It starts with a lovesong.

Chantha Nguon’s memoir is poignant, powerful, and profoundly her own.  A deeply personal story of Home.  Nguon expertly translates memory into lyrical prose that invites the reader to journey with her into her mother’s joyful kitchen in Battambang to refugee life in Vietnam and later Thailand to Cambodia again.  This is a tale written with both with compassion, humor, sorrow, and grief and is one of my most important reads of the year thus far.

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It starts with a lovesong. To her mother, to Battambang, and to flavor as a powerful catalyst for memory. Woven throughout, much like the fabric woven from the silk threads by her students in Stung Treng, are the themes of resiliency, women’s empowerment, and the importance of intergenerational connectivity. The importance of sharing and listening and not forgetting. 

At times Slow Noodles reads as an ode to Cambodia, to its lands and waters and Khmer people. To prahok. Nguon liberally invokes all of the senses, drawing the reader in, whether it be through her descriptions of young rice or the cravings of lime and sugar while experiencing the depths of hunger and malaria in Ratanakiri. Time and again Nguon succinctly offers the audience a look into the nuance that trauma and resiliency are not mutually exclusive. She shares with us the ingenuity and grit of a refugee, but does not shy away from an honest exploration of the cruelty she and countless other Vietnamese/Khmer refugees experienced at the hands of others.

Nguon is more magnanimous with the field of international development than I, but she also encourages an important shift in frame of reference.  Her experiences are important for the entire field to heed.  “The big foreign aid groups did their best, but they had no idea how to reshape a civilization from nothing.  Who does?  Donors, NGOs, and politicians want speedy, tangible progress. The natural bias is, Hurry up and heal.” (Page 249).  Nguon proposes a “slow noodles approach” to healing, bringing us full circle back to her mother’s kitchen.

The recipes sprinkled throughout the book are heartfelt and steeped in memory. As a reader, you immediately understands how special, how personal these are. The recipes are punctuation that both clarifies and reinforces a tale of both joy and sorrow, of compassion and cruelty.  And while I’m planning to try Mae’s Fish Amok and Smuggler’s Sticky Rice with Coconut and Sugar among others, I’ll encourage you to join me in steering clear of the Go-Home Rice (served upon seeking asylum in Thailand “with a side of loathing”).

Spanning several decades, this memoir is an important read so that we may never forget the irrevocable, intergenerational impact of genocide.  So that we may think intentionally about what it means to welcome and support those who need it. In a time where we are moving faster than ever and are often repeating the same mistakes of our past, we should all slow down enough to better understand the consequences of such.

This memoir is immensely powerful and important read.  Equally powerful is the epilogue by her daughter, Clara Kim.  I encourage you to order this book through your local, independent bookseller and use this as a selection for your next bookclub. We should all be grateful to Chantha Nguon for sharing her story so that we as future generations might learn if we so choose to listen.