Stealing Buddha's Dinner

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. ( )

Nguyen's memoir of growing up Vietnamese in Michigan after fleeing Saigon in 1975 is somewhat different from similar memoirs, and perhaps shouldn't be understood as an example of the same genre. Many accounts that begin with a similar premise are about not fitting in, about traumatization, about striving for the immigrant's version of the American Dream. While Nguyen certainly enacts and recounts all of these themes, the story in the forefront of this memoir is the allure of a particular form of consumption. Literally, this is a paean to the junk foods of Nguyen's Michigan childhood. Symbolically, it is a tale of incorporation, of gobbling up, of becoming American by ingesting American products. Yes, there are some Amy Tan-like moments of admiring the previous generation's culture, but most of the time Nguyen reminds me of the Vietnamese baby Kim from Trudeau's Doonesbury strips of the 1970's. Old people like me remember that long before she married Mike Doonesbury, Kim learned to speak English from television commercials, and her first words were "Big Mac."

Nguyen's America - through - oral - incorporation rings true, and is merely a different spin on the narrative of acculturation. At the same time, it has trouble finding its emotional center, and feels like a small book in some ways. Nguyen's relentless comparisons of herself to others wore me down. I can only assume that she found it exhausting as well. It's a story that's about as far from a Buddhist sensibility as you can get, and might have been more complex had this cultural tension been better articulated and woven into the story over time. ( )

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. ( )

I picked this book up for the interesting title and I like the cover. When I read the back description I was intrigued. I don't know very much about the Vietnamese war or what it was like to be a refugee in the 1980's, so I purchased this book. Even though I didn't grow up in the 80's, like the author, I felt connected to her. Reading her lists of foods and talk about television brought back memories of my childhood. Her family life was in my eyes sad and lonely. I felt that if we'd grown up together I would've been her friend, for my Mother was a smart shopper like her step-mother, and I've been frustrated just like Bich Minh Nguyen over not having the treats and food I wanted. Reading about her grandmother was very interesting as well, I have a strong desire to eat traditional Vietnamese food now. I hope that the author has started to rediscover her heritage. I know how it feels to want to fit in so badly that you loose vital parts of who you are.