Slow Noodles
A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
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5.0 • 8 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen.
RECIPE: HOW TO CHANGE CLOTH INTO DIAMOND
Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.
In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone—her home, her family, her country—all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers, and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse, and weaving silk.
Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this lyrical memoir that includes more than twenty family recipes such as sour chicken-lime soup, green papaya pickles, and pâté de foie, as well as Khmer curries, stir-fries, and handmade bánh canh noodles. Through it all, re-creating the dishes from her childhood becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother, whose “slow noodles” approach to healing and cooking prioritized time and care over expediency.
Slow Noodles is an inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee’s connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engrossing and evocative debut memoir, Nguon recounts how her mother's recipes sustained her family through poverty and genocidal violence. Raised in a middle-class, half Vietnamese family in Battambang, Cambodia, in the 1960s, Nguon learned to cook Khmer food by shadowing her mother, whom she affectionately called "Mae." In 1970, as the Vietnam War spilled over Cambodia's borders and communist revolutionary Pol Pot began his rise to power, Nguon and her siblings fled to Saigon, leaving their mother and oldest brother behind to "sort out the family's affairs." Five years later, after the death of her mother and most of her siblings, Nguon escaped Saigon with her boyfriend, Chan, and bounced around various refugee camps in Thailand, where she worked as bartender, brothel cook, medical assistant, and silkweaver. Eventually, Nguon returned to Cambodia to open the Stung Treng Women's Development Center, where she continues to provide food and education to Khmer women. Throughout, Nguon interweaves the hardships she endured with her favorite recipes and the memories attached to them, offering readers evocative glimpses of the bursts of light that sustained her through long stretches of harrowing darkness. This haunting yet hopeful account will appeal to foodies and history buffs alike.
