Land of Smiles

Boontakone is fourteen when he begins his 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, Boontakone and his father make their way to America - to California - where they depend on the temporary kindness of relatives and friends, and where Boontakone must make sense of such dazzling and puzzling Western phenomena as Superman, Saturday Night Fever, and American high school.