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    Stealing Buddha's Dinner
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    Stealing Buddha's Dinner
    Unavailable
    Stealing Buddha's Dinner
    Audiobook7 hours

    Stealing Buddha's Dinner

    Written by Bich Minh Nguyen

    Narrated by Alice H. Kennedy

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Beginning with her family's harrowing migration out of Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddha's Dinner follows Bich Nguyen as she comes of age in the pre-PC-era Midwest. Filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, Nguyen's desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food - Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House cookies. More exotic-seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to become a "real" American. Stealing Buddha's Dinner is also a portrayal of a diverse family: Nguyen's hardworking, hard-partying father; pretty sister; wise and nurturing grandmother; and Rosa, her Latina stepmother. And there is the mystery of Nguyen's birth mother, unveiled movingly over the course of the book. Nostalgic and candid, 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.

    "Her typical and not-so-typical childhood experiences give her story a universal flavor." - USA Today

    "Beautifully written...[Nguyen] is fearless in asserting the specificities of memories culled from early childhood and is, herself, an appealing character on the page...A writer to watch." - Chicago Tribune

    "Perfectly pitched and prodigiously detailed." - The Boston Globe
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 1, 2009
    ISBN9781423391128
    Unavailable
    Stealing Buddha's Dinner
    Author

    Bich Minh Nguyen

    Bich Minh Nguyen teaches literature and creative writing at Purdue University. She lives with her husband, the novelist Porter Shreve, in West Lafayette, Indiana and Chicago.

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    Reviews for Stealing Buddha's Dinner

    3.5/5

    141 ratings18 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I enjoyed this story of assimilation, but it struck me as a bit sloppy after the first few chapters. I read it a couple of weeks ago, and I can't say it has stayed with me at all.
    • 3/5
      Much of this book seemed to be a listing of aspects of American commercialism (food brands, pop songs, TV shows), and was not of interest to me since I have spent most of my life outside the mainstream. I do understand that much of what made Nguyen feel an outsider was her family's poverty which prevented her from having the things her classmates spoke so casually about, and that the first generation of immigrants from Vietnam endured a lot of prejudice from the local communities, but I am still not interested in having lists of food stand in for depicting the yearning for love and acceptance.
    • 2/5
      I read this for the reading club that meets tomorrow night at the Cupertino Library. I found this memoir interesting but not moving or enlightening to much of a degree. I guess it is a testament to the resilience of children. As immigrants from the fall of Saigon in Michigan, her family is strange. They are Buddhist. Her mom was left behind and that leaves a "missingness" to the author's life. There are long passages devoted to her candy and junk food passions, the TV and music that ran through her life.
      At some points the author recognizes that she somewhat chose her path, to lose her native Vietnamese language, to abandon the other Vietnamese children to end up pretty much alienated from most of her community. There is are family reunions but true to the flat emotional tone of the rest of the memoir it is no epiphany.
    • 1/5
      I do not understand how this got published. This is not sweet, its not salacious, its just boring. The book consists of list after list of stuff (mostly food, but also bands, and toys/games, stores, etc.) that make the author feel nostalgic about being the different weird Vietnamese kid in Grand Rapids in the 70's and 80's. There are few real stories, and little of interest. Just lists. Sometimes a half a page or so of fast food, or soda options. And the author was unhappy during this time, so I am not really getting the nostalgia. I don't think I have ever read a more disjointed book. I am fine with non-linear narratives, but here things bounce all over the place for no reason. Stream of consciousness is best as a first draft.I did not grow up in GR, but I am from Michigan, and I spent a good deal of time in the area near the time this is set. There is A LOT to write about in the land of strapping blond folk, and this author left out all the interesting things.
    • 2/5
      rabck from quiet orchid; author, father, sister and grandmother fled from Saigon near the end of the war, and were sponsered by a Michigan church. Slow and whiny most of the book - how the author wanted to be "american" with american dress and food, while her grandmother fixes the traditional vietnamese fare, which the author likes too. snippet at the end, where the author goes to Vietnam with her grandmother to see her grandmother's siblings and extended family. She also finds her birth mother, whom she never knew when she was old enough to remember, and feels no connection with.
    • 3/5
      Food is an important metaphor for American culture in Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. Growing up in Michigan in the 1980s, young Bich adores, even obsesses over, the cultural icons of that decade – from pop music to fast food and candy. She wants to consume it all. In her memoir, the role of the food she sees in commercials (“Hey, Kool-Aid!”) represents the essence of what is truly American.

