| Description |
256 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm |
| Contents |
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 -- Author's note -- Acknowledgments. |
| Summary |
From the Publisher: 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. |
| Subject |
Nguyen, Bich Minh -- Childhood and youth.
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Immigrants -- Michigan -- Grand Rapids -- Biography.
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Vietnamese Americans -- Michigan -- Grand Rapids -- Biography.
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Americans -- Food.
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Grand Rapids (Mich.) -- Biography.
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| ISBN |
0143113038 |
|
9780143113034 |
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