4/01/10

Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy

Ira Sukrungruang

Show Description:
On one side of the door, the enticing smell of sweet, spicy food and the calm of Buddhist devotion; on the other, the strangeness of a new land.
When Ira Sukrungruang was born to Thai parents newly arrived in the U.S., they picked his Jewish moniker out of a book of "American" names. Ira relates the early life of a first-generation Thai-American and his constant, often bumbling attempts to meet cultural and familial expectations while coping with the trials of growing up in 1980s America.

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Guest Bio:
Ira Sukrungruang is a Thai American writer born in 1976 in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a suburb just south of Chicago. He spent most of his childhood eating at McDonalds, playing Nintendo, watching kung fu movies, and writing horrendous unrequited love stories. Miraculously, he received an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University. Along the way, he married an animal-loving, environmentalist/feminist/poet/cookie maker extraordinaire, Katherine "The Great" Riegel, and co-edited, with his good friend Donna Jarrell, What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. He is also the author of Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy.