Selection for March: Stealing Buddha's Dinner

From the author's website: 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 blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme, the 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, herbs, and bean sprouts, 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 Tollhouse cookies become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to fit in, 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.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner is a vivid, funny, and viscerally powerful memoir about childhood, assimilation, food and growing up in the 1980s.

Plan for our March discussion: To meet at a China Chef . . . unless someone can suggest a good Vietnamese restaurant.

• Discussion questions
• Interview with the author

Review: The Devil in Pew Number Seven

This book is a memoir of actual events in a little girl's life, events that changed the course of her future and shaped her character. A weaker person, indeed her own father, would be scarred irreparably. But, ironically, it was the lessons he'd taught her by the time she was seven years old that saved her from becoming bitter.

Before you crack open the cover, you know something really bad is going to happen. And after the first chapter you know what it is, but it doesn't ruin the suspense. (There's plenty of mystery remaining as to who and why.) The Devil in Pew Number Seven lags a bit when the author gets a little carried away with her metaphors attempting to describe events before her own birth; the pace and power of description picks up once she comes of age. But from start to finish the book is a page-turner, a quick and rewarding read.

The reward comes in considering the nature and source of forgiveness. Big topic for a little girl, but she learned it at an early age. Her parents trained her for it, though the reason came from a different direction than what ultimately it was most needed for. It's heartening to realize that the lessons learned before one is seven can last a lifetime. The author's parents served her well.

At the same time, a large part of our discussion centered around the issue of whether she'd had to come to the point of forgiving her parents for remaining in a situation of terror that would ultimately cost one of them their lives and the other a complete physical and mental breakdown. Should they have left the church, or at least moved away from Mr. Watts? They repeatedly gave their reason for staying as devotion to "the call" of God on their lives, but was it sacrifice or foolishness? It was right for the Apostle Paul to put his own life on the line for the gospel, but he didn't have a wife and children. And he had direct revelation from God. The question remains open -- and important to drawing conclusions for ones own life -- whether staying in Sellerstown was God's will for them.

Related:

• Sellerstown shooting story told by little girl who survived
• Churches need to recognize the symptoms of avenger violence
• Dont miss the video below, which offers some interesting revelations and explains the early over-writing.