A memoir of refugee youth, street survival, and the bonds that form when everything else falls apart.
Parker Publishers is proud to announce the release of Cultures Colliding: Searching for a Way Out, Vol. 1, the debut memoir by Kao Saeteurn. The book is the first volume in an ongoing series and is now available wherever books are sold.
Set in Sacramento’s Evergreen Circle housing complex in the summer of 1995, Cultures Colliding follows fourteen year old Kao, a Mien refugee still learning English, as he navigates gang territories, the crack trade, and the daily arithmetic of staying alive in a neighborhood the rest of the city forgot. He is undersized, malnourished from years in camps across Laos and Thailand, and armed with a gun his mentor handed him so the bullying would stop. The story moves from dice games and smoke filled cars to gunfights, police investigations, and quiet moments of tenderness that arrive without warning and vanish just as fast.
What distinguishes this memoir is its voice. Saeteurn does not narrate from a safe distance. He writes from inside the car, inside the apartment, inside the split second a dice lands wrong and a whole night changes direction. The dialogue is sharp and unfiltered. The prose carries the rhythm of someone who learned English on the streets of Sacramento, and it is all the more powerful for it. Readers will find themselves inside a world that is brutal, specific, and deeply human.
At its core, this is a book about belonging. About the surrogate families that form in forgotten places. About the mentor who protects you with cruelty and loyalty in equal measure. About the girl who makes you believe life might hold something beyond the next corner. And about the refugee communities that hold together even when the country that resettled them looks the other way.
“Kao Saeteurn has written something that does not ask for permission or sympathy. It simply tells you what happened and trusts you to sit with it. That kind of honesty is rare, and readers will feel it on every page.”
— Parker Publishers
Cultures Colliding will resonate with readers of literary memoir, immigration narratives, and urban coming of age stories. Fans of Reyna Grande, Sanyika Shakur, and Viet Thanh Nguyen will find a story here that earns its place alongside those voices.
BOOK DETAILS
Title: Cultures Colliding: Searching for a Way Out, Vol. 1
Author: Kao Saeteurn
Genre: Memoir / Literary Nonfiction
Publisher: Parker Publishers
Series: Cultures Colliding (Vol. 1 of an ongoing memoir series)
Availability: Available now wherever books are sold
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kao Saeteurn is a Mien American writer and former refugee. Born in Laos, he spent years in refugee camps across Southeast Asia before his family resettled in Sacramento, California, in the early 1990s. His work draws directly from lived experience, chronicling displacement, street life, and the search for identity in a country that offered relocation but little else. He is also the author of Empires Fall, Book 2. Volume 2 of Cultures Colliding is forthcoming.
MEDIA CONTACT
Website link: https://www.searchingforawayout.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61584540137713
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorkaosaeteurn/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/AuthorKaoSaeteurn/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AuthorKaoSaeteurn
For review copies, author interviews, or media inquiries, please contact the address above.
