SLOW NOODLES

Chantha Nguon was born in Cambodia and spent two decades as a refugee, until she was finally able to return to her homeland. She is the co-founder, of the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center, a social enterprise that offers a living wage, education, and social services to women and their families in rural northeastern Cambodia. A frequent public speaker, she has appeared at universities and on radio and TV news programs, including NPR’s Morning Edition. She cooks often for friends, family, and for private events. An excerpt from Slow Noodles in Hippocampus was named a Longreads Best Personal Essay in 2021.

Kim Green is an award-winning writer and public radio producer and contributor based in Nashville. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, the New York Times, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Marketplace, and The New Yorker Radio Hour. A licensed pilot, she was formerly a flight instructor.

“I’ve never read a book that made me weep, wince, laugh out loud, and rejoice like Slow Noodles. In Chantha Nguon’s harrowing, wise, and fiercely feminist memoir, cooking is a language—of love, remembrance, and rebellion—and stories are nourishment.” —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Chantha Nguon connects to the joy of the sight, scent, taste, texture, and even sound of food, and when there is no food to eat she connects to the memory of food. In this potent narrative of unbreakable, inviolable, female power, each recipe is an act of grace, transformation, resistance, and reclamation.” —Alice Randall, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the NAACP Image Award for Soul Food Love

“A testament to the strength of women in times of war, a recipe book of memories, and a lesson in rebuilding after destruction, this memoir is a reminder that the world has ended many times over in different places, and that our teachers in survival walk among us every day.” —Thi Bui, bestselling author of The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

“Not only the remarkable story of Chantha Nguon’s life, Slow Noodles is a beautiful glimpse into the hearts of women as they find each other over food.” —Lisa Donovan, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger

“It is rare that a memoir and the meals it recounts truly depend on each other, each intrinsic to the other. Yet that is the case in Slow Noodles, where recipes reinforce the incredible, poignant, difficult, and often joyous tale of Chantha Nguon’s survival. This book tells a story that must be heard, and offers the tastes of an extraordinary life.” —Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal and The Everlasting Meal Cookbook

1. In the prologue, Chantha explains her “slow noodles” philosophy in the kitchen and in life. What does that phrase, and the book’s title, mean to her?
2. Chantha writes that “the Khmer Rouge informed the Cambodian people that we had no history.” What did “Year Zero” signify to Pol Pot and his revolutionaries, and to the people who lived through the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975 to 1979?
3. Why did Chantha include so many food descriptions and recipes in her memoir? Why do you think there’s such a powerful connection between food and memory?
4. What sets Cambodian foodways apart from the cuisines of neighboring countries like Vietnam and Thailand? Why do you think Cambodian food has gotten less attention from food-curious Westerners than other national cuisines?
5. How does preserving Cambodian culinary history, something so important to Chantha, dovetail with the strength of women—and their bonds—in this memoir.
6. Chantha writes about the “Rules for Women” (the Chbab Srey) and quotes a Khmer saying: “Men are gold; women are cloth.” What do the Chbab Srey and the proverb have to say about women’s and girls’ roles in the Cambodian traditions of Chantha’s childhood? In what ways does Chantha fulfill or defy those expectations in her own life?
7. On the surface, “Silken Rebellion Fish Fry” is a recipe for rehabilitating a too-old fish using “the art of culinary disguise.” What deeper truths about resilience and defiance does this recipe suggest? What does Chantha mean by the phrase “silken rebellion”?
8. When Chantha and her husband, Chan, were in the refugee camps, she saw a headline that said, “Charity Gets Tired.” What does that mean? How can we avoid “empathy fatigue” when there are so many refugees fleeing wars, revolutions, and dire poverty, and so much uninformed rhetoric surrounding immigration policy?
9. A major theme of this memoir is the question of whether her mother’s middle-class values prepared Chantha to survive alone as a young, penniless refugee. She often calls herself “spoiled” and “soft.” Do you think Mae’s lessons, beliefs, and recipes made Chantha too soft for a hard world or gave her the strength she would need to survive and rebuild her life?
10. What does it mean to Chantha, her mother, and her sister that she was born in the Year of the Buffalo? How do Chantha’s belief in astrology and her Catholic faith intertwine? How do her beliefs about fate and agency evolve over time?
11. What does the Elephant Fish fable say about a mother’s influence in a daughter’s life, even after the mother is gone? Why do you think Chantha ends her book with this story?
12. In the epilogue, Chantha’s daughter, Clara, writes, “If there’s one thing I learned from my mother, it’s that losing everything is not the end of the story.” What does she mean by this? Do you find Chantha’s story of survival and resilience relatable or inspiring? Are there ways to apply her experiences to your own struggles and losses, even if your life is very different from hers?