Chantha Nguon, Clara Kim, and Kim Green discuss Slow Noodles

The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith and lala books in Lowell, Massachusetts host Chantha Nguon, Clara Kim, and Kim Green to discuss and celebrate the release of Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes.
In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone-her home, her family, her country-all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. 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.
Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this lyrical memoir that includes more than twenty family recipes such as sour 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, 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.
Slow Noodles is an inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee’s connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.
Hosted by the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, this virtual event was originally recorded on February 24, 2024.
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