Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Conversation with Bich Minh Nguyen and Peter Ho Davies

Join the conversation! Professor Peter Ho Davies will lead a discussion in the Hatcher Library Gallery with author Bich Minh Nguyen, who will join him live via Webcast from West Lafayette, Indiana.

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a memoir chronicling author Nguyen’s migration from Vietnam in 1975 and her coming of age in Grand Rapids in the 1980s. Along the way, she struggles to construct her own cultural identity from a menagerie of uniquely American influences. The book is the Michigan Humanities Council's Great Michigan Read selection for 2009-2010. Books will be available for purchase at the event, courtesy of Nicola's Books.

Bich Minh Nguyen's family fled Vietnam the night before Saigon fell in 1975. Nguyen’s memoir-in-essays, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, was published by Viking Penguin in 2007. It received the PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center and was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2007, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, an Asian American Literature Award finalist, and a BookSense pick. Nguyen's work has also appeared in publications such as Gourmet magazine; Jane magazine; Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing up in America; and Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and currently teaches creative nonfiction, fiction, and Asian American Literature at Purdue University.

Peter Ho Davies was born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents. Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl (2007) and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000). His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Independent, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, among others. He is on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

The Author’s Forum is a collaboration between the U-M Institute for the Humanities, the University Library, the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, and the Ann Arbor Book Festival. Additional sponsorship for the author discussion is provided by U-M’s MFA Writing Program, Program in American Culture, Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program, and Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

See also the Michigan Humanities Council's traveling exhibit Their Journey: Vietnamese in Michigan in the Hatcher Library Gallery Feb 1-24.