The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze the book "Stealing Buddha's Dinner" by Bich Minh Nguyen. Specifically it will discuss what the reader learned about Vietnamese culture by reading the book. This book is a very enlightening glimpse into Vietnamese culture by a young woman who immigrated to America in 1975 from Vietnam with her family, and desperately wanted to fit in to American society. In her attempts to become westernized, she paints vivid portraits of the culture she left behind and now wants to give up.
             The author has a very eloquent way of telling her story and weaving in details of Vietnamese culture, even though she tried so hard to resist its influence in her life. For example, she notes that she does not celebrate a birthday, because her father could not remember the family's birthdays when they first immigrated to America, and so, the date of birth on all her official documents is wrong. She writes, "Perhaps because his mind was distracted, or perhaps because in Vietnam death is remembered more than birthdays, my father forgot our birthdays when he had to write them down at the refugee camp in Guam" (Nguyen, 2007, pg. 23). Thus, something that seems so important in American culture – the birthday – is not an event in Vietnam, instead it is when a person dies that is remembered, and that seems like an important element of the culture. It shows the difference between the two cultures as well. Here we celebrate as we grow older, and in Vietnam, they remember when people die, hopefully after a good and rewarding life. Later in the book she notes, "My father had always said that their spirits were with us and it seemed a comfort. Not a ghost, but something like memory, a respect for the past" (Nguyen, 2007, pg. 188). Thus, there is a respect and honor for the dead in Vietnamese culture that seems to be more mourning and sadness in our country.
             It is also interesting to see how the ...