49 pages • 1 hour read
Stealing Buddha's Dinner
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Themes
Liminality and the Immigrant Experience
As a first-generation immigrant who came to the United States as a child, Bich straddles two worlds: Vietnam, a homeland she doesn’t remember but that is a part of her everyday life, and America, where she spends her formative years feeling rejected by her own culture. This liminality creates a rift in her understanding of herself and makes it difficult for her to come to terms with her identity.
As Grand Rapids is a mostly white, conservative, and Christian city, Bich is surrounded by homogeneity. However, she spends most of her time out of school around other Vietnamese people, or in her own Vietnamese- and Mexican-American home. In her home, Bich faces conflicting messages about her identity. Chrissy makes fun of Bich and Anh for the fruit on Buddha’s altar, and something sacred becomes a point of shame. Bich starts to scowl at food prepared at home, even as she admits her love for it. At school and with peers her age, Bich feels unable to discuss her home life, even when she is excited about it. Because Bich is unable to change her family, she makes them invisible to and separate from her friends, who she sees as representatives of American culture. When her father throws a party and invites a band and a famous Vietnamese singer, Bich keeps it to herself, even though she is proud. In doing so, she realizes she has the choice to divulge different parts of her identity to others, a freedom she will always have. This ability to withhold what makes her different is a blessing and a curse because Bich is still not confident enough at that point to believe wholeheartedly in where she comes from.
Around other Vietnamese children, Bich feels alienated, as her parents won’t let her change her name or buy her the clothes and foods she wants. She feels too Vietnamese for the other Vietnamese kids but is also not fully literate in Vietnamese, so her ability to communicate is stunted. This becomes important when she meets her maternal grandmother, who doesn’t speak English. Bich cannot develop a full relationship with some members of her family because of language and cultural barriers. This complicates her identity and her understanding of what makes people close to one another.
The Role of American Food in Bich’s Identity
Bich uses food as a tool for identity-building. It is her most profound connection to the cultures she is part of, keeping her tied to her Vietnamese roots while allowing her to grow into her identity as an American.
The first food Bich mentions is a shiny can of Pringles; her attachment to American snacks is an explicit representation of her desire to be accepted by American society. Each new food she discovers in the houses of her friends or on television opens up a broader world for her, and she is convinced that in American food there lies an answer to her problem of assimilation: “I wanted to savor new food, different food, white food. I was convinced I was falling far behind on becoming American” (52). At school, Bich is fascinated by her peers’ lunches and is jealous of the way their mothers carefully package each lunch. Even when she has access to American dessert snacks, it is not enough, as “all the Hostess cupcakes in Grand Rapids couldn’t measure up with what Holly had” (79).
Many of the critical places from Bich’s childhood are culinary institutions. All of her family enjoys fast food, except for Noi, who often represents a Vietnamese sensibility. The family often goes out to eat at various locales in Grand Rapids. As Bich tries more and more food, especially at the all-you-can-eat-buffet, she realizes that it doesn’t live up to the expectations she had. This happens many times over. The chocolate cookies that Jennifer’s mom makes come from a box; Loan’s family eats a frozen pizza for dinner because it’s cheap; Ponderosa’s steak just doesn’t live up to Noi’s spiced beef.
Though Bich’s identity is partially built on her exposure to and love of American food, ultimately it is the failures of those foods that develop her character. When Bich goes on strike against the food Rosa makes, the children get to eat Noodle Roni and Kraft macaroni, but they are not interested because of the tension in the house. When her fantasy is made real, it never lives up to what she imagines. This translates into an analogy regarding Bich’s relationship with American culture. She aspires to be accepted as an American, but because she is so concerned with what she does not have, she spends her entire childhood dissatisfied. It is not until the end of the book that Bich comes to terms with this dissatisfaction.
Motherhood and Its Different Forms
Bich’s birth mother’s absence is acutely present in her memoir, and the theme of motherhood runs through the book, exploring the different ways in which adult women affect Bich’s childhood. Bich isn’t aware of why her mother was left behind in Vietnam, and this lack of explanation compounds the confusion she feels. When Holly asks her where her mother is, Bich tells her that her mother stayed in Vietnam because she prefers it there, not admitting “that [she] had never met her, that [she] didn’t know her name or what she looked like” (88).
Bich has an idealized version of motherhood, one gleaned from watching television commercials and her friends’ mothers. When she takes a cake-making class, she becomes convinced that the talent of frosting cakes “lay only in the hands of white mothers in aprons” (125). Her warped sense of what a mother should look like distances Bich from the maternal figures in her life. She sees Rosa as stifling, especially in her refusal to assimilate to Grand Rapids culture, and does not come to appreciate her as the mother she was until the end of the book. Often her stories about Rosa relate to Rosa’s failure to stand in as a mother figure, such as when Bich wants to ask “Isn’t it a mother’s job to teach lessons on good manners? How am I supposed to be a decent girl unless my mother shows me?” (120). Bich resents Rosa for not teaching her how to assimilate. In the same way, Noi often represents Vietnamese culture to Bich, so even though she almost always affectionately refers to Noi, she becomes frustrated when Noi does things that are non-normative for their neighborhood (like picking toadstools). In the end of the book, when Bich eventually reunites with her birth mother, it is underwhelming. Bich realizes that there is too much distance between them to make up for, and has to come to terms with the people in her life who stood in as her mother because she did not technically have one.
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