Themes Of Stealing Buddha's Dinner

In the memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen, we can see the cultural struggles refugee children have growing up in America. Nguyen's life starts off fleeing to Michigan with her family from the Vietnamese war in 1975 when she was just eight months old. Throughout the novel, Nguyen's family lives an average life that consists of her grandmother Noi, her older sister Anh, uncles and a father that works endlessly for a small place to shelter in. Until her father meets Rosa, a Mexican American single mother, life gets harder for Nguyen when she has to learn to balance each culture to survive. Overall, Nguyen was born with a love for food, however, she see’s it as a sign of social status and because of this, she is influenced to neglect her Vietnamese identity and uses books to escape her reality.Thus, causing her to feel alone by alienating herself and illustrating a theme around loneliness
In the fourth chapter, one of Nguyen's best friends " Jennifer, introduced [her] to the concept of homemade, which [she] only associated with American food"(pg. 57). Nguyen then believed the following, “Now I knew what real people ate… Real people did not eat cha gio. Real …show more content…
Nguyen was concerned and points out, “I would be the odd one out, the one anxious to find a seat in the cafeteria, the one having to court all over the blue-eyed girls who held the key to popularity (pg, 123)”. Then Rosa, being Mexican American, inevitably influenced Spanish terms on Nguyen. Outside of the home, she would condemn, “ I tried to keep these phrases under wraps from my friends. They thought I was different enough with the whole Vietnamese thing adding Mexican American to the mix just put me over the edge” (pg 167) Rosa's place was just another insecurity that Nguyen already felt throughout the school in terms of physical and linguistic