Slow Noodles

A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country
and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by
reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen.

RECIPE: HOW TO CHANGE CLOTH INTO DIAMOND

Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in
2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 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--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 pate de foie, as well as Khmer curries, stir-
fries, and handmade banh 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.