A thousand wings

by T. C. Huo

A Thousand Wings moves seamlessly in time between present-day San Francisco and Laos in the Vietnam War era to tell the story of one man's courtship of another through food and the shared stories of their Southeast Asian heritage. For Fong Mun, a successful, thirty-something caterer and cookbook author, food is life; his precious cache of family recipes is inseparable from memory and personal history. But it is his coveted recipe for crispy egg rolls that becomes the catalyst for his fateful meeting with Raymond, a handsome and captivating young Asian who barely remembers his Laotian heritage, and who becomes Fong Mun's window on his own lost past. As a powerful attraction blooms between these two very different men, we savor Fong Mun's memories of Laos through the prism of exotic, mouth-watering Southeast Asian cuisine. In his compelling voice, stories and recipes entwine in a vivid, evocative narrative overlaid with both sorrow and humor.