Realizing "Realness"

Meredith Ashton

22 September 2016

Reading Response

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner 

Realizing “Realness”

            The second half of the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Nguyen portrays Bich’s process of growing up and maturing in her relationships with her family and her own self-identity through the medium of food. Bich begins reading to experience and explore the worlds to which she will never have access. She idolizes the witty, white heroines; she craves their abundance of wholesome food, their cozy nuclear families, and their innate sense of belonging. This is juxtaposed with the older, wiser narrator version of Bich who views these novels more critically, as whitewashed manifest destiny propaganda in which she, as a young Vietnamese girl, could never hope to play a role.

            Bich’s growth is also depicted through the changing nature of the memoir’s chapter titles. Initially, the sections referenced stereotypical American foods, such as Pringles and Toll House Cookies, which then evolved into more intentional dishes that represented the complex cultural identity with which Bich is becoming acquainted. The chapter titled “Holiday Tamales” strives to grasp the complicated relationship Bich holds with Rosa’s Hispanic-American family. When Rosa accuses Bich of not trying to relate to her family in Fruitport, Bich responds “I like tamales and tortillas.” Despite their cultural differences, food was the common ground that Bich and Rosa’s relatives shared.

            In addition to contemplating her relationship to Rosa’s family, Bich further explores her connection to her own family near the end of the novel. In the chapter Mooncakes, Bich meets her birth mother for the first time and walks away with a sticky mooncake and twenty-years worth of still-unanswered questions. Bich writes “I always wanted mooncakes to be something other than they were” (Nguyen 233). Bich facilitates her feelings about her mother through the medium of food. The mooncake is something she always wanted to love and to have for her own, but every time the first bite is a disappointment. Throughout the novel, we’ve seen Bich idealizing the perfect “real” mother: the homemaker, the Marmee March,  the slender socialite. However, she acknowledges that she never dreamed her mother would be of this stock. Her own mother was almost “too real”—a painful and complex reality that would challenge the careful identity Bich had constructed for herself; a Vietnamese-American, Refugee-Citizen, and Hispanic by marriage who was striving to be white by choice.

However, in the end Bich realizes that “in truth, everything that was real lay right in front of me: oranges after dinner; pomegranates in the winter; mangoes cubed off their skin. Birthday cakes decorated in my own hand while my stepmother taught me the words to “Cumpleanos feliz.” Bich was real all along, however, it took the process of growing up to come to the realization of all that she had. The final chapter, Cha Gio, represents a returning to Bich’s Vietnamese roots, where she both respectfully acknowledges from where she came, but also that her tree has grown quite differently from it’s humble origins in Saigon. Bich doesn’t belong to just one place, or one type of cuisine. From processed American Pringles to Hispanic holiday tamales to Noi’s Cha Gio, Bich is from many foods, places, and peoples.