In the tradition of Katherine Boo and Tracy Kidder, a vital tale of endurance and adaptation that follows a Hmong woman from the mountains of her native Laos to the sunbaked flatlands of Fresno, California, revealing the power of war to destroy lives—and the power of love, food, and memory to heal and restore them.
When the news came, Ia Moua was planting rice—just as she and her family had done every springtime for centuries. But this was May 1975. When a young man delivered the message that Laos had fallen to the communists, eleven-year-old Ia and her family immediately knew that they were entering a whole new season of their lives—one of danger and dislocation, and of hunger for something beyond food alone. Just how long this new era would last, and how far it would take them from their homes, none of them could guess.
Some forty years later and an ocean away, Ia is parched and aching as she completes another harvest in Fresno. The rice that she grows here is different, the seeds toughened by seasons of drought and deprivation. But as the first grains are roasted over a wood fire, the golden aroma floods Ia with memories that time and distance cannot erase: of irreversible betrayal by those closest to her, but also of the home that she is defiantly rebuilding in this alien world.
In The Hungry Season, award-winning writer Lisa M. Hamilton tells the unforgettable story of a life lost and regained against incredible odds. Stretching from the jungles of Laos to the treacherous waters of the Mekong River, from a refugee camp in Thailand to the sprawl of California's Central Valley, it is an expansive tale of survival: about the ways in which we overcome heartbreak, and about the nourishment that matters most.
Journalist Lisa M. Hamilton uses a neutral tone, raising her volume occasionally to highlight extremes as she tells the story of Ia Moua, a Hmong immigrant who escaped wartime Laos and holed up in a Thai refugee camp, finally making her way to Fresno, California. The steadiness of Hamilton's voice is anchoring as Ia deals with beatings by her husband, the guns of invasive armies, pervasive hunger,
