Customer Reviews

Land of Smiles

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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.

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.

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.