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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, Nguyenโs barely conscious desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic seeming than her Buddhist grandmotherโs traditional specialtiesโspring rolls, delicate pancakes stuffed with meats, fried shrimp cakesโthe campy, preservative-filled โdelicaciesโ 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 โrealโ American. Beginning with Nguyenโs familyโs harrowing migration from Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddhaโs 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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