The American Dream, Complete With Candy and Introspection

There is nothing more unusual and entrancing to seven-year-old Bich Nguyen than a Hostess Cupcake. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the Purdue professor’s memoir of life as a Vietnamese refugee in the 1970s, centers on Nguyen’s obsessive fascination with American food and the hermetically-sealed, perfectly-assembled bounty that she comes to associate with American life.

Brought to Michigan at eight months old, Nguyen felt determined to become a “real person” like the turtleneck-wearing, blonde-haired classmate whose culture she had been thrust into. Unable to change her complexion or shy demeanor, Nguyen instead attempted to assimilate through food, hoarding Smarties and Reese’s Cups as she became increasingly embarrassed by both her culture’s cuisine and what it represents.

The extent to which food characterizes a civilization is extraordinary, and Nguyen’s charming, awkward coming-of-age illustrates it beautifully. In one chapter, she recalls how she and her sister Anha learned English by watching cereal commercials on television. They collected Pringles cans because the face pictured was to them America’s essence: “a big white man, gentle of manner, whose face signaled a bounty of provisions.” The stability, order, and plenty she saw in all-you-can-eat buffets and jumbo Nestle bars differed wildly from the hysteria and violence her family left in Saigon. “When I think of my childhood,” she writes, “I think of contrasts.”

This extends to her family’s reaction to America—while she and Anha were determined to assimilate at any cost, their Hispanic stepmother Rosa attempted to forge a Spanish-Vietnamese culture without any American influences. Her grandmother Noi defiantly continued her traditions, offering fruit to the statue of Buddha in their living room.

Nguyen uses Stealing Buddha’s Dinner to capture the frustration, embarrassment, and longing she felt growing up. At the same time, she also shows the sense of “aloneness” her entire family experienced as they attempted, in their own ways, to take up, adjust, or abandon their respective heritages. As Buddhists, they were often condemned by their neighbors as hell-bound, while Nguyen’s classmates often mocked her by drawing their eyelids back, chanting “Ching-Chong!” and “Chop Suey!” She states frankly that at times, it seemed there was a sign above the entrance to America saying: “Come on in. Now transform. If you cannot, disappear.” This is not to say that her memoir steeps itself in self-pity or resentment—with a keen sense of equilibrium, Nguyen balances her often shocking revelations on the pressure of assimilation with poignant, amusing observations on ‘proper’ table manners or Grand Rapids’ first snowfall.

The book’s one disappointment is Nguyen’s sudden and unexplained refrain from discussing her high school years, erasing 13 through 20 from the autobiography altogether. After an engrossing review of her earliest childhood and prepubescence, Nguyen cuts directly to college, with almost zero detail about the space between. And since, at its core, the book is about the tension between individual heritage and mass identity, it is particularly surprising that the high school teenage years, so traditionally consumed by identity crises, don’t show up at all.

It is a testament to Nguyen’s skill that the only problem is she hasn’t written enough. For those of us raised on Captain Crunch and microwavable snacks, it is hard to imagine such articles of everyday life as exotic or enticing. Easier to understand is that the desire to belong often correlates directly with the inability to do so. As college students, we also struggle to determine our place in a communal culture—and while Stealing Buddha’s Dinner may be one young Vietnamese girl’s story, Nguyen’s memoir is universal in its message that we are all “Other” at some point, no matter who we are.