After fleeing Cambodia through the brutal regime of Pol Pot, Chantha Nguon spent a long time in more and more determined poverty, first in city Vietnam, then the squalor of Thailand refugee camps and at last within the malarial jungles of Cambodia. Through all of it, Nguon relied on the scrumptious meals of her childhood for consolation. In her heartbreaking, exquisitely informed memoir, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes, Nguon tells her story with co-author Kim Green.
At the tip of every chapter, Nguon shares a recipe; some are scrumptious and complicated (bitter hen lime soup, village fashion), others bittersweet (silken rise up barbecue or as Nguon’s subtitle calls it, “How to Make Unfresh Fish Taste Rather Delicious”). Most of those she discovered sitting in her affluent childhood kitchen, watching her mom and older sister create magical dishes they shared with their much less rich neighbors.
That generosity received Nguon via her years in exile. She writes of sharing sources when she had so few, and making pals who would discover and carry one another many times. In the Thai refugee camps, the place Nguon and others waited years for even an interview, they discovered a selected household. “We refugees had nothing,” she writes, “but many of us drew close, and found ways to ease one another’s suffering. . . . Here in camp, we were all poor and full of loss. Often, that united us.”
Throughout Slow Noodles, Nguon returns to that theme: loss and despair giving approach to power. While this can be a struggle memoir, it is also in the end a narrative of hope. Despite the a long time of horror the Khmer Rouge inflicted on tens of millions of Cambodians, Nguon infuses her memoir with a spirit of persistence and defiance. Even within the face of evil, she continued cooking her childhood dishes, talking her childhood language and slowly, slowly making her method residence once more.
“When you have nothing, weakness can destroy you,” Nguon writes. “No one would carry me out of the jungle. I would have to carry myself.”
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