Chances are, there has been a time in your life when you felt like you didn’t fit in; a time when it felt like everyone but you had a niche, a role, an identity. And, chances are, you felt like you were the only person feeling this way, but you weren’t. “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” is this story.

Written by Bich Minh Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, this memoir is a beautiful ode to identity, lack of identity and the ever possible chance that even when we’re home we may not belong. “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” follows Nguyen and her family from Saigon in 1975 to greater Grand Rapids, Michigan and her struggle to find an identity amidst profound change.

Nguyen was determined to be American and strove to be like her peers. She loved food and longed to eat American foods, packaged and full of preservatives. Pringles, Toll House cookies, Steak ‘n Shake, Hamburger Helper. Instead she ate her Mexican stepmother’s sopa and arroz con pollo and her Vietnamese grandmother’s pho and cha gio.

The one thing she loved more than food was books. She immersed herself in stories, longing to find an identity within their pages. She tried to identify with characters as foreign to her as her neighbors; Laura Ingalls, Ramona Quimby, Elizabeth Bennet.

When this didn’t work, she tried to spend more time with her grandmother, meditating and connecting with her Buddhist heritage that was becoming itself increasingly foreign. It’s hard not to feel what she must have felt. I lament the sadness surrounding her, wishing it had been easier.

But even as she became more “American,” even as her Vietnamese past seemed further and further away, she still felt like an outsider. As an adult when she visited Vietnam, meeting her relatives and connecting with her homeland, she was still foreign. Her relatives proudly referred to her as American. She wasn’t at home in Vietnam; she wasn’t at home in America.

Although the chronology of this book is somewhat confusing, what matters isn’t age or date; it is the feelings Nguyen describes that we all share. This book is a tribute to feeling lost and evidence that it’s OK to feel that way. America is full of people who are nothing like one another, people from different states, countries, religious backgrounds and ethnicities. Let’s take comfort in being different, being outsiders, being lost, but being these things together.