SLOW NOODLES by Chantha Nguon

Beautifully weaving history, memories, and beloved family recipes, SLOW NOODLES by Chantha Nguon is a unique memoir of irrepressible spirit and determination. Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything—her home, her family, her country—but the remembers tastes and aromas of her mother's kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s. 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.

This book includes more than twenty family recipes such as sour chicken-lime soup and green papaya pickles, as well as Khmer curries, stir-fries, and handmade bánh canh noodles. For Nguon, 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.

An inspiring testament to the power of food, SLOW NOODLES keeps alive a refugee's connection to her past and sparks hope for a beautiful life.

— Recommended by Tess