Land of Smiles

By T.C. Huo

Book Overview

Set in the 1970s, in the era of the Vietnam War and its volatile aftermath, Land of Smiles tells the story of a young Southeast Asian man's journey from a refugee camp in Thailand to a housing project in Oakland, California.

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.

Balancing a moving account of dislocation and loss with gentle comedy, Land of Smiles is a new classic in the literature of the immigrant experience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452281857
• ISBN13: 9780452281851
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Quiet novel of painful migration

Hardly any of the book is set in Laos and the previous review is totally out of line. The narrator is clearly of Chinese descent and swam to Thailand. About half of the book takes place in a refugee camp in Thailand, and most of the other half takes place in America. The communist disruption of his schooling prevented him from school study of Laotian.The book is very insightful and often funny about the affronts a sensitive young man faced in a succession of foreign settings, and the rejection by Laotian Americans obviously makes another one. I think the book is honest, the previous reviewer not.

Precisely drawn portrayal of the losses of exile

Land of Smiles includes much deftly delivered quiet humor about trying to decode American life, even as it is lived by the earlier-emigrating relatives of its young, proud, and devastated Chinese-Lao-refugee protagonist, The romantic maneuvering of the adults in the refugee camp in Thailand is also mostly played for humor, though Boontakorn is deeply offended that various matchmakers are casting his father. Indeed, he is deeply offended by most everyone. "Meticulous" finds a place in his limited English vocabulary; "fastidious" would have been even more fitting. It's impossible not to feel sorry for Boontakorn, but his judgements of his father are so harsh that it's hard to like him. It is completely plausible that a traumatized adolescent would judge his father and other relatives this way, but Andrew Pham's _Catfish and Mandala_ shows more of the prime Buddhist virtue, compassion, in another catalog of devastation in and getting out of Southeast Asia.