Stealing Buddha's Dinner; A Memoir

New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Later printing. Trade paperback. Very good. Format is approximately 5 inches by 7.75 inches. [10], 256, [4] pages Frontispiece. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads For Roriko with all best wishes! Bich Minh Nguyen. As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest, the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic-seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha's Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen's struggle to become a "real" American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story. Bich Minh "Beth" Nguyen (born 1974) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novels Short Girls, which won a 2010 American Book Award, and Pioneer Girl, and a memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a Master of Fine Arts. In 2005, she received a PEN/Jerard Award. She is currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches fiction and creative non-fiction writing. Derived from a Kirkus review: A childhood immigration memoir for foodies. Nguyen's father fled Vietnam with his two daughters when Nguyen was just a baby. Sponsored by a family in Grand Rapids, Mich., the Nguyens began to adjust to life in a "pale city," dominated by conservative Christians and blonde Republicans. Nguyen explores her relationship with her new home through food: As a girl, she longed for and fantasized about the packaged goods that fill American grocery stores. One of her earliest discoveries was Pringles—the red tube in which the chips sit snuggly—which captivated her. When, as a girl, Nguyen began to read the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, she marveled at the descriptions of butchering hogs and making cheese, activities that seemed to encapsulate the American frontier experience. She contrasts her own stepmother, Rosa, with the mothers of her school chums: Real mothers cook things like pot roast; real mothers bake Toll House cookies in the afternoon; real mothers send their daughters to school with lunches packed neatly in Tupperware containers. Rosa, a hard-working schoolteacher, was too busy to be Betty Crocker, and the family usually dined on simple Vietnamese food, often cooked by Nguyen's grandmother. Nguyen finally went on strike, refusing to eat until her grandmother and stepmother agreed to "better" food. The author's prose is lovely and her imagery fresh. And in her recreation of a world populated by Family Ties, Ritz crackers and Judy Blume books, she has captured the 1980s with perfection. This debut suggests she's a writer to watch.