A Thousand Wings

A deft and artful blend of politics, history, and human emotion graced by surreal imagery, A Thousand Wings is the tale of one man's courtship of another through the food and stories of their shared heritage. T.C. Huo moves between present-day San Francisco and Vietnam-era Laos, as Fong Mun, the cook, tells Raymond of a land governed by ancient traditions and threatened by a war that will bring the death of a culture thousands of years old. Fong Mun's journey from the far provinces of Laos, through a refugee camp in Thailand, to a housing project in Oakland, represents a very contemporary immigrant experience, but one seldom told in fiction. As a gay man, Fong Mun is doubly an outsider, but through food and the stories that are inseparable from it, he will make his connection, first to a new culture, and then to a new love.
*T.C. Huo's delicate and startling imagery and wholly original approach to storytelling mark him as a major new voice in Asian-American fiction.
*This is one of the few novels to address the Southeast Asian experience in America.