An Unpalatable Dish: Performing the Bildungsroman in Bich Minh Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2007), is a Bildungsroman in which Bich, a Vietnamese refugee child, attempts to consume her way into assimilation. The Bildungsroman is a productive genre for linking immigration to assimilation; for refugee writers, the genre transforms their struggles with military and racial violence into stories of victimization and healing that are palatable to a largely white American audience. Using Nguyen’s memoir, a narrative driven by hunger for American junk food and integration, this essay links the language of nourishment to Nguyen’s performance of a Bildungsroman in order to articulate Nguyen’s resistance to the genre’s push for assimilation, as well as American discursive treatment of Vietnamese refugees as victims to be saved. In doing so, I argue that Nguyen’s performance of the Bildungsroman with an unsatisfying conclusion offers a model for the disruption of American assumptions about immigration, American inclusion, and the Vietnamese refugee experience.