http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A.../704130323/1037Everybody's been asking Bich Minh Nguyen about her favorite junk food lately, which is what happens when you elevate Pringles to poetry:
"The Pringles glowed by window light, their fine curvatures nearly translucent," she writes. "So delicate, breaking into salty shards on our tongues."
What must she think about Ding Dongs? Nutty Buddies? Kit Kats? Oh, the fudge-drenched drama that must ensue.
Nguyen's new book, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner," has a candy-laden cover that belies the sadness inside.
Don't dive into her life without some comfort food.
She felt isolated in new land
Nguyen, 32, writes about the isolation of growing up a Vietnamese girl among "the tall people" of Grand Rapids, a city so blond "I could swear I was dreaming in wheat."
More than anything, young Bich wanted to be a "real" American. To her, that meant forgoing the shrimp and vegetable spring rolls and green bean cakes her grandmother made and consuming "real" American food:
"At home, I kept opening the refrigerator and cupboards, wishing for American foods to magically appear. I wanted what the other kids had: Bundt cakes and casseroles, Cheetos and Doritos."
Her book is getting good buzz. The New York Times raved. National Public Radio featured it on "All Things Considered."
"People love the food in it," Nguyen says, sitting on the couch in the Ada home where she lived as a student at Forest Hills Northern High School.
"But for me, it wasn't just food. It was a way to become part of a world that I wanted to be part of."
Taunts added to her misery
It wasn't easy. She was Vietnamese with a Mexican-American stepmother and a name that brought cruel taunts on the playground. She wore glasses with chunky plastic frames from the eye doctor's clearance rack.
She felt as though she belonged nowhere. In her book, she calls the feeling "missingness."
Nguyen is now an assistant professor of English at Purdue University. She was in Grand Rapids last month on a book tour.
She has a writer husband, Porter Shreve. She has a New York agent.
But Nguyen spent her childhood feeling ugly, different and alone. It took her a while to climb out.
Her family arrived in Grand Rapids in 1975 with $5 and a knapsack of clothes, after fleeing Saigon the night before the city fell. She was 8 months old; her sister, Anh, was 2.
They were set up in a rental house by their sponsor from an area church. There were seven of them in a gray house -- her father, grandmother, two uncles, an uncle's friend, Bich and Anh. The voice she heard from Grand Rapids, she says, said, "Come on in. Now transform. And if you cannot, disappear." So she did -- into a life of junk food, 1980s TV and books.