A Vietnamese immigrant: stranger in a strange land

IN 1975, Saigon and Grand Rapids, Mich., were places as alien to each other as the moon and the sun. Bich (pronounced “Bit”) Minh Nguyen was 8 months old when her father fled South Vietnam during the fall of the capital with her and her older sister, leaving her mother behind in the chaos. They joined tens of thousands of refugees who were making the long ocean voyage to America.

As part of a federal resettlement program, their small family, which included two uncles and her grandmother Noi, went to Grand Rapids. The city, which Nguyen describes as conservative, white, predominantly Dutch and mostly Christian, became their new home long “before multiculturalism” and “before being ethnic was cool,” as she observes wryly in “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.”

In this deftly crafted memoir, which mixes humor and commonplace daily observations, Nguyen describes what it was like for her and other Southeast Asian refugees who found themselves in the Midwest of the 1980s. Far from being a memoir of what could be described as fitting into the kitschy ethnic-lit genre, her story is at once personal and broad, about one Vietnamese refugee navigating U.S. culture as well as an exploration of identity. An assistant professor of creative writing at Purdue University, she pays equal attention to the rhythm and poignancy of language to build her story as she does the circumstances into which she was born.

Nguyen, of course, looks different from most of the kids at school, and she is teased about her name. While she is timid and bookish, with pop-bottle eyeglasses, her sister is outgoing and pretty. When Nguyen starts grade school, her father remarries, a Mexican American named Rosa, who brings along a daughter whose father was white. Rosa also introduces Nguyen and her sister to her relatives, showing them another immigrant family navigating white American Midwest culture.

What Nguyen knows about Vietnam is what she’s been told by relatives, and especially what she sees in the stoic presence of her grandmother, Noi. It is Noi who does the cooking, Noi who tends the little Buddha statue in the house, leaving food as an offering to dead ancestors. It is Noi who is Nguyen’s real anchor to their heritage, more so than her father, who is either working at a pillow factory or out playing cards and drinking with other Vietnamese men who have settled in the area. Nguyen shows how Noi and Nguyen’s father never fully acclimate to the U.S., instead using the refugee community as a buffer between themselves and their new world.

The statue is an ever-present figure in the book, and a reminder of their far-away home. Noi places fruit at the foot of the statue then waits until an appropriate interval passes before slicing the pears, apples or oranges up for Nguyen and her sister. Nguyen writes of sneaking Buddha’s fruit, an act of secret pleasure captured by the book’s title. Nguyen uses food to weave her intricate stories on the differences between the culture of her birth and that in Grand Rapids. Although she loves her grandmother’s deep fried shrimp chips, steaming bowls of pho soup, and fish sauce, part of her wants to reject this for the food the neighbor kids get from their Betty Crocker-baking mothers. She fears being seen with the wrong things in her lunch box and rebels, demanding “real food,” which to her meant anything but Vietnamese food.

One of the most striking chapters in the book describes Nguyen’s discovery that her mother, left behind in the chaos in Saigon decades before, is alive and living in Pennsylvania. A college student at the time, Nguyen doesn’t want this reminder of her family’s past to surface and she avoids meeting her mother as long as possible. Her curiosity, however, wins out. Their brief reunion and the author’s first visit to Vietnam help the reader see through Nguyen’s eyes the dilemmas of identity she experiences and how she deals with growing up in one culture with constant reminders of another.

Readers will be struck by pop culture reminders of the late 1970s and 1980s she brings to the page. From the “real food” she yearned for, to the music, the games, the ever-present sounds of the summer ice cream van nearing the neighborhood, to how it was going to school at the time, or being the last real generation of kids who played mainly outside -- before computer games, play dates and the Internet took hold.

Nguyen comes as close as possible to explaining the challenges facing refugee kids who were trying to build a new life in America. Her memoir joins a rich and growing body of literature -- including the memoirs “First They Killed My Father” and “Lucky Child” by Cambodian American writer Loung Ung and the novels “The Gangster We Are All Looking For” by Le Thi Diem Thuy and “The Book of Salt” by Monique Truong, both Vietnamese Americans -- from refugees whose lives have been shaped by the Vietnam War and the regional conflicts that ensued.

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Michael Standaert is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Adventures of the Pisco Kid.”