Salty potato crisps sealed in long, round air-tight canisters. Artificial vanilla encased in chocolate shells, sprinkled with nuts and perched atop frozen waffle cones. Thick, gray slabs of meat, smothered in packaged gravy and torn through with a knife and fork. Unremarkable to most, but a great inspiration for one little Vietnamese girl who saw them as the axis of her desire and alienation, who grew up to write “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” a memoir of her life.

The book (Viking Adult, $24.95) is the story of a childhood in Grand Rapids, Mich. — and at its center is an immigrant who wants to fit in. Her yearning for American food symbolizes her desire to be the all-American girl.

Bích Minh Nguyễn’s family left Việt Nam on April 29, 1975. There were thousands of people storming the U.S. Embassy during the wake of total political destruction. While many resorted to just throwing their youngsters over the walls. her father discovered a passageway dug under the barbed wire, and they made their escape.

They had the option of going to California, where it was rumored to be warm, like their homeland. But Nguyễn’s grandmother had become enamored with a friend’s stories of a male relative studying at a university in Michigan. They had to settle there.

“The liberals in Grand Rapids — I assume they have a club with the 10 others,” Nguyễn joked about her adopted city, which the late President Gerald R. Ford also called home. “It is a very conservative place.”

Even in July, they were cold all the time. Life was different.

“When my father came here, he was 34 years old. I was 8 months old,” Nguyễn said. “It was so much easier for me. My father worked a lot to gain acceptance.

“And here I was this bratty kid always demanding ice cream cones.”

Nguyễn recalled snow as a foreign element.

“It was hard for my dad to get used to snow,” she said. “They were really obsessive about warming up the car — it’s a big deal in the Midwest.

“Once, my uncle didn’t want to waste 10 minutes warming up the car, and so he decided to put a brick on the accelerator. The car was ruined — it was his first, too.”

To the chagrin of American neighbors, the vehicle was left for many years on the driveway where it had died. Her dad would come this close to engaging in a brawl with their next door neighbor, Mr. Vander Wal, on their yard in front of that automobile. Racial and patriarchal tensions mounted as the fabric of the community changed.

In retrospect, Nguyễn has learned that there were nearly 2,000 Vietnamese families living in Grand Rapids and the immediate area at that time. Still, she felt overwhelmed in a sea of seemingly perfect girls and their seemingly perfect clans. Her Latina stepmother, Rosa, packed school lunches with a sandwich made of cheap white bread with olive loaf, the meat made by a company called Buddig. In her memoir, the author wrote: “The name drove me crazy, the way it sounded like a stuffed-up nose, and I wanted to rewrite every package to make it Budding.”

Other classmates brought delicate Wonder Bread sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and tomato soup kept warm in a thermos. Nguyễn found comfort in knowing that, at least, her family fell just above the qualifying level for free lunches. Still, the cafeteria menu intrigued her: Fried chicken, whipped potatoes and gravy, peas, fruit cup. These things didn’t sound so gross.

She wanted these foods so badly. The expression of her desire is obvious on the cover of “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.” A pastel candy necklace, sundae cone, marshmallow Snowball, and lemon cake tenderly laid out, laced with a smattering of Pringles chips and Skittles sweets. This enticing confectionary spread is presented on a red platter as an altar piece to religious and ancestral deities.

“My stepmother would always say that they were too expensive,” Nguyễn, who recently came to Southern California for a book signing, remembered. “It wasn’t a matter of nutrition. Food was a status symbol, and I realized that once I entered into lunchroom politics.”

“It’s both comic and tragic,” she said. “You are what you eat.”

Nguyễn’s diverse family also proved to be a cultural paradox for her. On one hand, her father married Rosa, a Mexican American who tried tirelessly to administer cultural pride in both Bích Minh and her older sister, Anh. Both were less than receptive.

Nguyễn recalled a “cultural festival” her grade school established one year. Approach to culture, back in the 1980s, was not as politically correct as we know it to be today.

“There were dragon dancers and Vietnamese food, and my sister and I had to wear our aó dài,” Nguyễn said. “They even played that Neil Diamond song, “Coming to America” on the loudspeaker. I was so humiliated.”

Hmm...

“My stepmother loved that song. I suspected she was behind that, actually.”

Along with the addition of Rosa came Rosa’s daughter, Crissy, whose biological father was Caucasian.

Crissy was both an intriguing and repulsive role model for Nguyễn in her early years. She knew about gluttonous curiosities like shepherd’s pie, but also broke rhubarb off the stalk in neighboring yards, sucking away at the sticky-tart dusty skin. Her Caucasian family dined on extravagant treats like stuffed bell peppers (which was what real people ate), but she could barbarically smash sliced bread into balls and dunk them in honey. Her wrists were a ruckus of bangles and her lace glove was a nod to her knowledge of sex and fashion, but she stole these items by sneaking them out of mall dressing rooms.

Crissy and Anh, Nguyễn believed, bonded by the terms of their physical beauty. In an instance in the book, Crissy’s father called Nguyễn homely. When she finally looked up the word, it tore a wound that she would nurse for years. She and Crissy did have one connection, however. The acknowledgement of their “other parents” remained largely taboo. They both had secret families.

Then, of course, there was the issue of worship.

Religion, in the volume, seems to be represented by two parties: her paternal grandmother, Bà Nội, and the girls at school. Nguyễn remembered being entranced by ripening pears and oranges lovingly placed in front of their altar to Buddha. There, the yellow and orange jewels gathered dust. On the days when they were finally allowed to be taken down, she and Anh would cradle and bruise them until nightfall, when they would finally be coaxed away, sliced, and communally relished.

Once her stepmother and Crissy moved in, the altar relocated to her grandmother’s room. Shortly after, the perfect girls at school began praying for her damned soul. Even her Brownie troop leader remained dismal about her chances for salvation.

“Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” seems to serve as the writer’s catharsis. Now an assistant professor at Purdue University, Nguyễn never really set out to write a memoir. She did, however, pen several contained essays about her life. They all seemed to be linked by a prominent theme: her apparent obsession with food, television, and commercials. Once she got the idea to go through with the book, it was impossible, as it often is, to go back.