Viet writer’s memoir selected “Great Michigan Read”

A book by a Viet author and professor at the Bolsavik’s alma mater, about growing up Vietnamese in a Midwestern town, has been selected “Great American Read” by the Michigan Humanities Council, reports the Detroit News here.

This is not the first honor for Bich Minh Nguyen, 34, a native of Vietnam who grew up in Grand Rapids. Her book “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” has won a number of other prestigious awards including PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center and Best Book of 2007 by the Chicago Tribune.

Being named “Great American Read,” however, has been compared by the Michigan NPR affiliate Michigan Radio here to being chosen by a giant state-wide book club, where everybody in the state reads the same book. It is a definite boost to sales, at least in Michigan.

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is ostensibly a memoir. Its chapters are more like a series of essays that can be read separately. The author was barely 8 months old when her father and his mother (the author’s grandmother) took her, her sister, and several uncles on a ship and escaped the communist invasion to arrive at Guam, then to a refugee camp at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, and finally to Grand Rapids. The family would later enlarge to include the author’s stepmother and her little half brother.

“We arrived in Grand Rapids with five dollars and a knapsack of clothes. Mr. Heidenga, our sponsor, set us up with a rental house, some groceries — boxed rice, egg noodles, cans of green beans — and gave us dresses his daughters had outgrown.” Thus began the first essay and the book.

Just as the title indicates and the first essay started, images of food fill the book. All chapters have food as their titles. “School lunch,” “Toll House Cookies,” “American Meat,” “Down with Grapes,” “Holiday Tamales,” etc. The references to tamales and the grape boycott reflect the fact that the author’s stepmother Rosa is Latina.

Bich Minh Nguyen is now splitting her time between Chicago and West Lafayette, Indiana, where she is a professor at Purdue University. Bich Minh Nguyen earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Michigan and currently teaches creative nonfiction, fiction, and Asian American Literature.