In their books about refugee resettlement, writers like Anne Fadiman and Dave Eggers have approached this problem by shifting their focus to the bewildering cultural encounters that occur when groups from isolated, war-shattered countries are plopped in American communities.
But Hamilton recognizes a singular truth about her subject: Ia is not particularly interested in American culture, nor does she need to be. She is a naturally gifted entrepreneur, and upon arriving in the United States in 1993 she sees, in the diaspora of 35,000 homesick Hmong immigrants, a virtually unlimited market for traditional strains of rice.
When Ia returns to farming, the book begins to sparkle. Hamilton is a master observer, as attentive to Ia’s world as Ia is to her seedlings. Consider a scene in which a frail widow is dropped off at the farm by her children, who are desperate to revive her interest in life, but skeptical that manual labor is the answer. “When they pulled up, Pao Houa leapt out of the car, closed her eyes, and breathed down into the bottom of her chest,” Hamilton writes. “Do you smell that, daughter? That’s the smell of rice!” It’s been 46 years since she last harvested back in Laos, but the old woman proves to be an ace in the field.
A nonfiction deep dive into rice farming may not sound like a page turner. But Ia’s story has real suspense to it, her farm constantly teetering on the edge of inviability. Her Hmong ancestors, pushed out of the Chinese lowlands by imperial Han armies, carved ribbons of farmland out of the sides of mountains. Now, in the 20th-century American West, she is playing a game of chicken with climate change, depleting precious groundwater reserves to replicate the world she had left behind.
Small-scale rice farming has no future in the San Joaquin Valley, and Ia’s children know it; they find work indoors, at Walmart or the Gap. Hamilton makes clear the rising costs of their mother’s enterprise, following grandmothers and grandfathers as they creep around, pulling weeds in their cardigans and floppy hats in 107-degree heat. It is no exaggeration to say that farming could kill them.
