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

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 acknowledgments of his own well-received memoir Catfish and Mandala (1999) asks, “Where do our stories end and others’ begin?” (343) and thanks his family for allowing him to include “our stories” in his memoir. Here we see collaborative memory as a potential site for communal formation, a technique to write and bind identity under the sign of common experience rather than essential racial, ethnic and/or national difference. For refugees driven off a unified geographic plain, dispersed throughout the world, this could certainly be a productive and tempting move. Why does Nguyen feel the need to distance herself, or her memoir, from being a document of collaborative experience? What would be the harm in turning her family into collaborators? In short, what is the underlying anxiety that compels her to take the time to include this “Author’s Note” in order to make this clear?

The culinary encounter often is the material means where these anxieties are produced, and the contradictions play out in the construction of race and ethnicity. Since their arrival on US soil, Vietnamese Americans have been compelled to produce a causal explanation for their bodies’ existence in this space, and this demand includes accounting for their families. Hence, with the 1.5 generation making enough cultural and capital gains to finally shake off the image of the refugee, an exciting new generation of artists is searching for forms that pay homage to earlier generations without being defined solely through them.¹ The additional challenge they face, however, is an entrenched readership that demands a certain narrative, having developed an acquired taste in Vietnamese American cultural production. Culinary encounters are defining events where bodily performances change and refigure the image of Vietnamese Americans. While the exceptional focus on the Vietnamese American body is in many ways a burden, this overdetermined attention also provides an opportunity for transformation—as long as one is careful to choose the right collaborators.

A recent Vietnamese American figure in popular culture who faced the quandary of collaboration was Hung Huynh, winner of Bravo TV’s hit television show Top Chef in the third season. Martin Manalansan contends, “Today cooking shows, cookbooks, and restaurants have become...