#StealingBuddha'sDinner

[birdwholanded]

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the Buddhist Scriptures review

    Both are interesting books. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Nguyen, the text is divided into chapters based on foods like Pringles, Forbidden Fruit, Dairy Cone, Fast Food Asian, Toll House Cookies, School Lunch, American Meat, Green Sticky Rice Cakes, Down With Grapes, Bread and Honey, Salt Pork, Holiday Tamales,Stealing Buddah’s Dinner, Ponderosa, Mooncakes, Cha Gio. They are vignettes. Stealing Buddah’s Dinner is a memoir and coming of age story. It relates life in Vietnam to life in America in the way that she ventured from Vietnam to start a new life in America. I enjoyed the whole book because of the difference of cultures and culture shock.  It was July 1975 when people were fleeing Vietnam on boats and they were chasing cars to try to escape from the war taking place. People in Saigon knew that the war had been lost and that the children were going to be put into reeducation camps. She was worried that some of her relatives would not get to come to America.  Bich Minh Nguyen immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in the 1970’s fleeing the Vietnam War taking place at the time. She and her father moved to Grand Rapids to start an American life. Her father got a job at the North American Feather. She discusses eating at Dairy Cone, McDonalds, Burger King, having Chef Boyardee meals, vanilla wafers, and typical American food. She talks about having to assimilate in a new way of life and noticing the differences between what she had known to what she has to learn now. Her father does not know anything about how to adapt with learning American customs and the way of life. He has to learn how to navigate through an entirely different world. She and her friends discuss changing their names to American names to fit into the American society better and so people could pronounce them instead of butchering their Vietnamese names. She questions her identity as an Asian American because she idealizes herself to be blonde haired and white like everyone else she sees. She feels like she doesn’t fit in after she first moves to Grand Rapids. She doesn’t know how to identify herself and feels like an outsider. Buddhism plays a role in her upbringing because there was a Buddha statue in her home in Grand Rapids and her grandmother would meditate by it. Her father and grandmother participated in the events at the Buddhist temple and they contributed a lot to rebuilding it and getting new pews for it and creating its new image and identity.       Buddhism is a religion where one seeks Enlightenment and the ways of reaching it. It talks about the various hells one can go to, it discusses if one will get reincarnated as a different animal in the next life. My favorite sections of the Buddhist Scriptures are The Realms of Rebirth, Karma Tales,The Three Jewels, Proving the Buddah, The Ascetic Ideal, The Direct Path to Enlightenment, and Wisdom and Compassion. The three jewels of Buddhism are divided into Buddha, Sangha and Dharma. The Buddha is the fully enlightened one, the Dharma are the teachings expounded by the Buddha and the sangha is the monastic order of Buddhism that practices Dharmas. It then ventures out into the sections Upaya, Shila and Dhyana. Dharma is the ultimate reality. Upaya is defined as being a term used to refer to an aspect of guidance along the Buddhist paths to liberation where a conscious voluntary action is driven by incomplete reasoning about its direction. Shila are Buddhist ethics. Dhyana is the training of the mind commonly translated as meditation to withdraw the mind from automatic responses to sense impressions and leading to a state of perfect awareness. My favorite section of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner was the conclusion because I like how Nguyen went to Vietnam again when she was in graduate school to see her grandmother. She got to partake of Vietnamese food like Cha Gio, which is a spring roll. It is interesting that she gets to appreciate her heritage in her young adulthood. She reconnected with who she really is and where she came from.     It talks about Buddhism. Buddhism deals with the Buddah, reincarnation, nirvana, enlightenment, The Noble Path, etc.  It refers to it in the way that it discusses reincarnation, and where people go when they pass away, if they get to come back again. In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Nguyen went to a Catholic school where she had to pray to God, but she did not follow Catholicism. She told the instructor that her household was buddhist and she gave her a letter from her family saying that she could not pray to God anymore. Nguyen was thinking about the idea of reincarnation and if she would have a better next life. She contemplates heaven, hell and nirvana. 1980’s music is referenced in this book, classic or typical American food is talked about. She was delighted to eat out at McDonalds and Burger King.     I relate to this memoir because growing up, my family and I did the opposite of what she did. She appreciated all things American and comfort food because she did not identify with her Vietnamese heritage, while my parents, my brother and I would specifically seek out Asian cuisine like Indian, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. I was introduced to them when I was nine because there were Vietnamese restaurants by my dad’s work and on the weekends or Friday nights after work, we would meet my dad there sometimes and eat a buhn or papaya salad. My family frequented the Vietnamese restaurant so often that we became friends with the owners. It was a mom and pop type of restaurant with limited seating. It was a small restaurant. My dad got to order special things that weren’t even on the menu. On the wall of the restaurant, they had a whiteboard with daily specials and one of the specials was chickens’ feet salad. I never ordered it but I kind of wanted to see how it would taste. On the wall of the restaurant, the owners would play peaceful scenes from Vietnam on the television and it was interesting for me as a child and teenager to see the different way of life and culture in Vietnam. We are the opposites of her because we are a Caucasian family in America willingly seeking out Asian cuisines, while she comes from an Asian background and wants to eat typical American food. My family does not have any ties to Vietnam but I would like to visit it one day.     She ties her American side to her Vietnamese side and compares the life that her father sacrificed by fleeing Vietnam to coming to Grand Rapids and starting over.     In The Buddhist Scriptures in the chapter of Wisdom and Compassion, I highlighted the text, “Instead, all who traverse the path to buddhahood must develop extraordinary compassion and extraordinary wisdom, yet there is an apparent contradiction between these two. Compassion leads to a dedication to provide assistance to other persons yet wisdom brings the understanding that ultimately there are no persons because there is no self.” I do not understand why the text says that there are no persons because there is no self. I maybe believe that is said because when one loses his sense of self by helping others out all of the time, he doesn’t recognize that he is himself any more because he is not dedicated to his self interests but interested in helping out others. That makes sense when the quote states, “Compassion leads to a dedication to provide assistance to other persons.” One becomes selfless in the pursuit of being compassionate. I also highlighted the quote, “ In his first sermon, the Buddha had described a middle path between the extremes of self-indulgence and asceticism, both of which he had experienced prior to his enlightenment. Here and in other Mahayana sutras, especially those of the ‘Perfection of Wisdom’ genre, the notion of the middle way between extremes is given a more philosophical sense, as an inexpressible reality between the extremes of permanence and impermanence, self and no-self...but emptiness is not an ultimate reality, eternal and autonomous.” (351) She incorporates her Vietnamese roots and culture to the American side to compare the two different ways of life and the differences between the cultures.     The Buddhist scriptures tell different parables and stories about the Buddha and his journey to enlightenment and nirvana. It talks about the different hells and heavens one goes to and it talks about people possibly being reincarnated into different animal forms. It talks about bodies being turned into crows. The Budhist scriptures relate your deeds on the earth to what one will reap in the afterlife.     I like Buddhism as a belief and religious system because of its discussion about karma and how things are interconnected with people’s fates and livelihoods. It centers people to a common good. It talks about inner peace and how one can attain it. Buddhism talks about being peaceful and calm within oneself, growing through change as well. It talks about coming to terms with life events and making peace with them.       The title of ‘Stealing Buddha’s Dinner’ is interesting to me because it ties her religious belief, which is Buddhism, to her heritage, which is Vietnamese to the Vietnamese cuisine. American food is cheap and processed like Hostess’ Twinkies, frozen Kid Cuisine meals, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, etc. It is cheap to produce and purchase, especially American fast food like McDonalds and Burger King.