Stealing Buddha's Dinner

“I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into western Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants became staples in every town.”

Here, Bich comments on the cultural period in which she came of age, before multiculturalism was the norm in non-major urban centers in the Midwest. Bich and her family are surrounded mainly by white, Christian conservatives.

“As a child I couldn’t figure out what ‘All-American’ was supposed to mean. Was it a promise, a threat, a warning?”

Her position as a Vietnamese-American whose family is hesitant to assimilate means that Bich is usually considered other. Her relationship to her identity is skewed by the fact that she isn’t seen as wholly American due to her race, which complicates her relationship with family and friends.

"In school hallways blond heads glided, illuminated in the lockers creaking open and slamming shut, taunting me to be what I only wished I could be. That was the dilemma, the push and pull. The voice saying, come on in. Now transform. And if you cannot, then disappear."

The image of the blond girl repeats in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and in many ways represents everything that Bich knows she cannot be but still desires. She sees only two options: conform or figuratively vanish.

“We had to put together the pieces of America that came to us through television, song lyrics, Meijer Thrifty Acres, and our father, coming home from work each day with candy in his pocket. We couldn’t get enough Luden’s wild-cherry flavored cough drops, or Pringles stacked in their shiny red canister, a mille-feuille of promises.”

Because of their identity as immigrants, Bich and Anh do not know how to naturally navigate American culture, so they rely on popular culture to be their teacher. Leading the way are American food products.

“Too much to ask, and too much to do. English to learn, streets to navigate, work to manage, food to buy, friends to find.”

As Bich reflects on her family’s first few years in Grand Rapids, she realizes she underestimated how hard the adjustment must have been for her father, grandmother, and uncles, who must provide for themselves and for the children in Bich’s family.

"Meijer and the Saigon Market, both on 28th Street, became the epicenters of our lives, splitting our existence between two cultures. The Saigon Market meant home, familiar faces and foods, our own language, a general store for all things Vietnamese."

The two grocery stores the Nguyen family goes to are located on the same street, and the two stores, Meijer and the Saigon Market, stand in for Bich’s two seemingly-conflicting identities.

“Stung by her family’s criticism, she became an atheist, immersed herself into left-wing activism–as much as was possible in Grand Rapids–and made her own life and career.”

This quote is in reference to Rosa, Bich’s stepmother. Rosa is a very intelligent, stubborn person. Her family’s reaction to her choices leads her to reject their faith and way of living and build a life for herself that represents her own values.

"They created two lives for themselves: the American one and the Vietnamese one—Oriental, as we all said back then. Out in the world they were Tiffany and David; at home they were Truoc and Doan."

For Bich, one of the easiest ways to start to assimilate to American culture was to change your name. She is envious of the other Vietnamese kids she meets whose parents understand this, but also understands that they are partially sacrificing a part of their Vietnamese identity in doing so.

"My name: Bich. In Vietnamese it meant jade, which was all well and fine in Vietnam but meant nothing in Michigan [and][b]y second grade I was being regularly informed that I was a bitch. I started fantasizing then about being Beth, or maybe Vanessa or Polly. But I knew I could never make it stick. Who would listen to me? Who would allow me to change? Not Rosa, nor anyone at school."

Bich’s name leads to much torment from her peers. Further, though she knows that Rosa’s intentions are good, she resents her for not allowing the change nonetheless. Here, we see the opposition, too, between sight and sound; Bich’s name is pronounced similarly to “bit,” but is a letter away from being the word “bitch.” While Bich’s name means something expensive and beautiful in Vietnamese, it becomes, to Bich’s peers, a derogatory term. This shows the extent and depth of the difficulties of assimilation.

"I wondered how many more layers of discovery stood between me and true Americanness."

When Jennifer explains homemade chocolate chip cookies to Bich, she is exposed to a whole new world of culinary possibility. She believes these discoveries will culminate in something, making her feel truly American.

“It was exhausting, this secrecy, this effort to be normal, and I took to wandering the house at night when everyone else was asleep. I liked being invisibly in between, a shadow dissolving into itself.”

Bich struggles with the silence in her life but appreciates that she has the ability to retreat into her own little world. She starts to stay up at night to gain back some sense of herself through solitude. This quote illustrates the liminality present in this moment in Bich’s identity, and the psychic weight it places upon her.

“Every immigrant knows a dual life, marked by a language at home and a language inside.”

