Where Two Rivers Meet: Literary Geography and Feminist Returns

• In Event: Hmong Americans and Creative Placemaking in the Empire

Abstract

In Hmong American writer, Kao Kalia Yang’s third memoir, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life, she writes about a place where two rivers meet. Where two rivers meet is both a place of origin, of memory, and of return. This paper examines the moments when Yang invokes “where two rivers meet” in her memoir to theorize about feminist literary geography that makes possible feminist returns to one another through love. It pays particular attention to how mothers and daughters invoke an intimate landscape of senses: how sights, sounds, and scents return us to one another despite the separations and devastations of war and colonization.

Author

• Chong A Moua, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh