Stealing Buddha's Dinner

Checked in with olduvai's October reads and saw Bich Minh Nguyen's 'Stealing Buddha's Dinner'. Not that I know anything about the author; the title which captured my attention. Didn't manage to swing by a bookstore. Had to buy an e-copy. Heeeeee. Okay lah. Filled up some gaps between meetings instead of running amok on social media. (Reviews here, here, here, and here.)

The author said she thought of "this memoir as an homage to CHILDhood, suburbia, and all the bad food, fashion, music and hair of the deep 1980s. It is also about an immigrant's dilemma to blend in or remain apart." She took us through her life and thoughts as she struggled with her identity through food parallels.

Religion also featured prominently as a theme within. The dichotomy of growing up in a foreign country, in Midwest America, with her native culture and family surrounding her still. In the 70s and 80s, the color of her skin and how she looked, her race, were all a thorny issues, resulting her feeling more like an outsider than an American. She was less than a year old when she began living in Grand Rapids, Michigan; it can't be Vietnam she misses. There's also family dynamics thrown in with a new stepmother. Her mother didn't come with her to America the day the family fled Saigon in 1975.

I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into western Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants became staples in every town. When I think of Grand Rapids I remember city signs covered in images of rippling flags, proclaiming "An All-American City." A giant billboard looming over the downtown freeway boasted the slogan to all who drove the three-lane S-curve. As a kid, I couldn't figure out what "All-American" was supposed to mean. Was it a promise, a threat, a warning? 

... My father and uncles and grandmother were grateful for a place to go - how could they be anything less? - and preferred to overlook how the welcoming smile of our sponsor gave way to a scowling face behind a drugstore cash register: Don't you people know how to speak English? Why don't you go back to where you came from? 

The 16 chapters in the book are titled after food- Pringles, Forbidden Fruit, Dairy Cone, Fast Food Asian, Toll House Cookies, School Lunch, American Meat, Green Sticky Rice Cakes, Down with Grapes, Bread and Honey, Salt Pork, Holiday Tamales, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, Ponderosa, Mooncakes, Cha Gio. They represent her desires to eat them, and beyond that, what having those cans of Pringles mean, and the memories and conflict the foods stir. Also mentioned, about eating like the average American teenager where they don't usually have a golden statue of Buddha sit in the living room or grow ray răm, Vietnamese coriander (we know it as daun kesom, or laksa leaf), or stock packs of jasmine rice.

The chapter that the book took its title from- 'Stealing Buddha's Dinner', tells the angst and conflict between the religion she and the family practiced at home, Buddhism, and the religion of her first school, Catholic, and followed the religion of her classmates in her second school, Christianity. It also depicted the author's fascination with food, and wonderment at the assortment of fruit left for the Buddha sitting on the altar, and decided to steal a plum just to see if she would be punished.

With one fingertip I touched the stem of a plum, whose violet skin always looked dusty. For just a moment, I hovered over it. Then the fruit was lying in the flat of my hand. I looked up at Buddha. His eyes were still closed. Sometimes, when we wanted to scare each other, Anh and I talked about how one day Buddha's eyes would fly open, shooting out beams of light. I waited a minute longer, until I heard the sound of the basement door opening and sliding shut. Then I ran out of the room, pushing the plum into my shorts pocket as I hurried out the front door.

I couldn't empathize with the author's childhood experiences or her conflicted feelings. I grew up in a time of peace, in a country where my face, hair and skin color look like they belong to the majority race. Long family visits to US and UK as a child didn't enlighten me to what my cousins might have felt. A product of this island-state's bilingual school system, I knew no overt discrimination until the teenage years. I didn't know anything about the racial riots in 1964 and 1969. I didn't even know a refugee camp existed in Singapore at Hawkins Road till 1996 until my early twenties. Appreciated the perspectives found in this book, like many out there, I read to understand what these authors thought and felt growing up transplanted in different cultures.

The memoir ended with the author making a four-week visit to Vietnam in 1997 as an adult with a rudimentary grasp of Vietnamese. The family traveled from Saigon to Nha Trang to Hanoi. It's been 22 years since the family fled the country; the author saw the new-country through the eyes of her father and grandmother. While staying with one relative, thinking that the author "would only like American food," they made her "a heap of broad-cut french fries every night." Memories, childhood angst, emotions and grown-up identity coming full circle, so to speak.

I tried to imagine the years my father and uncles and grandmother spent here, having no idea that they would one day flee it, leaving everything behind. I tried to picture the stories my father and uncles had told me. Was this where the cat with the pet rat slept on languid afternoons? Where did the angry chicken hang out? I tried to imagine my sister and me, so little and so demanding - my sister's feet stamping the concrete floor, Noi feeding us mashed bananas as she contemplated our future. The dingy, gray rooms held no resonance for me, no meaning. This home was not my home to remember. 

Perhaps he steeled himself to a choice that would never have been made differently: his children, their future, their lives came first. That I cannot imagine that moment, the panic and fear, the push to leave his country and aim for an unknown land, is perhaps his gift. It is my Americanness. What my father must have thought, what must have replayed in his mind for years - I cannot every really grasp. In just a few minutes, in half a night, our lives changed. Our identities changed. We were Vietnamese, we were refugees, we were Americans. My father could not possibly regret it. I do not regret it. I am grateful for his unimaginable choice.