children had resettled in the Twin Cities, and they spent their days with their children and grandchildren.

But they were still the anchors of their family. They greeted the grandkids at the bus stop after school. They helped them catch grasshoppers in the back yard.

They never considered themselves Americans, but America changed them. In earlier times, their hobbies included tubing on the Apple River in Wisconsin or catching carp on the St. Croix. "Coke" and "two Big Mac" were among the only English words they knew.

They bought other treats from McDonald's as well, often two at a time so one could be refrigerated for later.

"Apple pie was their favorite," Blong said.

Two war tragedies made Blong the eldest in his family. His older brother, Yia Yang, was guiding an American pilot over Laos in 1973 when their plane was gunned down during the Vietnam War. Chia Yang, his sister, was killed the following year when North Vietnamese troops ransacked her village.

Nao Tou and See's five remaining children and their families resettled in the Twin Cities. Blong, now 58 and a Maplewood resident, spent his first year in this country using his own version of sign language instead of speaking English. He eventually became a Hmong-American pioneer in Minnesota and an admissions adviser at Century College in White Bear Lake.

His biggest contributions, though, were in the home.

He made his daughters sign a contract agreeing not to marry until they finished college.

To build their vocabulary, he also demanded they write a new word on a sticky note every day until the basement walls in their North End rambler were covered with Post-Its.

After completing a high school program in Germany, MayKao became a camp counselor at the Concordia Language Village near Bemidji, where one summer she taught German to Chelsea Clinton. The thought still makes MayKao's father giddy with laughter.

While his children were still in elementary school, Blong borrowed a book on the top U.S. universities. Prestigious names like Brown, Penn and Vanderbilt caught his eye. Three of his children eventually graduated from those schools, and two others finished their studies at Carleton College and Mankato State University.

Nao Tou Yang was 88 at the time of his death. When See Lytongpao saw the marker her children prepared for her husband's grave, she was upset.

Whoever chiseled the inscription placed the words to the far right of the headstone. She asked Blong why Nao Tou's last tribute was not centered. She did not realize – and her family did not want to tell her – that the left half was left blank for her.

"We tried to make her happy," said their youngest son, Vang Yang of Vadnais Heights. See died a little more than a year later at age 86 after complications from a routine kidney stone operation.

MayKao Hang, now a director of adult services for Ramsey County Human Services, often thinks of the sacrifices her grandparents made. They lived quietly in this country. But they gave her a sense of confidence and completeness that spoke far louder.

"No matter how different I was in this larger, white Western world that didn't quite fully accept me, somehow I belonged here," she said. "I had a role, even if it was only as a granddaughter."

The couple's children arranged elaborate funeral rites, each lasting four days. When they pay their respects at the gravesite, they leave fruit, flowers and Big Macs.

And when those gifts cease to adorn the grave, the rest of the stone will speak for itself: Mother. Father. Birth, death, and U.S.A.

One day Nao Tou and See's great-great-grandchildren will read that and learn of their roots in this country, Blong said. "Someday, somehow, we need to know that," he said. "It will be a good story."

Laura Yuen can be reached at lyuen@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5498.