Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir

#138
Title: Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir
Author: Bich Minh Nguyen
Publisher: Viking
Year: 2007
Genre: Asia, memoir
257 pages  

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.