Synopsis

In 1968 Bangkok, Thailand, 17-year-old Piper Lewis’ world is changing in unsettling ways. The U.S. Military’s expansion into Thailand in support of the Vietnam War is reshaping the city she loves. Her USAID Official father’s mysterious absences fray their once-close relationship. Her stepmother’s obsession with appearances suffocates her. Worse, she can’t summon the passion to bring Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata to life. Only her beloved piano teacher, a Thai Prince, senses the depth of her disconnect.

One night, Piper ditches the American Teen Club to party with an older crowd. Sparks fly when she meets Jack, a 19-year-old GI on R&R from Vietnam. Defying the Army’s non-fraternization policy, they pledge to spend his leave together. As the hypocrisy of the war closes in on them, Jack’s name surfaces in a drug investigation and Piper discovers a disturbing truth about her father, forcing both to decide what they are willing to risk for a few more days together.

Sawadika American Girl is the story of a young American woman coming-of-age on the periphery of a brutal, unjust war.

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Praise

“Evocative, immersive and beautifully written, Sawadika American Girl is historical fiction at its best. With seventeen-year-old Piper as our narrator, this intimate portrait of an American family in Thailand during the Vietnam War is a fresh, soulful take on our tragic involvement in Southeast Asia.” —Catherine Filloux, award-winning playwright and librettist of Where Elephants Weep

“Daria Sommers’s stunning historical coming-of-age novel offers an unexpected take on the US presence in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of Piper, an American diplomat’s daughter, thrust into a world unlike any she has ever known. Piper’s experience of the trials of young adulthood—navigating friendships, family life, even romance—is made ever more engaging when framed against this vibrant landscape. A complete page turner, Sawadika American Girl stayed with me long after I read its heartbreaking final chapter.” —John Fried, author of The Martin Chronicles

“When Sommers transports her heroine halfway around the world, she sweeps her readers along with her. Sawadika American Girl is one of those rare adventures worth taking!” —Kathryn Johnson, bestselling author of The Gentleman Poet and The Death of a Maven

“Sawadika American Girl is a truly special love story. Love of family, diverse cultures, and friendship. An American teen living in Bangkok, Piper is every young woman who sees too much, questions the status quo, and falls in love. Set in 1960s Thailand, Piper and Jack’s love affair will linger with readers for years; everyone will recall their own special person, that first soulmate who touched their heart.” —Marcia Bradley, author of The Home for Wayward Girls

Excerpt

Saturday, June 29, 1968

Phetchaburi Road

Afternoon

Cindy’s driving made Piper nervous. She wasn’t worried for herself, but for the drivers around her. Their Plymouth station wagon was a tank, nearly three times the size of the Isuzu sedans, Datsun flatbeds and Honda motorbikes crowding Phetchaburi Road’s rush hour traffic. Despite needing a pillow to see over the car’s mammoth steering wheel, Cindy drove through Bangkok’s streets as though she had a divine right of way.

“So can I count on you?” she pleaded to Piper, before blasting her horn at a slow moving samlor.

The three-wheeled vehicle, a diesel-fueled post-World War Two replacement for rickshaws, appeared to be on its last legs. The driver revved its engine in defiance, coughing soot into the Plymouth’s open windows. Piper fanned the air with her hand. Cindy smacked down on the horn again, holding it there until the samlor moved. “Not a word to your father, ok?”

“Yup,” Piper mumbled, looking past Cindy to the rows of Chinese-style shophouses with store fronts on the bottom and living spaces on top. Signs in Thai, Chinese and English announced an oddball mix of businesses. After a blur of travel agencies, electrical repair centers, insurance offices, and tailors, Piper saw that the stretch of road she’d been waiting for was coming up.

“My doctor says I’m more than eight weeks pregnant. Maybe twelve,” Cindy announced with giddy disbelief. “You’re the first person I’ve told. Except for Noy. I had to. You can’t keep a secret like this from your dressmaker.”

Traffic slowed. Up ahead, in the middle of the road, a flatbed truck loaded with caged chickens had broken down. Adding to the congestion, a Fiat sedan had stopped to help. The two drivers stood between their vehicles untangling a pair of jumper cables. On both sides of the bottleneck, traffic crept forward—a wall of water seeping through cracks in a dam.

“I meant to tell your father first. He’s been gone so much it’s been hard to find the right moment. I can’t have him hear the news from you. Promise you won’t breathe a word?”

Cindy tapped her freshly manicured nails against the steering wheel. Irritated at the lack of progress, she tried to enter a faster lane, but the surrounding cars moved in a tight, bumper to bumper formation. She checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror then glanced sideways. “Piper, are you even listening to me?”

She wasn’t. Her attention was glued to the strip of nightclubs and bars on Cindy’s side of the road. Honey Lady. Thai Heaven. Sugar. Rhapsody. In the early evening light, neon signs f lashed their names in garish colors, teasing the night’s possibilities. Young Thai women, wearing mini-skirts and heavy make-up, stood outside the competing establishments like bait. At school, kids referred to them as bar girls. The older boys called them whores. Piper thought of them as teenagers. Girls her own age. Piper’s history teacher, an American woman who met her Thai husband when he was in the States studying engineering, explained that most of these girls came from poor villages upcountry and sent the money they earned to their families. Two weeks ago, at the Teen Club’s party for graduating seniors, she’d overheard Mrs. F’s son brag about the night he’d posed as a GI and landed a bar girl for himself.

During her early years in Bangkok, Piper barely registered the American military’s presence. After their 1965 home leave, it became impossible to ignore. GI hotels sprouted like weeds. Bars, massage parlors and nightclubs mushroomed in tandem. Like red ants swarming to create a new colony, GIs were suddenly everywhere. Bargaining with taxi drivers on Sukhumvit Road, getting into drunken brawls in the back of the Thermae Bar near her school, loading up on cigarettes, candy bars and hi-fi equipment at the American Military’s PX and filing in and out of clubs in Patpong and on Phetchaburi Road. American military police patrolled the streets. The number of American kids at school doubled. Many had fathers in the military. Others had fathers who worked for the CIA, USAID, or as contractors. Lots of families were transplants from Saigon, which was no longer safe for American dependents.

About the Author

Daria Sommers is a writer and filmmaker whose work includes both fiction and non-fiction. Her novel Sawadika American Girl will be released from Vine Leaves Press May 5, 2026. Her essays, op-eds and reviews have been widely published including in the Ginosko Literary Journal, Woman Around Town, Art New England and The New York Times. Daria is currently the Managing Editor of VBC Magazine.

Her feature-length documentary Lioness, about women soldiers who served in the Iraq War won Duke University’s coveted Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Film Festival. Other films include the half-hour 35 mm drama Ready to Burn, winner of Panavision’s New Director Award; Three Trembling Cities, a web series on immigrants in New York City, winner of Best Drama at UK WebFest and Philly TV Fest; and Eastern Spirit, a profile of Chinese American artist Diana Kan.

Daria’s work has garnered support from the NEH, the NEA, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Fledgling Fund, Chicken and Egg Pictures, NYSCA and the John Whitney Payson Fund among many others. She has been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Arts and Mass MoCA, served on the Metropolitan Museum’s Program for Art on Film and been a juror for the UN’s One In A Billion Film Series.

Her work has screened at festivals around the world including Tribeca, the London Human Rights Watch Film Festival and the Valencia Film Festival, and been broadcast internationally on PBS, BBC, CBC, and in France and Australia.

Daria is a graduate of Oberlin College.

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