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Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir

de Bich Minh Nguyen

Membros	Resenhas	Popularidade	Avaliação média	Menções
538	26	44,929	(3.45)	8
Beginning with her family's harrowing migration out of Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddha's Dinner follows Bich Nguyen as she comes of age in the pre-PC-era Midwest. Filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, Nguyen's desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food - Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House cookies. More exotic-seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to become a "real" American. Stealing Buddha's Dinner is also a portrayal of a diverse family: Nguyen's hardworking, hard-partying father; pretty sister; wise and nurturing grandmother; and Rosa, her Latina stepmother. And there is the mystery of Nguyen's birth mother, unveiled movingly over the course of the book. Nostalgic and candid, Stealing Buddha's Dinner is a unique vision of the immigrant experience and a lyrical ode to how identity is often shaped by the things we long for. "Her typical and not-so-typical childhood experiences give her story a universal flavor." - USA Today "Beautifully written... Nguyen] is fearless in asserting the specificities of memories culled from early childhood and is, herself, an appealing character on the page...A writer to watch." - Chicago Tribune "Perfectly pitched and prodigiously detailed." - The Boston Globe… (mais)

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Mostrando 1-5 de 26 (seguinte | mostrar todas)

I liked this biography a lot. It was very interesting - the story of a Vietnamese girl who came to the United States as an infant and throughout her childhood never found herself at home with either being Vietnamese or American. She tells the story through food - the chapters are themes about food and how she relates her love of junk food and American food and how it applies to the emptiness she often feels inside.

I wish the chapters had been more chronological. She was generally chronological, but not always, and she skipped around some as she pursued some of her food themes. She was 10, then she was 8, then she was maybe 11, then back to being 10. I would have liked more linear progression. I wish she had talked more about high school and college. She wraps up quickly after junior high/middle school. I'm also not sure how old she is now or how she currently feels about her life.

Even with that said, this was a very good picture of life for an immigrant in Grand Rapids in the 1980's and also just life in general in the 1980's. It made me think of my own life in the 70's and what I thought of the food my family ate and what other families ate. (

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Chica3000 | Dec 11, 2020 |

rabck from quiet orchid; author, father, sister and grandmother fled from Saigon near the end of the war, and were sponsered by a Michigan church. Slow and whiny most of the book - how the author wanted to be "american" with american dress and food, while her grandmother fixes the traditional vietnamese fare, which the author likes too. snippet at the end, where the author goes to Vietnam with her grandmother to see her grandmother's siblings and extended family. She also finds her birth mother, whom she never knew when she was old enough to remember, and feels no connection with. (

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nancynova | Jan 10, 2020 |

Read this book at an achingly slow pace, savoring the words like a good meal. (

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alyssajp | Jul 29, 2019 |

Bich was a baby when she came to the US. About her growing up here. Not good

jhawn | Jul 31, 2017 |

I do not understand how this got published. This is not sweet, its not salacious, its just boring. The book consists of list after list of stuff (mostly food, but also bands, and toys/games, stores, etc.) that make the author feel nostalgic about being the different weird Vietnamese kid in Grand Rapids in the 70's and 80's. There are few real stories, and little of interest. Just lists. Sometimes a half a page or so of fast food, or soda options. And the author was unhappy during this time, so I am not really getting the nostalgia. I don't think I have ever read a more disjointed book. I am fine with non-linear narratives, but here things bounce all over the place for no reason. Stream of consciousness is best as a first draft.

I did not grow up in GR, but I am from Michigan, and I spent a good deal of time in the area near the time this is set. There is A LOT to write about in the land of strapping blond folk, and this author left out all the interesting things. (

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Narshkite | Jan 25, 2016 |

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Great Michigan Read (2010)

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Michigan Notable Books (2008)

UC Berkeley Summer Reading List (2018)

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