      Her particular family situation is insightful as to why she was so drawn to such convenience foods. While born in Vietnam, her step-mother is Hispanic, and their family lives among neighbors of Dutch descent with their blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. To fit in with her friends at school, Bich saw food as the great equalizer. Ethnic food proclaims one’s differences, but fast food means they are all part of one culture.

      As a child the author, perhaps passively, disassociates herself from her Vietnamese heritage. While trying to blend in with her surroundings, she slowly loses her connection to her cultural community as she stops attending parties, fails to contact childhood friends, and eventually lets her native language go.

      It seems young Bich is looking to the adults in the household for help in finding a middle path of incorporating into her life the variety of these cultures. Sadly, the father can’t be trusted to provide a consistent and stable presence; and her mother is too busy to teach her basic social graces. In addition, there are strong family secrets and taboos that cripple everyone’s ability to relate in healthy ways toward one another.

      Her one anchor – both to the past and present – through this difficult acculturation process is her grandmother, Noi. Noi grounds Bich in her Vietnamese heritage via delicious hand-prepared food, her Buddhist faith, and nonjudgmental spirit. Still, it is not enough to overcome the yearning that Bich has for cultural acceptance. Even today, the author, through this memoir, recalls the ache of growing up different in America.

      (Note: If you enjoy memoirs, this is a recommended read. I'd rate it 7 of 10.)
    • 4/5
      I really loved this book. but then I admit my immigrant story bent. This was about a girl growing up in MI after fleeing Vietnam as a baby with her father and sister. Since we have the same time period growing up in the midwest I can relate to her life in many ways to my own. The foods she craves, the things she wishes to do, the whole life looking in from the outside. I can relate to all of that myself. I love how she tried to live her life thru books and wish to inhabit them so completely. I also respect that she was looking back at herself and trying to resolve how her Vietnamese self and her want to be a white girl with blonde hair from a novel.

