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.
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