49 pages • 1 hour read
Stealing Buddha's Dinner
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Holiday Tamales”
Bich’s family goes to visit Rosa’s hometown of Fruitport, Michigan. Rosa was accepted back into her family when Vinh was born, and so Bich has to become used to dozens more cousins, tias, and tios. Rosa’s parents, Juan and Maria, are from Texas. In the summers, they throw huge barbecues, “cooking slabs of meat on giant grills fashioned out of oil drums” (167). Bich always brings books on these trips and tries to keep a low profile. She resents her new family and how uncomfortable and alone they make her feel, and notes she must feel, at these parties, how Rosa feels at the Vietnamese parties.
They go back to Fruitport every Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, and Rosa’s mother makes tamales from scratch. There are mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, string beans, frijoles, arroz con pollo, pumpkin empanadas, and mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows. Bich only feels entertained during dinner, and Rosa takes offense to her resistance to Fruitport. Bich cannot explain to her that it isn’t dislike, it’s unfamiliarity. When they get home, everyone silently goes their way.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner”
In the fall of 1982, Bich and Anh attend Catholic School for four days. At lunch, the children are expected to take turns saying a prayer, but Rosa writes the girls a note saying they are Buddhist, not Catholic. Bich has her birthday during school and passes out Hershey’s kisses. Rosa takes them out of the Catholic school two days later, and Bich suspects it has something to do with her abandoning Catholicism. Bich finds out that Shirley, Rosa’s best friend, is Jewish. She becomes fascinated by religion, especially when she moves into Noi’s room, in order to get away from her sisters.
Noi and Bich would sleep with their heads facing the golden Buddha statue as a sign of respect. Bich thinks a lot about reincarnation and misunderstands it as a system in which if you’re a good person, then you get a better and better life. Rosa explains this to her and fails to mention nirvana or the negative parts of reincarnation, and nobody corrects her. Bich worries that her hateful feelings toward the people in her life will give her a worse life the next time around. Bich watches 2001: A Space Odyssey with her family and develops nightmares and insomnia. Noi revives her by serving fruit in her bedroom rather than the kitchen. Noi attends Buddhist temple and is one of the leaders of the makeshift community she is part of. Bich decides to practice at home and copies Noi when she meditates but has a hard time clearing her head.
The summer after third grade, Bich helps Jennifer practice songs for her Sunday school musical, singing from Agapaopolis. One day, Jennifer’s best friends from school join them, and Bich brags about having Michael Jackson’sThriller record. Rachel, one of the girls, tells her that the album goes against God, and Bich responds, “If there’s a God he can strike me down right now” (191). Later, Jennifer tells Bich that God will forgive her.
Bich often regards Buddha as a stand-in for God, praying to him regularly. When her prayers aren't answered, she decides it’s time to steal a plum from Buddha’s altar. She realizes as she does this that she has misunderstood: “Buddha never claimed to be a god. He could not be tested. He had no wrath. He granted no miracles or wishes. He asked me to prove nothing” (195). Bich thinks about her ancestors and that they are always watching her. She eats the plum sitting high up in a tree, overlooking her neighborhood.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Ponderosa”
When they live in the house on Florence Street, Bich’s family goes out to eat occasionally at Yen Ching or Chi Chi’s. Yen Ching is an Asian restaurant that has tables with lazy susans, where Noi feels comfortable with all the shrimp and noodle options. Chi Chi’s is a Mexican restaurant, and Rosa and Chrissy’s favorite.
In 1984, things shift, and Rosa and Bich’s father begin to fight. That summer, there are free Denny’s vouchers being passed out at the library, and they eat there so much Bich gets sick of the food. Rosa seems to be around an increasing amount, and their father less and less. Bich hoards money in the top drawer of Noi’s credenza, and one day finds the drawer empty. When Noi confronts Bich’s father about it, he flies into a rage, “which meant he’d lost all the money gambling” (202). He yells at Bich that he’s given her everything, and she takes it to heart, never mentioning the money again. In the future, she keeps money in between pages of her books.
Rosa tries to rein Bich’s father in with chores around the house; he installs an above-ground pool and builds an addition for a dining room on the first floor and a family room in the basement, which he completes in the fall of 1985. Around the same time, Rosa announces that they are getting a new foster brother from Vietnam named Huynh. Huynh enrolls in bilingual education at a high school downtown and sleeps on the couch. He and Vinh become instant friends. Bich is ashamed that she feels resentful towards him, but Huynh doesn’t stay long enough for her to deal with these feelings. He runs away and comes back a few times, and eventually, Bich’s parents just let him go. In early 1986, the family gets two new foster brothers: Phuong and Vu, brothers from Saigon who are Chrissy and Bich’s ages, respectively.
In the spring of 1986, Bich’s father stops working at North American Feather. He becomes an independent contractor, and, shortly after, they decide to move to a new house a half hour away. The new home has a long driveway, four acres of forest, and an eerie, enclosed pool. Bich’s uncles get their own apartment. Even though part of the reason for the move was to get Bich’s father away from his friends and his drinking, it continues. He builds his contractor business around his social life. He and Rosa become more and more distant.
The next spring, Bich is finishing seventh grade at City School, a charter school for gifted kids. Even there, she doesn’t fit in. Her father discovers Ponderosa, a steakhouse chain with an all-you-can-eat-buffet. The family goes every week, stuffing themselves with food, but after a while, it isn’t satisfying anymore. One day, Bich realizes they haven’t been in weeks, and she can’t remember the last time they went to Yen Ching or Chi Chi’s. Around the same time, she builds up the nerve to refuse to go to Fruitport. Rosa doesn’t protest.
