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Beginning with her family’s harrowing migration out of Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddha’s Evening meal follows Bich Nguyen as she comes of age in the pre-PC-era Midwest. Filled up with a rapacious being hungry for American personality, Nguyen’s need to belong transmutes into a passion for American food – Pringles, Set 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 on her behalf struggle to turn into a “real” North american. Stealing Buddha’s Evening meal is also a portrayal of your diverse family: Nguyen’s hardworking, hard-partying daddy; pretty sister; smart and nurturing grandmother; and Rosa, her Latina stepmother. And there is the mystery of Nguyen’s labor and birth mother, revealed movingly over the course of the book. Nostalgic and candid, Stealing Buddha’s Evening meal is a distinctive eye-sight of the immigrant experience and a lyrical ode to how personality is often formed by the things we long for. “Her typical and not-so-typical childhood experiences give her account a universal taste.” – USA Today “Amazingly written...[Nguyen] is fearless in asserting the specificities of memory culled from early on childhood and it is, herself, an attractive personality on the page...A writer to view.” – Chicago Tribune “Flawlessly pitched and prodigiously detailed.” – The Boston Globe
