Stealing Buddha's Dinner

Bich becomes good friends with Holly. They are the only ones in their class whose parents vote Democrat, and bond over the differences they share. When Holly asks where Bich’s real mom is, Bich says she stayed in Vietnam because she likes it there. Bich admits this is a lie. Nonetheless, it becomes the story she tells people.

Bich learns to use a knife at age nine when she has a sleepover with Holly. At dinner, Holly's mother serves pork chops. Bich tries to copy Holly and how she uses the knife and fork, but when the knife slips the meat goes flying across the room. Because of this incident, Bich starts to practice at home with a fork and knife.

Rosa enrolls the girls in a bilingual education program at Chamberlain Elementary when Bich is in kindergarten. Bich likes her teacher Mrs. Walter, who lets her sit in a corner and read while the other kids play with memory cards and Loc Blocs, and she becomes friends with another girl named Corinne. The next year, Bich joins Anh in bilingual education class, where they are the only wholly-Americanized students. Bich’s first-grade teacher is Mrs. Sikkema, a grumpy woman who throws cold looks at Bich when she leaves for bilingual ed. Bich becomes friends with Loan, the other Vietnamese girl in her class.

That year also marks the first Tet activities that Bich remembers. The Vietnamese Community Center organizes a day of festivities at the nearby Marriott. Rosa signs Bich up to perform a traditional dance. Bich loves Tet because it is a holiday “all about food, firecrackers, and cash” (100). Noi spends days preparing a feast for Buddha, including green sticky rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves and tied with bamboo and ribbon, called bang chung. Bich doesn’t like them and prefers cha gio, goi cuon, bun noodles, and banh bao stuffed with sweet Chinese sausage.

Noi sews matched ao dais for Anh and Bich, and Rosa makes the kids wear them to school. The girls’ teachers assume they need to work on the assembly, so they skip class and sit down to eat the rice cakes, but a teacher tells them to stop and that the food is for everyone. During the assembly, they play Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” and boys perform a dragon dance. All of the Vietnamese students are called to the stage, where Bich is asked to help present a bouquet of roses to the principal. Bich sees that no one has eaten the rice cakes.

Bich’s father starts to go to the Vietnamese parties alone, which relieves some tension in the house. In 1986, he decides to throw a dance hall party, and books a semi-famous Vietnamese singer and a boy band called Y White. Bich feels out-of-place at the party. Though her father expects to net a profit, he spends too much money on entertainment and doesn’t break even. Bich doesn’t tell anyone at school about the party, as she doesn’t know if they will understand.

At one of the last Vietnamese events she attends, Bich realizes that all the other children have formed close bonds in the years that they stayed at home. Anh tells her they should eat, so they retreat to the cha gio that Noi brought. Bich realizes, in watching some of the other girls, that none of her friends would understand where she is. She realizes she always could choose: whether or not to go to the parties, who to be friends with, whether or not to tell people about her life at home.

Bich describes the mothers in her life: Jennifer’s mother, Holly’s mother, Mrs. Harrison next door, Mrs. Doornbo down the street. And then there is Tara’s mother, who “introduces [Bich] to beef Stroganoff and shows [her] that she has no manners” (118). Tara is Anh’s friend from school and an only child; Bich tags along whenever Anh and Tara have play dates during the holiday break. The first time, they see Cinderella at the movie theater, and Tara’s mother buys them popcorn, pop, and M&Ms. Later, at dinner, Bich sits at the head of the table where Tara’s father usually sits and then starts eating before they say grace. Rosa makes fun of her for not knowing that she was rude, and Bich gets angry at her for not teaching them the right lessons.

Rosa, who loves protests, keeps the children home when the teachers at her school strike. Bich is the only person missing from her class. The family had also previously boycotted lettuce, grapes, and Campbell's products because of the indignities suffered by migrant laborers on their farms (one of Rosa’s buttons reads “Down With Grapes”). Bich finds her sense of justice reading Grapes of Wrath. Rosa takes them to the picket line where the teachers are, and Bich tries to get excited about it by imagining how the characters from Grapes of Wrath would feel if they were part of the strike. Two weeks later, the strike ends, and Bich is nervous that kids at school will have formed bonds without her there; however, nothing much has happened. Bich becomes confident and brags about her experience until a girl in her class named Jamie calls her and Rosa communists.

Rosa works downtown near the “bad” part of the city, teaching GED and ESL classes at the Hispanic Institute. Sometimes the kids go there on the weekends and after school to help out. Rosa enrolls Bich in a cake-decorating class in the evenings, where she makes a cake decorated with a pink unicorn prancing in a field of violets. Bich is frustrated that she cannot make even waves of frosting like in commercials and becomes convinced that it is a talent reserved for white mothers in aprons.

All of her friends’ moms fit into the commercial version of womanhood, but Rosa never does and refuses to buy or make Americanized food. One night, Rosa makes another pan of Mexican rice, and Bich decides to strike. She tells Rosa she is “sick and tired of eating the same things” (127) and that she is going on strike until they start eating better food. Things get heated, and Bich tells Rosa that she can’t tell her what to do because she isn’t her biological mother. Rosa doesn’t talk to Bich for a couple of days and serves Kraft macaroni and chicken nuggets for lunch, but the kids are too stressed to eat. Eventually, Noi is back in the kitchen, making shrimp soup, and they never talk about the fight again.

At the end of the chapter, Bich mentions her birth mother, and that her existence complicates her identity. She hints that her mother is making her way to the United States.