Reading Respose for “Stealing BUDDHA’s Dinner”

 

“ In just a few minutes, in half a night, our lives changed. Our identities changed. We were Vietnamese, we were refugees, we were Americans. (251)”. Needless to say, the cultural identity is the one of the most important theme of this novel. The protagonist is a girl, who migrated from Vietnam to America. She spends her childhood, which is one of the most sensitive age, thinking about her own identity. Her character, social life, religious policy has been influenced by the fact that she is an Vietnamese and different from other friends. She develops her identity through interacting with sisters who has different characters, looks and her strict mother, her grandmother, who has a characteristic spiritual life style which is based on Buddhism, and various books. However, the most interesting is the expressions of “food”. This novel is written by Bich’s first person view and the author gives very derailed explain her feelings about various foods or impressive experiences of diets so when we talk about this story, we cannot help focusing on “foods”. The description of foods plays the role of the basement of her identity as Vietnamese, symbolized image of adored American foods, or the shelter in order to escape from her complexed emotion, those are lack of confidence and an inferiority to White culture. Needless to say, foods are closely related to their cultural lives. People cannot live without having foods and there are a worlds of difference between each region. Therefore, eating habits can represent their culture explicitly. It is said that the all of characters in Bich’s favorite books enjoy eating so we can say that Bich has a special enthusiasm toward eating. And now, this essay will seek her inner feelings through focusing on the fact “foods”.

Her childhood was filled with struggles and problems. She always felt stressed by the fact that she was different from her white friends. However, foods allowed her to forget about it even though it was temporally. Her memories about foods, cooking and eating are so vivid that we can easily imagine how enthusiastic she was thinking about eating. When she foresees that day’s dinner, or imagine cuisines in her favorite books, she was freed from daily distresses and enjoying her true identity that she likes eating very much. In short, foods was her important “shelter”.

She speaks English, and lives in the American society, that is, she lives as almost Americans. For her, the Vietnamese cuisine played the important role as a symbol of her home culture. No matter how she lived as American, she eats the pho or sopa which are cooked by her grandmother. At some time, she was suffered from this situation and thought about differences from her white friend. But at the other time the Vietnamese cuisine definitely relieved her feelings. For example, when she went to Holly’s house and had a dinner, she could not be relaxed. She had to eat strange foods in strange manners, and atmosphere. In this dinner she missed her home dishes and when she got to home she felt relieved. Absolutely, her regional cuisine was the Vietnamese style.

On the other hand, she was longing for the “real” life and it was remarkably represented by her thirst for American foods.  She could not help thinking that “real” girls eat not pho but McDonald’s or beefsteaks. A couples of years later, this dream came true by Ponderosa. But instead Ponderosa told her American food is not better than Vietnamese food.

Thus, foods were centered in her life. They were her important spiritual ground, and the representative of her while complex, and the most significantly, the symbol of her culture. Through depicting her way of eating, this novel successfully describes one girl’s sensitive, complex background.