      The only thing I would pick on would be that she jumps around in time and sometimes I lost my bearings as to what age she was and what yr it was. But in reality the story was good enough that I did not care.
    • 2/5
      bits and bits of interesting parts, very interesting material, but overall woven weakly and doesn't have a good grip of the audience's attention. Weak emotional stream.
    • 4/5
      Stealing Buddha’s Dinner Bich Minh NyugenThis is the memoir of a young Vietnamese girl growing up in 1980’s Michigan. Bich Nyugen tells her emotional story--- of being a Vietnamese immigrant after the fall of Saigon, 1975. Not long after settling in Michigan, Bich’s father marries a Hispanic woman. It is interesting to see yet another culture blend into Bich’s young life. Throughout the book we gradually learn about Bich’s mother and the mystery surrounding her absence.Bich artfully exposes moments and facts through food, tradition, culture, and the youthful desire to “fit in”, to “belong”. Her story is both universal and intimate.A very unique memoir, sweet and poignant, its flavor will linger.
    • 3/5
      I picked this up through Bookmooch because it sounded interesting. Frankly, anything involving food is interesting to me. I read cookbooks for fun.This is a memoir, an account of Nguyen's escape from Saigon to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her dad made the decision to flee, in order to allow his 2 daughters a future that didn't involve bombings and war. They ended up in Michigan with grandma Noi and eventually, a stepmother Rosa and step sister Crissy. This is Nguyen's story - told through the lens of the 80's and the food of 3 cultures: her Vietnamese heritage kept alive by her grandma, her desire to be fully American and eat at McDonalds, and her stepmothers Mexican heritage, complete with tamales and sopa.The 80's were an embarrassing decade, I know, I grew up in it. And I got a little secondhand embarrassment from reading this book. If only because I pretty much did the same things and tried to wear the neon and poof my hair up to the sky as well.Nguyen was shy and "not pretty" so she kept to books. I related well, my best books were the Little House books and the descriptions of food from Ingalls kept me entranced as much as it did Nguyen.Nguyen reconciles her childhood, understanding now all of the things that she couldn't grasp back then, like most people do when they grow up. It's a fairly quick read but satisfying...like McDonalds.
    • 4/5
      Another hard-to-read memoir. Nguyen, her sister, and her father, along with her grandmother and uncles, manage to escape from Vietnam after the war and come to America. But America is tough on Nguyen, trying to find a way to blend in, wanting to eat Twinkies and Little Debbie snack cakes and Count Chocula cereal instead of Cha gio and bean sprouts and nuoc mam. Things get worse for Nguyen when her father marries a Mexican-American and Nguyen has a new half brother, a Vietnamese-Mexican American. Nguyen tries to find her way through Donna Summer and Buddha altars, Little House on the Prairie and holiday tamales.
    • 3/5
      Vietnamese Bich Nguyen comes of age in lily-white, conservative Grand Rapids... growing up under an attractive older sister, distant father, and well-meaning, intense Latina step-mother. Both alienated and attracted to American culture, Bich fixates on TV sitcoms and food. The heroine of the book is her Buddhist grandmother. Her real mother (left behind in Vietnam) remains a cipher even after a reunion as adults. A pleasant tale; could-a been a "contender" but bogs down in details (food & more) that sacrifices the narrative drive.
    • 3/5
      A meandering, sometimes touching memoir of a young Vietnamese immigrant who arrives after the fall of Saigon in Grand Rapids, Michigan with her father, sister, grandmother and uncles. The adventure expands once her dad marries a woman of Mexican-American ancestry. Take a trip down memory lane as Ms. Nguyen rattles of list after list of American snack foods, fast food, packaged foods, you name it (if it had artificial flavorings, chances are it made her list). More delicious to me than the author's attraction/repulsion to American foods were the brief but nonetheless tasty slices of life she provides...how did new immigrants acclimate themselves? What was it like learning a new language and nearly forgetting your native tongue? How awful was it to go to a blonde, Christrian friend's house for dinner? (Answer: pretty darn awful!) How did her grandmother cope with this total upheaval in her life (rather well, apparently). Anyone who has felt the outsider can relate to much of this tale. But it's the monotonous listing of food and more food is just hard to digest. Burp. It's worth a read, but it could have been so much more.
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed in this book. I wanted to like it. I very much enjoyed two other Vietnamese refugee memoirs: A SENSE OF DUTY: MY FATHER, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY, by Quang X. Pham, and THE UNWANTED, by Kien Nguyen. Maybe there was something I just didn't "get" here, or maybe it was a gender thing, but I found almost all but the last twenty pages or so pretty boring, and was soon skimming over the endless descriptions of food and snacks, both Asian and American. I guess maybe I was expecting a story of hardship, depravation and discrimination, but although there was a hint of the last, Nguyen's situation of a mildly unhappy somewhat chaotic homelife didn't seem all that different from that of a lot of kids growing up in the 80s where both parents had to rush off to work every day leaving the kids to fend for themselves. And the author actually had her grandmother there when she got home from school, so she may have had things a bit better than others in that respect. I couldn't feel much pain when she talked of "differences" and slights (real or imagined) by her older sister and step sister. Her complaints of being plain and having to wear thick, clunky glasses? Again, it didn't seem so awful or horrible. Lots of kids feel that "otherness," particularly in the pre-teen and teen stages. I wearied early on of her whining about wishing for countless rich sweets and American snackfoods. By her own admission, she seemed to have plenty of everything, and not just food, but TV, music, books, and all the other useless junk kids yearn for, egged on by too many TV ads. Bich Minh Nguyen was, as far as I could tell, a typical kid of the MTV generation. Only in the final twenty or thirty pages does her narrative take on any uniqueness - when she finally meets her birth mom and a couple of half-siblings she'd never known. And then when she journeys back to Vietnam with her grandmother and uncle. And even that experience falls a bit flat, since she speaks or understands very little Vietnamese and can't relate to much of anything there. She seems to me to be a pretty much fully assimilated young American woman. Here, I think, is the problem. While Nguyen is obviously a talented observer and writer, she still lacks the necessary perspective of years and life experience. Perhaps she should have waited another ten or fifteen years to write her story. If she were already a parent herself, I think she might have had a very different slant on her early life - particularly regarding her father and stepmother - than the view she presents us with here. To put it into culinary or "food" terms - which was the prevailing theme here - the ingredients all seem to be here, but the proper seasoning is missing. Having suffered through this book, I am not overly anxious to read her next one.
    • 3/5
      Interesting to read about Nguyen (Vietnamese) and how she desperately wanted to be American in every way, but the writing was only so-so.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book... even though I grew up in very different circumstances there was so much of Bich's story that I identified with. Much of the book was like a trip down memory lane for me - a really fun one at that... I also found her struggles to assimilate into American culture so interesting and I feel like I learned a lot too... the whole book was just a really well written good read.
    • 4/5
      Good insight on a refugee's point of view in America. Also, it is the same time period that I grew up in so I could relate. Wished it didn't go back and forth in time.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed this story of assimilation, but it struck me as a bit sloppy after the first few chapters. I read it a couple of weeks ago, and I can't say it has stayed with me at all.