All posts tagged: Kanya Lai

Lao America’s 2017 Year in Review

Published by Saysomphorn Sisavatdy

What a year?! Perhaps propelled and fueled by covfefe, it really felt like the personal and the public occupied some blurred lines in 2017. This year showed us what happens when you throw enough water particles into a vat of hot oil the size of a planet. Is anyone left innocent and unshaken? To those that can make that claim…share that medication before it’s re-allocated to the rich! Take a look below and let us know what we might have missed! January After the US Presidential Election slammed to a close, one of our staffers at Little Laos on the Prairie felt it prudent to address the shocking results…and its massive implications. Not surprisingly, we weren’t the only ones shocked with the results. The Laotian Times also addressed the elections. On January 24, “A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA” by Joshua Kurlantzick made its way to print. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asia W. Patrick Murphy visited the Lao PDR on Jan 16 and 17. He outlined several …

Education and Expression: An Interview with Kanya Lai

Published by Bryan Thao Worra

Kanya Lai is an English teacher at Nashville School of the Arts. She spends her summers traveling to exciting locales, where she usually volunteers in underprivileged schools and/or orphanages.  Her work has appeared previously in Little Laos on the Prairie, and Bakka Magazine. She joined us in Minneapolis in 2015 for the National Lao American Writers Summit where she spoke and performed her writing. We had a chance to catch up with her recently to discuss her journey and her thoughts on creating lifelong success for students. What’s a story about your family’s journey to the US that you remember the most? I was 5 yrs old when we immigrated to the states so I don’t remember too many memories from Laos. I know that the most poignant memory for me was the struggles and hardships my parents faced when we first arrived to Nashville, TN. I know that sounds like the standard immigrant story, but it is honestly what I remember most. When we first arrived here, we didn’t have a car and my dad …