Stealing Buddha's Dinner
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Average rating4
15
Ratings2
Average rating4
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha's Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen's struggle to become a "real" American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.
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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.
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