Hungry Memories for

Bich Minh Nguyen

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

Viking Adult, 2007

By Irene DeVette

The words Chef Boyardee, Wonder Bread, and Betty Crocker sounded like music to the ears of young Bich Minh Nguyen. She kept opening the refrigerator and cupboards wishing for American foods to magically appear, and dreamt about Doritos, Hubba Bubba, and Jell-O parfait. But instead, her grandmother Noi served pho, the typical Vietnamese noodle soup, and bang chung, steamed green sticky rice cakes in banana leaves. Her Latina stepmother prepared Mexican rice and spicy tacos.

Food has a prominent role in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, a touching memoir about Bich (pronounce Bit) Minh Nguyen’s almost insatiable hunger to become American, growing up as a Vietnamese immigrant. After her family fled Saigon by boat in 1975, they stayed in refugee camps and had to decide where to live; the choice fell on Michigan. The family settled in the ultra-conservative, ultra white Grand Rapids, with inhabitants predominantly of German, Dutch, and Irish descent.

“I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into Western Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants became staples in every town. When I think of Grand Rapids I remember city signs covered in images of rippling flags, proclaiming “An All-American City.”

The chaotic extended family in which Nguyen grew up seemed worlds apart from the blonde, God-fearing families who seemed to live in blissful harmony. “Normal” mothers stayed in their immaculate homes all day, baking cookies, but her stepmother Rosa worked (her father got married shortly after moving to the US). Neighborhood kids had their own bedrooms, but in the Nguyen household there was never a moment of privacy with parents, a grandmother, three siblings and three uncles always around. TV-series, books, and food provided an escape for the silent Bich.

“Pringles were one of the first things I remember eating,” the author says in a phone interview. She wondered how anyone could make food in such a magical shape. It was her first encounter with American foods, and Nguyen developed a preference for everything sugary, salty, and processed. As a kid desperately trying to fit in, those foods meant access.

“When the knife pushed through the final barrier of flesh and hit the plate, it made the sound that ice skates make when a skater slices into a jump. The stub of meat, cleaved free of its chop, sailed through the air and dropped onto the carpet near Mr. Jansen’s chair. Hands shaking, face burning, I set my knife and fork down. I eyed the fallen meat with terror – a stain on the carpet, on my entire being.”

Nguyen didn’t know how to use a knife. The Vietnamese girl felt like she could never be like her blue-eyed “frenemies,” with their frill dresses and pink socks. She both admired and hated them for being perfect. Nguyen describes how exhausting her efforts to be normal were, being “a shadow dissolving into itself.” Anyone who has ever felt “different” in whatever sense can identify with young Nguyen’s struggle.

“Anh and I hung out with the others kids in the basement, playing Atari and ping-pong and watching TV. The commercials held our interest as much as any show, for they let us know what we should be eating, playing, and wearing. They let us know how we should be. After a commercial for Lite-Brite a girl with shiny pink barrettes might triumph, "My ma and ba me bought that." Another kid would boast about going to McDonald's three times in one week.”

Eighties galore in the memoir, and Nguyen’s funny and vivid descriptions feature big hairdo’s and shiny dresses, Pat Benatar and Scandal playing in the background, and Days of our Lives, Loveboat and Charlie’s Angels on TV. “TV idealized family life, and I had a disconnected, chaotic family,” she says.

The book is written from the perspective of an adult looking back. “I understand things now that I didn’t back then,” she says. It’s also specifically about her memories, which might be different from her sister’s or brother’s. The author relied on family members though, because she had only been eight months old when they fled Saigon.

“It’s sometimes difficult in Asian cultures to talk about private things, but my family has been very supportive and happy to answer all of my questions,” says Nguyen, who now teaches literature and creative writing at Purdue University. She had always been writing prose and poetry, but the nonfiction form turned out to be the best way to convey her perspective on the immigrant experience in the eighties.

“Every immigrant knows the dual life, marked by a language at home and a language outside. For me it was also the face I saw in the mirror, it was the smell of rice simmering in its cooker. The statue of Buddha in Noi’s bedroom.”

“A lot has changed for immigrants now,” says Nguyen. Communication methods have improved, Ethnic food is readily available, and the image of the immigrant in the American society changed,” she explains. The cultural access is broader, but “a lot of obstacles still remain,” she says. “I know a lot of people who have been here for many generations, who continue to be perceived as “foreigners.” Nguyen considers herself a Vietnamese American, but still gets questions like “But where are you really really from?”

“For immigrants, food is what you hang onto,” she says. Although the writer still craves gummy bears every once in a while, her taste buds have changed dramatically. She now loves Vietnamese foods, and “struggles to cook as well as her grandmother does.”

“As a kid, I had a very confused sense of good and bad. But I guess that kind of defined the eighties.”

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (Viking Adult, 2007) by Bich Minh Nguyen is available now at all major and independent bookstores.

www.bichminhnguyen.com

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