The Bridge Generation Grows Up by Kaia L Simon

The Bridge Generation Grows Up by Kaia L Simon

The Bridge Generation Grows Up examines how daughters of Hmong refugees growing up in America develop skills to read and write across languages and cultures. Kaia L. Simon demonstrates how a childhood spent bridging languages and cultures leads members of this community to relocate Hmong language, literacy, and culture for their parents, for themselves, and for their children. They do this work within the operations of intersecting macro-level forces related to geopolitics, race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, and citizenship in ways that foster the vitality and thriving of Hmong language and culture in the United States. This book offers a generational perspective on the familial and emotional dimensions of literacy for children of migrants, especially those who grow up after a critical event of mass relocation. Simon illustrates how this generation occupies a unique linguistic, literate, and cultural position that allows its members to strategically and purposefully move themselves and their communities toward more just, inclusive, and sustainable lives.

Kaia LSimon’s book beautifully details the literate agility developed by Hmong women who bridge geographic, linguistic, and generational divides. Grounded in the narrative perspective of a generation after mass migration, the book helps readers think hard about what it means to be women who bridge through literacy: challenging gendered expectations, enacting translingual agency, and creating ‘new ways of being.’

Kaia L. Simon is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.