SLOW NOODLES

 

Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and one 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—home, family, and country—all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She takes us back to the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and exterminated more than a million Cambodians, including ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an emigrant in Saigon, the author 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 and inspirational memoir that includes more than twenty family recipes for dishes like 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, recreating 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 to cooking prioritized time and care over expediency.

 

For readers who devoured Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil, Slow Noodles is a testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee’s connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.