Land of smiles
By: T.C. Huo.
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
Subjects: Laotian Americans -- Fiction.; Fathers and sons -- Fiction.; Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 -- Refugees -- Fiction.; Emigration and immigration -- Fiction.; Immigrants -- Fiction.; California -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: "Boontakorn is fourteen when he begins has flight to freedom by swimming across the Mekong River to Thailand. Reunited with his father in a refugee camp there, he is suspended between the past and present, between memories of his mother and sister - who did not survive their journey - and the secret social order of the overcrowded camp, where matchmakers cluck over his father and try to find a wife to cook for him.

Eventually, Boontakorn and his father make their way to America - to California - where they depend on the temporary kindness of relatives and friends, and where Boontakorn must make sense of such dazzling and puzzling Western phenomena as Superman, Saturday Night Fever, and the American high school."--BOOK JACKET.