An extraordinary cross-cultural memoir about two refugee families--one Vietnamese, one Cambodian--"adopted" by an American family living in Tuscany. In 1979, Thekla Clark and her husband John, Americans living in a small village outside of Florence, decide to "adopt" an ethnically Chinese refugee family from Vietnam. The Du Caus--Tuyen and his wife Trinh, and their severely malnourished son Bo--arrive sickly and dazed after time spent in Vietnamese refugee camps. Less than a year later, the Clarks offer a home to the four surviving members of a Cambodian family. Sary Khul and her three children, Samreth, Kilen, and Houssara, come with everything they own: some clothing, a wooden mortar and pestle, and a Bible written in Cambodian. After their arrival in Italy, the members of both families, young and old, struggle with living in an unfamiliar culture and making sense of their grief-filled pasts. As they learn--incredibly--to communicate in Italian, their personal histories unfold. They share their individual sagas--of seeing the dead body of a small child before it was tossed out of a refugee-packed boat, of learning to barter in the squalid refugee camps, of being force-marched from their homes by the Khmer Rouge--as well as stories of life before war. Out of this unusual multicultural group, living in a large, twelfth-century house in the Tuscan countryside, a wonderful community emerges. Children in Exile is Thekla Clark"s memoir of this remarkable experience.