From a refugee camp in Thailand, Dia Cha's aunt and uncle, Chue and Nhia Thao Cha, sent her the story cloth that is the inspiration and the centerpiece for this important 11 1/4 x 8 1/2" book about the Hmong. The cloth they stitched depicts the history of the Hmong, whose culture reaches back thousands of years to China, and stretches from Asia to North America, where over 100,000 Hmong have settled in the years since the Vietnam War (including many in Wisconsin). Hmong means "free people," Dia writes in her introduction. "This story cloth will tell you about our life." In the text, Dia simply and skillfully threads her own story into that of the Hmong people as she tells about life farming with her family as a child in Laos, and then the violent upheaval of the Vietnam War that saw the death or displacement of thousands of Hmong in Southeast Asia. Dia's Story Cloth includes a discussion of Hmong history, culture and artistic traditions by the Curator of Ethnology at the Denver Museum of Natural History. (Ages 8-11)