“Ponder Rosa” takes on a new meaning, and Bich begins to think about her relationship with her stepmother. She finds books on codependency in a junk drawer. Bich’s father has been absent from home more and more, partly to avoid Chrissy and Anh’s rebellions. Rosa thought moving to Ada would bring them closer, but “it left [everyone], I think, feeling lonely” (213). That summer, Rosa takes Anh, Vinh, Vu, and Bich to the town of Baldwin to see a log cabin built by hand, and up to Lake Michigan, to blueberry pick. Rosa makes blueberry pies, but they turn out too sugary.
The next summer, Rosa announces that she has divorced Bich’s father. She hugs the kids and takes them out to Sizzler. It’s the only time the divorce is mentioned. Bich’s father sleeps on the sectional in the living room; past this change, things remain the same.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
In Chapter 12, Bich goes to visit Rosa’s family in Newport. Bich imagines that how she feels there must be how Rosa feels at Vietnamese parties and resents being told to love people she doesn’t know. There are moments in this chapter where Bich’s tenderness for Rosa shines through, as when Rosa relays a childhood of “feeding chickens, washing dirty clothes with a handheld scrub board, having no electricity or running water for years” (166). Once again, she is confronted with the thought that she has it good, and that though she finds things difficult, she is not the worst off.
The presence of Rosa’s family complicates Bich's identity. She writes, “It was too much for me to synthesize white American culture, Mexican-American culture, and my own Vietnamese culture all at the same time” (176). It’s also worth noting that when Rosa tells Bich she needs to get more involved with her family, Bich defends herself by saying, “I like tamales and tortillas” (176). Even in these serious moments, Bich turns to food to express the nuance of her feelings. Because she does not have the capability yet to explain to Rosa why she’s not interested in being close to her new family, she uses what she knows: food. She eventually tells Rosa she does not want to go and is allowed to stay home. This marks a change in her level of freedom and also signifies a shift in how Bich processes her family in that they become something she chooses in these final chapters.
Chapter 13, the title chapter, is all about religion. Bich and Anh are sent to a Catholic School for four days, where Bich is confronted with required prayer and wary classmates. She also finds out that her aunt Shirley is Jewish, which sparks her curiosity. Bich moves into Noi’s room, where she observes Noi’s Buddhist rituals closely. Her obsession with reincarnation is misguided and Bich starts to guess at the lives she must have had. She fixates on her imagined past life as a lonely blond English girl in a mansion; this fantasy is another example of her self-distancing from her culture and her life. Bich is worried that her hateful thoughts will lead her to be a street urchin or a starving farmer in the next life.
When Bich suffers from insomnia after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, Noi feeds her pomegranates, and, without acknowledging it, Bich learns mindfulness: “We helped Noi pick out each kernel, laying them out in piles. Glittering rubies, I thought” (185). There are many of these unspoken lessons in spirituality from Noi throughout the book. After watching Noi at one of the Buddhist temples, Bich decides she is going to try to practice at home and imitates Noi, as Noi meditates.
When Bich gets into an argument with Jennifer’s friends and tells them that “if there’s a God he can strike me down right now,” (191), the other girls get upset. It’s worth noting that Bich never brings up these initial conversations; she is drawn into them by Christian girls who believe that their way is the only way. Bich doesn’t have the luxury of normality, and so anything she says in these instances will mark her as other in some way. Because Bich is surrounded by so much Christianity, which isn’t really explained by her family’s religion, she believes that Buddha functions much as God does. She starts to pray to him and when none of her prayers are answered, she decides to test Buddha’s wrath and steal fruit from the altar. She realizes that “Buddha never claimed to be a god. He could not be tested. He had no wrath” (195). Bich often feels distanced from religion because it doesn’t belong to her, but in these moments, she has discovered something about faith on her own.
In Chapter 14, Bich’s father becomes more and more distant from the family and starts to gamble and drink much more. He steals all of Bich’s saved up money and when confronted about it yells at Bich that he has “given her everything” (202). Though he is definitively in the wrong, she feels guilty over the event. At this point, Rosa is doing everything she can to keep the family together: she gives Bich’s father projects, they expand the family to include foster brothers, and they even move houses. But it’s not enough to keep Bich’s father from continuing down his destructive path.
This chapter revolves around many food establishments, but the most important is Ponderosa, an all-you-can-eat buffet the family goes to once a week. It starts out as a fantastic family outing but eventually fades, so that Bich notices that the food isn’t that good and “the brick-colored floor [...] looked like the floor at Burger King” (212). This speaks to Bich’s dissatisfaction when confronted with the American things she desires. Even as she is eating steak at the restaurant, she is thinking about Noi’s food.
When they stop going to Ponderosa, the word takes on new meaning, and Bich has a chance to “Ponder Rosa” and think about her stepmother's situation. She mentions that when Rosa gets home from work and is too exhausted, Bich will help her take off her boots. Bich understands that Rosa moved them to their new house to keep them together, and also sees that it is failing. Her warmth towards Rosa begins to show. When Bich is fourteen, her parents get divorced, but no one speaks of it beyond that, and they all go on living together. The kids accept it as “one of their unspoken arrangements” (219). This chapter illustrates Bich’s growth when it comes to understanding that possibility can sometimes lead to dissatisfaction and pining over a way of life often distances a person from the life they actually lead. In the move to Ada, Bich realizes she can no longer claim childhood when she stops being able to order off the kid’s menu, which speaks to the close relationship in her life between food and identity.
Unlock all 49 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: