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, 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 Toll House cookies becomes 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.Beginning with Nguyen's family's harrowing migration out of Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddha's Dinner is also a portrayal of a diverse family: Nguyen's hardworking, hard-partying father, pretty sister, and wise and nurturing grandmother - and Rosa, her Latina stepmother, the loving, no-nonsense foil to her gastronomical and materialistic fixations. And there is the mystery of Nguyen's birth mother, unveiled movingly over the course of the book.
Nostalgic and candid, deeply satisfying and minutely observed, Stealing Buddha's Dinner is a unique vision of the immigrant experience and a lyrical ode to how identity is often shaped by the things we long for.