episodes.” Despite what seems like a lifetime of
parrying “Hoarders of All Things Asian”—weird
white men who unabashedly and unconditionally
advance upon Asian women—and suffering failed
dates with Chinese boys arranged by her pau pau,
Lindsey is still interested in romance. She sud-
denly finds herself in a relationship with Ve g a n
Warrior travel editor Michael Cartier, a white guy
and fellow “closet meat-eater.” His love of varie-
gated foods from Twix bars to sautéed pea sprouts,
like Lindsey’s, knows no cultural bounds. The re-
lationship begins tentatively, with Lindsey’s anxie-
ties of family acceptance and echoes of her cousin
Brandon’s scolding: “[Y]ou only like white guys.
What’s up with that?” Yet traveling away from San
Francisco, first with her grandmother to China
and then with Michael to the California town
of Locke, proves to be a traveling toward herself
and her family history as she learns more about
her grandmother’s World War II experiences and
her father’s western hometown. Reckoning with a
new knowledge of her family’s past allows Lindsey
a certain stability—or a certainty in her instabil-
ity—that helps her come to a decision about her
relationship with Michael.
In Keltner’s sequel Buddha Baby, clues and
musings about Lindsey’s family history continue
on—with Lindsey’s reminder that “Confucian
proverbs eluded her, but she was well versed in
the spunky aphorisms of great philosophers such
as Fonzie and Fred Sanford.” Buddha Baby intro-
duces a more mature Lindsey who has left Ve g a n
Warrior and now lives with her fiancé Michael.
She juggles part-time work as a museum gift-shop
clerk and as a teacher at St. Maude’s, the Catholic
school of her youth. Each job leads to a distinct
adventure, revisiting the anxieties explored in The
Dim Sum of All Things: family, racial identity, and
relationships with men. At the gift shop, Lindsey
runs into a childhood flame, the sweet-talking
Chinese Texan, Dustin Lee. As Michael is away on
business, Lindsey panders to her curiosities about
dating Dustin and Chinese men in general. As it
turns out, Lindsey and Dustin share similar reck-
onings with regard to dating and what it is to be
Chinese—“authentic Chinese flavor,” in Lindsey’s
words— which fuels an attraction between them
that could threaten her engagement to Michael.
Meanwhile at St. Maude’s, Lindsey wades through
the bureaucracy of nuns and other cohorts to sift
through the school’s basement records. Shocked to
discover a 1928 photograph of a girl who is her
spitting image, Lindsey embarks on solving a case
of mistaken identity, as Keltner reintroduces an
element of gothic mystery into “chick lit” and clev-
erly shows how the constraints of family history
always leave room for the novel individual.Bibliography
Dong, Stella. Review of The Dim Sum of All Things
and Buddha Baby, by Kim Wong Keltner. South
China Morning Post, (Hong Kong), 25 December
2005, p. 5.
Keltner, Kim Wong. The Dim Sum of All Things. New
York: HarperCollins, 2004.
———. Buddha Baby. New York: HarperCollins,
2005.
Michelle Har KimKim, Myung Mi (1957– )
Award-winning, post-modern poet Myung Mi
Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her fam-
ily immigrated to the United States when she was
nine years old. Through a series of moves within
the country, Kim’s childhood was filled with muted
struggles to learn a new language and adapt to an
alien culture. Later on, such cultural and linguis-
tic displacement and diasporic reconfiguration
are traced and revisited in her poems. Kim gradu-
ated from Oberlin College in 1979, and obtained
an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1981.
After teaching English at Stuyvesant High School,
New York, from 1983 to 1984, she went on to pur-
sue an M.F.A. and received it from the University
of Iowa in 1986. After teaching at Luther College in
Decorah, Iowa, and at San Francisco State Univer-
sity, she has been teaching poetry since 2002 at the
State University of New York, Buffalo.
In 1991 Kim’s first poetry collection, Under Flag,
was published and won the 1991 Multicultural Pub-Kim, Myung Mi 147