The Contradictions in Culinary Collaboration: Vietnamese American Bodies in <i>Top Chef</i> and <i>Stealing Buddha’s Dinner</i>

Abstract

Near the end of Bich Minh Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2007), a memoir of a Vietnamese American girl growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the reader encounters a conspicuous two-page “Author’s Note.” In this section, found between the body of the text and the acknowledgments, Nguyen explains some of the decisions she made when writing the book—specifically, “owning up to my own memories rather than others’” (255). She continues: Although I did need to rely on stories from my father, uncles, and grandmother to depict our escape from Saigon, I generally tried to avoid turning my family into collaborators. . . . I do not mean to speak for all of my family, or all of Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom have had entirely different experiences with, and opinions on, assimilation, culture, and language. (255-56) This note, as brief and unobtrusive as it may be, is striking when one considers the dearth of Vietnamese American writing and scholarship, a field that is distinctly marginal even within Asian American Studies, never mind the humanities at large. With Michele Janette’s warning that Vietnam is in danger of slipping away from the American psyche through projects that systematically erase memories of violence, contradiction, and defeat (280), one might think that Nguyen, whose memoir traffics richly in the hardships Vietnamese refugees faced in America, would be more than happy to open up and submit her memoir as evidence of the trials that she, her family, and other Vietnamese American families have had to endure. Distinguishing her experience from others’ avoids producing a broadly conflated image of the Vietnamese American subject. Considering the paucity of Vietnamese diasporic representation, this is surely a concern. But still a question lingers: what is behind this reluctance to turn her family and other Vietnamese immigrants specifically into “collaborators”? For instance, Vietnamese American author Andrew X. Pham in the