Land of Smiles
SynopsisPlot
The novel opens with a Laotian boy, Boontakone, who swims across the Mekong River, leaving his old life behind, and losing his mother and sister in the process. In a refugee camp in Thailand, Boontakone struggles to decipher the secret codes of his new life. Huo offers a glimpse into a world as highly ordered and dependent on proper observance of social customs and manners as any created by Jane Austen. Eventually Boontakone and his father make their way to America, where the young man will have to sort out impressions as dazzling and puzzling as the American high school, Superman, and Saturday Night Fever.
Story
About this book
Boontakorn is fourteen when he swims across the Mekong River from Laos into Thailand. His mother and sister do not survive the crossing. On the other side he finds his father in a refugee camp, a crowded place governed by unspoken rules. Matchmakers fuss over his father, hoping to find him a wife who will cook. Boontakorn must learn these customs while holding memories of the family he lost.
Father and son eventually reach California, where they depend on relatives and acquaintances. Boontakorn encounters American life in fragments: high school hallways, the figure of Superman, the spectacle of Saturday Night Fever. Each new impression arrives without context, and he has to piece together what these things mean from the outside. T. C. Huo sets moments of gentle comedy alongside the disorientation of starting over in an unfamiliar country.
The novel moves through three settings: a home left behind in Laos, a Thai camp where residents wait, and a new life in the United States. Each has its own code of behavior, and the story follows a teenager working out what each one expects of him and what remains of the place he left.
