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 off 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 prefab 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, Christian 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 that was hard to digest. Burp. ( )

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. ( )

Interesting to read about Nguyen (Vietnamese) and how she desperately wanted to be American in every way, but the writing was only so-so. ( )

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen, teacher of Asian American literature, creative nonfiction, and fiction at Purdue University. Nguyen’s father, sister, grandmother, and uncles left Vietnam the night before the fall of Saigon. After spending some time in the Philippines, the received a sponsor in Grand Rapids, MI to come to the United States, where Bich’s father eventually met and married Rosa, a woman of Mexican heritage. Growing up in a bi-cultural family was difficult for Bich in white, middle-class (as it was at the time) Grand Rapids. Her family’s food, traditions, and ways of thinking were markedly different from those of her not-so-understanding classmates.

The beginning of the book was definitely stronger than the end - there is a conclusion that you as a reader are not really prepared for in the book and isn’t fully explained. However, it is perhaps more authentic that way, it does not seem that Bich was prepared for this resolution either, although I’m not totally sure how it enriched her story of a child’s immigrant experience. Overall I enjoyed this book; it was a fast and engaging read.

For the whole review: http://devourerofbooks.wordpress.com/... ( )

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. ( )