Assimilation into a Cultural Hegemony

Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner via food related memoirs presents the struggles of assimilation from a foreign culture into the corporate influenced culture of the United States. While the book focuses on one girls struggle to find her new American identity while pressured by her family roots to maintain aspects of her original Vietnamese culture, Stealing Buddha's Dinner reveals through an uncorrupted immigrant child eyes the vast corporation-influenced cultural hegemony taking place in the the United States.

 While young Bich merely wants to be integrated into the American culture, she feels she must do this by indulging in all corporate America has to offer. This troubling premise brings up the growing fact that popular American culture is increasingly defined by powerful corporate America's sponsored products. Instead of celebrating the culture contributed to everyday by American cities and individual citizens, most Americans and citizens around the world celebrate international corporate success of McDonalds and other companies, the innovations of Pringles potato chips, and other such products insistingly pushed to the forefront of the public eye with the power of corporate branding and mass international made in America advertising. I believe we have a rich and ever-changing culture in the U.S. that shouldn't be defined in the international eye by America's corporate success and overall capitalistic greed. I believe finding an "American" identity should be assimilation with America's diverse melting-pot of citizens, not integration to the the cultural hegemony enforced by corporate America. But then again, corporations now are apparently considered people.

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