By Chris Byron, Grand Rapids Public Library
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a vivid, funny, charming memoir of growing up in the 1980s and assimilating into a new culture. Bich Minh Nguyen was eight months old in 1975 when her family fled Vietnam. She resettled in Grand Rapids, Mich. with her father, sister, grandmother, and two uncles. Under Jerry Ford’s encouragement, Grand Rapids was one of cities across the country that participated in the resettlement program of finding community sponsors to help the new immigrants.
Growing up, young Bich (pronounced “bit”) was torn between the old ways of her family and the new experiences of America. She writes about what is what like to grow up in a Vietnamese household in an “All-American” city.
Nguyen’s childhood resonates with the experience of two cultures’ clashing religions, habits, clothes, and, especially, foods. She wrestled with the conflicting desires for her grandmother’s native cooking and the junk food that “real” Americans ate. The allure of Pringles, Toll House Cookies and Popsicles become a metaphor for her struggle to fit in. Her father remarried a Latina woman and more cultural conflicts presented themselves. She wonders what happened to her real mother. Nguyen’s immigrant story is America’s story, retold this time in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Along the way, local readers will recognize descriptions of Wyoming and Grand Rapids, of Meijer and Gas City, of Christian Reformed churches and public libraries. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner was selected by the Michigan Humanities Council as the 2009/10 “Great Michigan Read” and was chosen by the Library of Michigan as a Michigan Notable Book.
