Before I start critiquing the first 9 chapters of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, I want to be sure that I make the point of how much I enjoyed them. Bich Minh Nguyen is a wonderful writer, and her memoir has been pleasant and enjoyable to read. The story is relatable, detailed, and personable, and it is partially because of these traits that reading it almost made me disgusted and somewhat depressed.
As I read stories about Nguyen’s early childhood, I was struck by how much she equated fitting in in the United States with eating the “right kinds” of food. She talked many times about her obsession with such “American delicacies” as Hamburger Helper, Toll House cookies, and Wonderbread. Reading such an intense and detailed narrative about a young immigrant’s obsession with finding her American identity through unhealthy, processed foods only affirmed my pre-existing opinions about America’s poor reputation.
Reading Nguyen’s memoir felt backwards to me. I was shocked when the Vietnamese dishes her grandmother made were described with distaste and resentment--I only wish I could be so lucky as to sample half of the foods she described. I had my own turn at distaste and resentment, though, when she described the various processed, packaged, and fast foods that she revered as an unattainable ideal. As the daughter of a working mother who was also quite a poor cook, I am all too familiar with these “American foods,” and my attitude towards them is little less than disgust.
It was shocking and sad to read, over and over again, Nguyen’s impression that true Americanism lay in the consumption and familiarity with these sorts of fatty, unhealthy foods. The story of the child who boasted about eating at McDonald’s three times a week was especially poignant--how can something that sounds so disgusting to me be so exciting for her, a child who lived a mere 20 years and 150 miles away from where and when I grew up.
The beauty of Nguyen’s writing was that in spite of all of these differences of opinion between myself and her, her memoir was extremely relatable for me. I could understand how her ache to belong could cultivate itself in such a way. I could understand her longing to fit in with the blonde, pig-tailed children around her. And, although I disagreed with it vehemently, I could understand how her need for approval could lead to such an obsession with American foods. It wasn’t Nguyen that I was upset with in any way, it was American culture. Because any society which encourages children to gorge themselves on candy, cookies, ice cream, and processed foods just for the sake of fitting in is, in my opinion, flawed beyond comprehension. All I can hope is that it is not flawed beyond fixing.
It strikes me that your repulsion at her desires creates a dissonance that highlights the absurdity of American culture. In other words, her narrative is working on you exactly as she planned! Your post--and excellent comments you've made in class--have me thinking about how much (and yet how little) things have changed in American culture since the '80s. We--and by we I mean our media, especially--critique food culture much more openly and in a way that brings about change. It's fascinating to me how focused we as a group in discussion are on health and nutrition; that's a HUGE generational shift!
ReplyDeleteI really thought that your response touched on some of the same things that I was noticing. I think Nguyen wants to evoke this sense of outrage in her reader about the unhealthy mass-produced food that we eat all too often. I took note especially to her description of the heavy feeling of the chocolate chip cookies from the Crisco. Yuck!
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