As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America capture her imagination.
In "Stealing Buddha's Dinner," the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen's struggle to become a "real" American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.

Winner of an American Book Award Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Library Journal A novel about two Vietnamese-American sisters, longtime rivals, growing closer as they "grapplewith their upbringing, their present circumstances and their shortcomings" (Kirkus Reviews) Called "A writer to watch, a tremendous talent" by the Chicago Tribune, Bich Minh Nguyen makes her fiction debut with the deeply moving and entertaining story of two Vietnamese sisters. Aside from their petite stature, Van and Linny Luong couldn't be more different. Diligent, unassuming Van works as an immigration lawyer in the Michigan suburbs where she resides with her handsome, Chinese-American lawyer husband. Beautiful, fashionable Linny lives in Chicago and has drifted into an affair with a married man. When Van's picture-perfect marriage collapses and Linny finds herself grappling to escape her dead-end life, the long-estranged sisters are unable to confide in one another- until their eccentric inventor father calls them back home to the Vietnamese American community they fled long ago.

"A powerful and wholly original American saga." --"San Francisco Chronicle"
Bich Minh Nguyen's previous books--the acclaimed memoir "Stealing Buddha's Dinner "and the American Book Award-winning novel "Short Girls"--established her talents as a writer of keen cultural observation. In "Pioneer Girl," Nguyen entwines the Asian American experience with the escapist pleasures of literature, in a dazzling mystery about the origins of Laura Ingalls Wilder's classic "Little House on the Prairie."
Lee Lien has long dodged her Vietnamese family's rigid expectations by immersing herself in books. But now, jobless with a PhD in literature, she is back at home, working in her family's restaurant under her mother's hypercritical gaze--until an heirloom from their past sends Lee on a search for clues that may lead back to Wilder herself, transforming strangers' lives as well as her own.