Northwest Asian Weekly: ‘Buddha’s Dinner’ is a filling read

nwasianweekly.com April 12, 2008

‘Buddha’s Dinner’ is a filling read By Andrew Hamlin Northwest Asian Weekly “I wanted every packaged and frozen dinner from the grocery store: Noodle Roni, Hamburger Helper, Stouffer’s, Swanson and Banquet. All the trays with separate compartments for Salisbury steak, whipped potatoes and peas … I would take from restaurants: Brann’s, Big Boy, Charley’s Crab — all the white American meals I desired to try.” In “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir of immigrant Vietnamese life in and around Grand Rapids, Mich., she traces the days from Gerald Ford to George H.W. Bush. Almost every minute of those days, judging by her prose, she lusted after the American foods absent from the table ruled over by Noi, her father’s mother. The gushing menus of “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” signify desire and envy. Nguyen sniffs triumph over her Vietnamese roots in every American dish. But she also feels doubt and guilt over her wants, proportions changing chapter to chapter, episode to episode. She learns to become one person at Noi’s table, one person on the school playground, one for the status-fraught school lunch room (“the anxiety of what to pack weighed on me every school week”), and one for her best friend’s parents’ dining room. Arriving at Grand Rapids, Nguyen records food in her first sentence, from her family’s first sponsor —“boxed rice, egg noodles, cans of green beans” — as she settles into a strange house, city, state and country, surrounded by one father, one grandmother, three uncles and one older sister. Her mother is missing, and she’s just barely old enough to know not to ask. A stepmother, Rosa, arrives on the scene shortly, producing, after a bit more, a half-Latino, half-Vietnamese half-brother for Bich and her sister Ahn. Grandmother Noi’s Vietnamese dishes bang into Rosa’s cooking like gridlock. Meanwhile, Bich endures classroom racism, the two-facedness of white girlfriends, her own sneaky, vindictive tendencies towards petty crime, including an hour or two of vandalizing a neighbor girl’s possessions with her sister. Their forced apology takes place in the white family’s living room, where Bich thinks, “In spite of the humiliation I couldn’t help thinking how funny it was to be here at last, in the grown-ups’ room, where company sat.” Her insatiable anxiety-fueled desire for American cuisine, frozen or plastic-wrapped, drives the awkward young girl into further bouts of minor crime. Eventually, as the book title promises, she makes off with a piece of fruit from the offering Noi leaves to Buddha. “I bit into the plum … too soon, the fruit was gone and the pit lay in my palm. It was an eye, I realized. A wrinkled, wizened eye. I thought about how the spirits were always watching out for us.” An immigrant’s story, to be sure, but unlike many such memoirs, Nguyen doesn’t pin a mantle of blame on anyone (“I generally tried to avoid turning my family into collaborators”) and holds a heart for others around her, particularly her stepmother, who, like herself, felt confused and hostile in a too-narrow crawl between at least two cultures. Such compassion renders her frenzies more sympathetic. Her real mother, incredibly enough, eventually shows up in America, but incredibleness does not provide closure for Bich’s confusion and anxiety in her multiple roles. “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” by Bich Minh Nguyen. Published by Penguin Books, New York, 2007. $14.00. Andrew Hamlin can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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