Stealing Buddha's Dinner eAudiobook MP3

Beginning with her familys harrowing migration out of Saigon in 1975, Stealing Buddhas Dinner follows Bich Nguyen as she comes of age in the pre-PC-era Midwest.

Filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, Nguyens desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House cookies.

More exotic-seeming than her Buddhist grandmothers traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled delicacies of mainstream America become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to become a real American.

Stealing Buddhas Dinner is also a portrayal of a diverse family: Nguyens hardworking, hard-partying father; pretty sister; wise and nurturing grandmother; and Rosa, her Latina stepmother. And there is the mystery of Nguyens birth mother, unveiled movingly over the course of the book.

Nostalgic and candid, Stealing Buddhas Dinner is a unique vision of the immigrant experience and a lyrical ode to how identity is often shaped by the things we long for. Her typical and not-so-typical childhood experiences give her story a universal flavor. USA TodayBeautifully written...[Nguyen] is fearless in asserting the specificities of memories culled from early childhood and is, herself, an appealing character on the page...A writer to watch. Chicago TribunePerfectly pitched and prodigiously detailed. The Boston Globe