Refugee communities across Minnesota felt the weight of national scrutiny last month when President Donald Trump called the Somali community “garbage.” 

For St. Paul-based Hmong American writer Kao Kalia Yang, whose books have focused on the experiences of displaced children, the rhetoric hit close to home. 

“As a refugee who is very active in the community, I experience all the refugee hate and distrust,” Yang said. “People are questioning, of course the Somali community, but also the Hmong community — how many of you are illegal?” 

“At the front line of all of these things, beauty must still exist,” she added. “Otherwise, I would die. The beauty must be there. There has to be a place for the calm in all of the stormy skies that we’re under, and that’s what writing allows me.” 

Yang’s search for belonging reverberates in the Twin CIties arts scene this weekend, where performing and visual artists are confronting questions of home, identity and the American dream. 

Finding belonging on the page

Yang has witnessed suffering that much of the country still looks away from. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in the wake of the Vietnam War and spent her first six years inside barbed wire fences, with men carrying guns around her. She has watched children confined in cages at the U.S. southern border and the ways society still tells children of color they don’t belong. 

“All of these years later, it’s happening to my own children,” Yang said. “I have interracial children and they’re still told in many, many ways, that they don’t belong here.” 

As an author, Yang refuses to look away. Her work confronts this collective suffering head-on, offering young readers a way to move through the world’s injustices. 

“I make it a point not to turn away from the hurt and the pain of being alive,” she said. “I want you to build in your arsenal all the strength that you would need to meet our world as it is, so we can call on some imagined future, some more hopeful thing.” 

For Yang, storytelling is inseparable from survival. She grew up selectively mute in English, withdrawing from spoken language when she sensed that the world would not listen to her parents.

“When my mom and dad tried to speak English, you could feel the tapping on the counter, the tapping of the foot. People were impatient because they were struggling,” Yang said. “So, as a child, I decided that if the world didn’t need to hear my mom and dad, then it didn’t need to hear me either.”

Her voice found its first safe harbor in writing after her mother gifted her a locked journal. This private space allowed her to explore fear, memory and possibility without judgement. 

“Writing has always been for me, this place where I felt safe,” she said. “Every single day, if I’m going to write, I’ll usually start in my journal so that I can face the world unafraid, not weighed down by all the heaviness of being human in these times.” 

Her two forthcoming children’s books, “The Blue House I Loved” and “A Home on the Page,” explore what it means to find belonging as a Hmong refugee child in America and how home isn’t just a physical place but the memories, culture and community one carries. 

This Friday, Yang invites readers to her “Evening of Children’s Literature” at The Ordway, where she will read, for the first and last time, her full body of children’s work.

A love letter to New York

Latino playwright Matthew López — known for the queer seven-hour play “The Inheritance” and the romantic-comedy “Red, White & Royal Blue” — turns to his own family history in “Somewhere” at the Guthrie this weekend. Set in 1959, the play is a love letter to the New York his Puerto Rican family once knew. 

It follows the Candelaria family as their Manhattan neighborhood is torn down to make way for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. With eviction imminent, each family member holds onto dreams of careers in Broadway, dance and acting. Inspired by López’s family stories and the spirit of the “West Side Story” musical, “Somewhere” captures a family fighting to imagine a life beyond the demolition notices on their door. 

Interrogating American identity

At the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, two exhibits ask what happens when American art and culture try to depict Black and Indigenous identities. 

“As an artist who went through art school, my work is heavily influenced by the Western canon which is predominantly white American and European art history,” said Wisconsin-based painter Taj Matumbi. “I began to research African American history to reconcile my own identity by inserting my own positionality into the conversation of European art as a Black artist working in the current times.” 

In “Ante Up,” Matumbi’s figures move between abstraction and Renaissance portraiture, draped in symbolic patterning and hints of hip-hop and skateboarding culture to examine American exceptionalism.

“I am visually interrogating metaphors of fallacies with slogans, such as ‘having to pay to play,’ or ‘pull yourself by your bootstraps’ which feel authentically American historically and currently,” Matumbi said. “I find the dichotomies of these slogans do not accurately account for individuals’ varying material conditions.”

Meanwhile, Frank Buffalo Hyde’s “Unapologetically Indigenous” spins animal iconography, Internet culture and pop references into sculptures and paintings that show how Native identity is often distorted for mass consumption.  

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