Stealing Buddha's Dinner
By Bich Minh Nguyen
(Viking Adult, Hardcover, 9780670038329, 272pp.)
Publication Date: February 2007
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Compact Disc (March 2009), Compact Disc (March 2009), MP3 CD (March 2009), MP3 CD (March 2009), Paperback (February 2008)
Categories: Ethnic Cultures - General, Personal Memoirs, Women
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A vivid, funny, and viscerally powerful memoir about childhood, assimilation, food, and growing up in the 1980s
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Bich Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity. In the pre-PC era Midwest, where the devoutly Christian blond-haired, blue-eyed Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme, Nguyen's barely conscious desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties--spring rolls, delicate pancakes stuffed with meats, fried shrimp cakes--the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America capture her imagination. And in this remarkable book, the glossy branded allure of such American foods as Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House cookies become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to fit in, to become a "real" American.
Beginning with Nguyen's family's harrowing migration from Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddha's Dinner is nostalgic and candid, deeply satisfying and minutely observed, and stands as a unique vision of the immigrant experience and a lyrical ode to how identity is often shaped by the things we long for.
Bich Minh Nguyen (pronounced /Bit Min New-win/) teaches creative writing at Purdue University. Stealing Buddha's Dinner is her first book.











