Read Online Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen - Free Book Online Page B

liking her food— cha gio and pickled vegetables still held an iron grip on my heart—but now I knew what real people ate. And in my mind I used that term: real people. Real people did not eat cha gio. Real people ate hamburgers and casseroles and brownies. And I wanted to be a real person, or at least make others believe that I was one.
    The closest Noi came to cooking American food was making french fries her way, wedge-cut, served with vinegar and lettuce, and thin steaks pan-fried with onion and garlic. These, along with a bowl of my favorite mi soup—shrimp-flavor Kung-Fu ramen— made lunches and dinners to dream about. Still, I knew that no one at school had homemade french fries, or ramen. No one at school knew how I really ate. They didn’t know how much time I spent thinking of dinner, of stolen popsicles, of ways for a Whopper to rise up and beat, once and for all, the Big Mac.
    For I realized that the other kids scorned Burger King. McDonald’s was the cool thing, and at recess girls clapped hands with each other and sang, Hamburger, filet-o-fish, cheeseburger, french fries, icy Coke, thick shakes, sundaes, and apple pies. They even had birthday parties in the McDonald’s playroom, where each girl got her own Happy Meal with a Strawberry Shortcake figurine. The Whopper had a long way to go to beat the Big Mac. In the gaze of my classmates I understood the satisfaction of symmetrical yellow arches. Even the hamburgers were tidier, more self-contained; no one at McDonald’s spilled onion and ketchup with each bite. The very word McDonald’s rolled more easily off the tongue—a sturdy lilting name, nothing there to make fun of, against the guttural, back-of-the-throat emphasis of Bur ger. Once in a while Chu Cuong and Chu Dai alleviated my fast food sorrow by taking my siblings and me to McDonald’s. Despite my father and Burger King’s campaign, Chu Cuong had developed a fondness for the Big Mac, and he always ordered dessert: apple or cherry pies, deep-fried, gorgeously oblong and brown and burning hot as they slid out of their thin cardboard sleeves.
    Chu Cuong and Chu Dai were also the ones who drank extravagant amounts of Sprite, shunning the two-liters of RC and Squirt we usually had in the house. They let us kids keep the cans for the deposits—ten cents in Michigan, which added up fast for candy purchases. Chu Cuong would toss his empty pop cans into the backseat of his blue Thunderbird and wait until they piled up, a shimmering mosaic of silver and green. Then after we collected them in trash bags he’d ferry us to Meijer’s bottle return center. Carrying the sacks across the parking lot, he was like a vision of a Vietnamese Santa.
    Next door, the Vander Wals’ oldest daughter, Jennifer, was almost my age. She was blond with matching socks and unscuffed shoes. When summer emerged we found ourselves face to face across the strip of grass that separated our driveways, just bored enough with our siblings to become friends with each other.
    Jennifer introduced me to the concept of homemade, which I only associated with American food, when she gave me half of a cookie her mother had baked. Nestlé’s Toll House, she called it, and I thought, You name your cookies? But it was like no cookie I had ever had. It was crumbly and rich, the chocolate chips bearing no resemblance to the pinpoints found in Chips Ahoy. In our house, cookies came from Keebler, Nabisco, or, more frequently, the generic company whose label shouted “COOKIES” in stark black letters. Once in a while, at my father’s request, Rosa brought home Voortman windmill cookies, or the cream-filled pink and yellow wafers that were as dull to me as graham crackers.
    The concept of homemade cookies struck me as suspect and impossible. “What do you mean, your mom made them?” I demanded.
    Jennifer tried to explain the flour and sugar and Crisco, her mother’s big