Stealing Buddha's Dinner

I like relating my own experiences with the pieces of literature I read. While I was reading this book I felt like I was a child again, watching the world around me with those innocent eyes that only a child can have, constantly wondering questions and trying to find an answer for them. The funny and clear way Bich remembers her childhood and count her attempt to fit into the American society and how that process of assimilation and Americanism is paved with American junk food makes this book an interesting and readable journey. She is a Vietnamese refugee who comes with her family to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a christian dutch society in  which Bich struggles to find her own identity and in which she doesn't belong to. I could see her world through her descriptive words and how she struggled with her sense of  identity in an extended family including her father, her buddhist grandmother, her sister, her missing mother replaced by a Mexican- american stepmother and her half American sister.

One of the memorable moments in the book for me was when Bich won first place in her school's spelling bee. Then, she tells she had forgotten her rain boots in class,  and after coming back to the school she overheard her teachers saying: “Can you believe it?....A foreigner winning our spelling bee!” After this, the story ends with bich contemplating over these words. The emotion of nostalgia I felt towards this passage moved me, I felt like a child again, being part of a very traditional Peruvian family living in a little town in Spain, trying to identify myself with any place and asking myself why I was and felt different compared to everyone else. I didn't know that someone felt the same way i felt about finding my own identity. Over time I have learn to accept myself the way I am, it is great to be different and lucky to be a bicultural individual. This is the message I also have taken from this book, that it is a waste of time wishing to be someone else rather than accepting yourself and being proud of your culture and knowledge.

The Reporter's Kitchen Reading Response

When I was reading this essay, something came to my mind, something that I had said to my friend when I was in Morocco: Foodies like good food but first they like traveling.  The reporter tells her memories, all of them related to cook and kitchen, from her first memories since she was a child and made her first dish and then tells the different dishes she learnt and made in different parts of the world.

Our memories and feelings as a whole make our own life and thanks to it we can identify a smell or flavour with a place in which we have been before or something that we have experimented previously. I was lucky to have a sort of feeling, I could define it as a flashback, while I was reading this chapter. While the author was telling her feelings when she was in Morocco in the little town of Meknes, reporting a story about the berber traditional wedding, she uses two adjectives to describe the place, wild and unpleasant that unfortunately reminded me the feeling I had when i was in Meknes. Then I started thinking that maybe our memories may be similar even identical.

But this not happened to me when I read the word tagine. That only word make me go back to that summer in Marrakech. In Jamaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakech was crowded of tourists with tired and angry faces complaining about the insistence of local people for just earn a couple of dirhams, some men dressed with traditional costumes wondering the square looking for someone who wanted to take a photo with them, snake charmers sitting in the ground, little monkeys in the streets used as an entertainment and fun. And I was there, excited and curious, in a little and hot restaurant crowded of local people, not tourists just ordering omelette with salad, waitinf for my first tagine. All those memories hit my mind when I just saw the word tagine. That smell of boiled potatos, tomatos and olives mixes with different spices was incredible, it was like tasting the moroccan culture in one dish. In this moment I realised that maybe others may have tried a tagine in Marrakech, but I am sure that my memories and my perception are different from theirs. The author of this essay just with her writing make me go back to that moment and I felt like traveling and visiting places that I have never been in.