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A vivid, funny, and viscerally powerful memoir about childhood, assimilation, food, and growing up in the 1980s
Viking
February 2007
On Sale: February 1, 2007
272 pages
ISBN: 0670038326
EAN: 9780670038329
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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