Being multilingual gives Bich access to two different worlds of language, and two different understandings of the world. Like the above quote, it speaks in part to the liminal nature of Bich’s existence as she is growing up.

“I knew the cookies would stay with me forever, echoing with each successive one I might eat and learn to make, each chocolate chip a reminder of the toll, the price of admission into a long-desired house. How I wanted such entrance through cookies, through candy and cake, popsicles, ice cream, endless kinds of dinner. I wanted all of it, and hated to be hungry.”

Bich sees American food as a gateway into American culture; when Jennifer tells her about homemade cookies, she is filled with a hope and a hunger for assimilation. Much like dividing up the word “Ponderosa” into “Ponder Rosa,” here, we see Bich reapply the language of Toll House cookies into “toll” and “house.”

“The good student had privileges, after all: they could escape notice; they could even do independent study [at] the back of the room or out in the hallway. Being good meant freedom from watchfulness.”

Bich discovers that if she is quiet and gets good grades, she will be afforded a certain amount of freedom. Because she lacks privacy and space alone in her home, she makes it a priority to do well so she has access to the privileges of a good student, which in part mean more time to herself.

“Making friends on the playground would be like Charlie’s Angels, I imagined.”

Bich takes her cues on American culture from television shows and commercials. She assumes that making friends will be like what she sees on the screen but finds out she is mistaken. This quote is an example of the idyllic version of American life that plays out often in Bich’s mind with what actually occurs in Bich’s largely-white, largely-conservative community.

"It occurred to me that I had always had choices: to go to parties or not. To call my friend Loan or not. To keep up my Vietnamese or not. To tell my friends at school, My father threw a party once and hired a lady singer and a band called Y White. I bit into the rice cake, its sticky sweetness scenting my tongue. It tasted like a secret long kept, old and familiar and unspeakable."

Initially, Bich isn’t entirely capable of making choices for herself. She feels trapped by the lack of information she has and the anxiety she feels over her Vietnamese identity. However, through the course of Chapter 8, she finds solace in her newfound ability to choose, with the rice cake working as symbol for this choice.

“It's such a small thing—a stalk of rhubarb, a bottle of bread and honey. Yet it's dark in my mind as a moment of withholding. A moment of descent, marking myself as the one who would not go along, into the club of girlhood.”

Chrissy acts as a guide for the younger girls in how to grow up. Bich doesn’t feel like she is progressing towards girlhood in the same way; in refusing Chrissy’s snacks, she is rebelling against their refusal to let her into that club.

“Debora had wanted me to be afraid, I realized, just as she had wanted me to believe what I could not believe. I was supposed to fear teenagers, boys, the wreck of adolescence.”

Bich is supposed to be afraid of the kids she sees smoking and lounging in the parking lot on her Girl Scouts trip. However, when she sees Chrissy in the group, Bich realizes that the teenagers she is supposed to fear are only dealing with adolescence in a different way.

"I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone."

Bich finds solace in literature. She doesn’t feel that her reality fits what she wants, so she loses herself in fictional worlds. In those worlds, she finds friends, and space to be by herself.

"I couldn't explain to her that it wasn't dislike; it was unfamiliarity. Her family didn't know me as I didn't know them. It was too much for me to synthesize white American culture, Mexican American culture, and my own Vietnamese culture all at the same time."

When they go to visit Rosa’s family in Fruitport, Bich feels distanced from Rosa’s family and does not want to have to deal with balancing three cultures at once.

“Buddha never claimed to be a god. He could not be tested. He had no wrath. He granted no miracles or wishes. He asked me to prove nothing.”

Bich misunderstands Buddhism as being similar to Christianity; she imagines that Buddha is there, listening to her prayers and paying close attention to her mistakes. When she steals fruit from the altar in front of the golden statue of Buddha, she expects his wrath, but only gets a reminder that her family’s faith is a lenient, mindful one.

“I remained a stranger or a ghost, something in between.”

When Bich meets her mother, she feels distanced from her. They do not spend enough time together to really get to know each other, and their relationship remains surface level.

“In the end, I left my questions unanswered. I couldn't comprehend the loss, the nearly 20 years’ absence, the silence and unknowing, the physical distance literally impossible to break.”

In the end, Bich comes to terms with the absence of her mother, once the two meet and Bich is disappointed by their interaction. The adage that time heals all wounds doesn’t ring true for Bich, who instead finds that time sometimes causes too deep a rift to cross.