As a Vietnamese girl in Grand Rapids,
she stood apart. Baby Ruths helped her fit in.
By S.L. Wisenberg From the April 2007 Issue
Wooded Bliss A 1920s cabin gets a modern renovation
An Artist Apart Sent alone to Indiana, a Japanese boy grew into a genius sculptor
Dune Warriors Gasping runners traverse the Indiana Dunes, and some think they’re crazy. Their response? “Zoy!”
The New VIPs* *(Very Incredible Party Spaces)
Lake Magazine covers the hottest information on the Lake Michigan area.
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Just as her memoir of food and acculturation, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, was about to hit the bookstores earlier this year, author Bich Minh Nguyen was struck hard by her first case of food poisoning. The culprit was crab from a restaurant in Key West, Fla., where Nguyen was teaching a writing workshop. For the first time, she said, food became double edged. “It seemed dangerous,” she says. “It became fraught.”
It was a blip in an otherwise unblemished love affair with food – a relationship well-chronicled in Nguyen’s book, one of a very few Vietnamese-American memoirs and a thoughtful look at growing up different in Grand Rapids, Mich., long before multiculturalism became a buzzword.
First, there was the crunch and chew of salty and sugary junk food that Nguyen hoped would make her as American as the “sea of blonds” that filled Grand Rapids. Factory-made food was America. The kids who called her “bitch” (though her name is pronounced “bit”) and yelled “chop suey” and tried to get her to accept Jesus were America. It was difficult to get along with them, easier to eat what they ate.
“I wanted what the other kids had,” she writes of living in the midst of the Dutch Reformed in western Michigan. “I had memorized the menu at Dairy Cone, the sugary options in the cereal aisle at Meijer’s, and every inch of the candy display at Gas City: the rows of gum, the rows with chocolate, the rows without chocolate.” What follows is a paragraph-long list of treats, from “spartan packs of Juicy Fruit” to Laffy Taffy and Baby Ruth bars. “I dreamed of taking it all, plus the freezer full of popsicles and nutty, chocolate-coated ice cream drumsticks. I dreamed of Little Debbie, Dolly Madison, Swiss Miss, all the bakeries presided over by prim and proper girls.”
You might expect Nguyen, now 32 and an assistant professor of English at Purdue, to be as round as the Buddha. Instead, she’s slender. “Genetic disposition,” she explains. Despite a childhood of longing to eat America and thus be transformed, she has managed to remain sane around food, now seeking quality and freshness. Most recently, she’s fallen for the food at Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate in Empire, Mich., and Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago.
Ngyuen was born in Saigon in 1974, the year before the Vietnam War ended. On April 29, 1975, the day the city fell, her father and uncle scooped up baby Bich, her sister Anh, and grandmother Noi onto their prized motorbikes and raced to the harbor. Amid panicking hordes, they managed to slip through a barrier, her father staring down an M-16 wielding soldier. The Nguyens made their way to a ship, eventually arriving in a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Ark. The family was given a choice of places to resettle: California, Wyoming or Michigan. A friend of Nguyen’s grandmother had a son who’d studied at the University of Michigan, so that guided their choice. They moved into a ramshackle house in Grand Rapids, wearing donated clothes and learning English from a Salvation Army TV. Her father worked shifts in a feather factory. Her grandmother boiled rice daily, and made pho and summer rolls and shrimp chips and egg pancakes. Another uncle and a friend completed the crowded household.
Every few days Noi would place offerings of plums, pears, apples, or peaches on an altar to Buddha and the family ancestors. After a few days passed, she would divide up the fruit for Bich and Anh to share. “The fruit seemed dearer to us than candy,” she writes, “and I believed that the transformation from globe to glistening slices involved some kind of magic. It would be years before either my sister or I ever bit into a whole apple.” (One day she dared to steal the ancestors’ dinner – and nothing happened.)
Slowly, the girls became Americanized. When they were still young, their father married Rosa, a Latina woman who taught adult education. (They didn’t remember their mother, and no one would talk about her and why she was still in Saigon.) Nguyen in her thick eyeglasses found solace in books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. She didn’t read a book by an Asian-American author until she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. It was Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and it was a revelation.
In Ann Arbor, while studying for her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry, she met Porter Shreve – who is now a novelist, and her husband. They live in a 1920s shingled house in West Lafayette, Ind., with high ceilings, plaster walls, and an office for each. In the summer of 2006, the couple bought a condo in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, where they spend long weekends and summers. Where does she feel at home? “I’ve thought about it over the years,” she answered. “I never felt comfortable anywhere except in those two houses I have right now.” She added, “It’s partly due to feeling comfortable with myself.”
The French author Marcel Proust found that when he soaked a madeleine in a cup of tea, the memories flooded in. To write her book, Nyugen reached for that familiar red cylinder. “It sounds crazy to have a Proustian moment about Pringles,” she said. “I don’t particularly like the flavors because it tastes chemical to me now.” But the chips “helped bring me back to that time and place. I don’t long for them anymore. They don’t have the metaphorical power that they once seemed to have.”
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