Stealing Buddha's Dinner is a collection of memoir-essays, published by Viking Penguin.
Some background on the book:
As a girl, my favorite books were the ones that had good food scenes—The Boxcar Children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Little House on the Prairie books. Here, food meant prosperity and possibility, longing and escape. Wanting to eat what these characters ate meant wanting to live in their worlds--and I wanted to be anywhere else, pretty much, besides where I was, which was Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the heart of the 1980s.
Fast forward twenty years. My husband and I are driving from North Carolina to Washington, DC, when he suggests that I write a memoir. This is December 2003. I had published a couple of essays on childhood, and my husband says, why not gather them toward a book-length work? The idea seems startling at first, but it also makes vague sense; I’d always been interested in the subjects of food, immigration, identity, and childhood. It's also true that whenever I tried to write about food in fiction or poetry, the descriptions kept insisting on the real, the true: what I really ate; what I really wanted to eat. And it's true, too, that I still spend a lot of time thinking about the foods of my youth—Pringles, ice cream cones, cha gio spring rolls, Little Caesar’s Pizza—and how they represent my childhood in suburban Michigan, where I was always reminded that I was a “foreigner,” and where the girls in my neighborhood told me I was going to hell because I wasn’t baptized. I knew I could never be as truly “American” as they were but I decided I could transform myself; I vowed that my English and spelling would be as good as theirs, or better. I could eat what they ate, too, if only my grandmother would abandon her tofu soup and give me some breaded pork chops.
Just as my husband and I are driving by the Potomac Mills outlet mall, I think: Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. The title just appears--a wonderful and rare feeling. It emerges from my remembering the statue of Buddha my grandmother keeps in her bedroom, and the time I tried, unsuccessfully, to become a "real Buddhist." The memory leads to so many more, all having to do with seeking an identity through food or music or TV. It occurs to me that the effort to claim a culture, whether American or Vietnamese, has always felt like a theft, like a taking of something that didn’t or never really would belong to me. There are a couple of literal moments of theft in the book too, but they’re also food related. I was a very hungry child.
I found that I could write in the memoir form what I could never seem to articulate fully in fiction or poetry: how my family fled Viet Nam on April 29, 1975 and how we left my mother behind; how we settled in, slowly, to life among tall people in Grand Rapids; how my father came home with feathers in his hair after shifts at the feather factory where he worked; how my new Latina stepmother and stepsister changed all of our lives. I didn’t want, after all, to hide this story in fiction or poetry. In order to write it I had to acknowledge it as the truth—or my truth, the truth as I knew and experienced it.
When I was growing up the world seemed steeped in mystery. The minor mysteries—how exactly did Pringles get their shape?—weighed almost as much as the major mysteries—what had happened to my mother? The subject of her life was shrouded in secrecy—no one in the family wanted, or dared, to talk about her—and in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner I try to recreate that sense (and structure) of silence. I find out "what happened," of course, but not until the near end of the book, when, no longer a child, I can face the truth I'd been avoiding.
I grew up with two older sisters and adored whatever they adored—Madonna and Culture Club, some Def Leppard and Van Halen, a healthy dose of Pat Benatar and Sheila E. It was from my sisters that I learned the habit of listening to the same song over and over.
While writing this book I listened to a lot of 80s music; it called forth memories and reminded me of how the songs functioned—both as symbols of longing for access and markers of context
Today, I can still appreciate the good badness of the 80s: Lionel Richie, "The Love Boat," "The Facts of Life." Back when the Whopper beat the Big Mac, when music videos were earnest (and actually played all the time on MTV). In retrospect, the 80s really taught me how to understand and appreciate irony and camp.
For me, part of the ethos of the 80s includes the landscape of bad food. There’s a lot of it in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner—Ponderosa, Chef Boyardee, fast food, fried chicken. One of the worst is a dish that was always served at my stepmother’s family’s get-togethers: instant pistachio pudding mixed with Cool Whip and a can of pineapple tidbits. I’ve since heard it called Watergate Salad, which seems a fitting name. The good food in the book is what I took for granted and felt ashamed of, like my grandmother’s fried spring rolls (cha gio) and pho and canh chua soup. At the time, such foods were viewed by non-Vietnamese people in Grand Rapids as “weird” and “gross"; a lot of people in my high school had never even tasted Chinese food. (Odd, later, to watch Vietnamese food ascend into foodie-dom in the 1990s and then become mainstream.)
Everyone in my family remembers me as the pickiest eater, and I was. They had good taste in food; I did not. I was always holding out for what I couldn’t get, all the boxed and canned dinners in commercials—too expensive to think of buying. I used to fantasize about all the wonderful foods in the world, just waiting to be eaten, and I couldn’t wait to grow up in order to be able to get to them at last. In Stealing Buddha's Dinner I look back at that time of earnestness and longing, when I resolutely embraced the symbols of pop culture. It's a little shocking, now, to think of how truly I believed I could make over my identity from the inside out.