Land of Smiles [Mass Market Paperback]

T. C. Huo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 1999

A unique and delicately comic novel describing the Southeast Asian experience in America.

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. In this passage, T. C. 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.

"Huo writes with a surreal quality reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinski . . . Highly sensual, a thoroughly rewarding novel." --USA Today (on A Thousand Wings)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Boontakorn, a pubescent Laotian boy, swims across the Mekong River to Thailand in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, this dangerous passing is only the first step in a long journey toward the mythical Land of Smiles. The boy safely reaches the Lao Refugee Camp in Thailand, but his mother and sister drown in their later attempt to escape; his father and grandmother join him eventually. In the camp, the Laotians create a complex miniature society, providing basic needs, schooling, language instruction and even mating services for the adults, but everyone thinks only about passing the emigration interview. Finally, Boontakorn and his father are permitted to emigrate to San Francisco, where later he learns that the refugee camp burned down after he left; it's another bit of his past that "disappeared from the earth." Now a teenager, Boontakorn's forays into American culture are sympathetically portrayed, his alienation delineated in bittersweet scenarios. He's surprised to learn that he is too young to work legally; he becomes familiar with late 1970s disco music, and struggles with the idiomatic English language. Most of all, he's simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the forwardness of American culture, and finds a sense of place amid San Francisco's burgeoning Asian and Southeast Asian immigrant population. After dropping out of college and becoming a hairdresser, Boontakorn comes full circle when he takes a trip back to Laos with his friend Martha, a Chinese-American anthropologist. At the book's close, this young man comes to terms with the myths and legacies of his heritage, the multifarious and shifting definitions of nationality, of identity and of "home." As a chronicle of an exile's courage, bewilderment and numb longing, Huo's taut but impressively atmospheric second novel (after A Thousand Wings) is a valuable addition to our literature of Asian ethnicity.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Born in Laos (of Chinese descent), T. C. Huo immigrated to the United States in 1979. He received a master's degree in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. Among the writers Huo has studied with are Thomas Keneally, Ethan Canin, and Robert Pinsky. He is the author of A Thousand Wings.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Plume (August 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452281857
• ISBN-13: 978-0452281851
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,294,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Precisely drawn portrayal of the losses of exile, September 27, 2000

By 

Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Land of Smiles (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quiet novel of painful migration, February 1, 2001

By 

Ramon (Minneapolis) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Land of Smiles (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Impostor?, January 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Land of Smiles (Mass Market Paperback)

After reading this book and Huo's previous novel A THOUSAND WINGS, I have to question whether Huo has actually ever lived in Laos. There are just so many cultural and historical inaccuracies that detract from the writing, which is in itself subpar (just look at the title for an indication of how cheesy and cliché-ridden Huo's writing is). One glaring example of Huo's misunderstanding of Lao culture is his spelling of the protagonist's name: Boontakorn. Such a name, which might be only Lao-ish to start with, would never be spelled in the Siamese manner, as Huo spells it. In romanized Lao, it would be spelled Bountakone. For any Southeast Asian-savvy person, the romanized spelling of names has always been an easy way to discern whether a person is of Thai (Siamese) or Lao origin. And the reason it works consistently is that Laos was under the French orbit, whereas Siam was more influenced by Great Britain. That's just an example. Since this must be short, I just have to warn readers away from thinking that Huo (who himself admits to being Chinese) is *the Lao-American writer. Sooner or later, a real Lao-American voice will emerge. But since the Lao have no reputation for rushing, we have to be patient.