At various critical moments throughout this remarkable memoir co-written with Kim Green, Chantha Nguon reflects on the protracted but satisfying process of preparing and cooking handmade noodles the way her mother did. You couldn’t shorten or hurry the method. If you did, the end product would betray a lazy cook in both its taste and its texture. Hence the title SLOW NOODLES, a lifelong metaphor for patience --- often unimaginably extreme patience --- amid a life of danger and uncertainty.

Nguon describes her childhood self as a pampered and “soft” middle-class Cambodian girl growing up in the 1960s in her hometown of Battambang in the eastern region of Cambodia. The youngest of a large family, she learned early that no matter how prosperous life might be, a family’s future was always invested in its boys. Girls were meant to serve and work domestically, even though there were many signs of change in the world beyond her home.

"At various critical moments throughout this remarkable memoir co-written with Kim Green, Chantha Nguon reflects on the protracted but satisfying process of preparing and cooking handmade noodles the way her mother did.... You will never read another food-inspired memoir like SLOW NOODLES."

But by teaching her daughters unusually high standards of cooking and sewing, their mother --- a founding heroine of SLOW NOODLES --- equipped them to fend for themselves in an uncertain and misogynistic society that would soon be torn apart by decades of overlapping wars in Southeast Asia.

Little did young Chantha know how critical those skills would become. While maintaining the compliant exterior demeanor expected of Cambodian women, she met every challenge by internally strategizing how to best deal with it in the moment. The deaths of her father, mother, sister and other close relatives came in cruelly rapid succession as the family’s fortunes rapidly declined. She found herself alone as a vulnerable twenty-something adult, an internally displaced refugee in a war-ravaged country with dreams of escaping to Europe or North America. Those dreams were dashed at every turn, costing all of her meager savings each time.

Virtually homeless, Nguon survived year after humiliating year by cooking for others. She somehow remembered the vast store of recipes taught by her mother, learning how to adapt them to the often sparse ingredients and conditions at hand. SLOW NOODLES recounts numerous examples of how her meals fed every level of Cambodia’s disrupted society of the 1960s and ’70s --- businesspeople, professionals, students, soldiers, fellow refugees, aid workers, and even prostitutes as young as 12 who were sold into sexual slavery by their destitute parents.

While Nguon’s life until middle age was an extraordinary patchwork of disasters and opportunities held together by her own dogged resilience, two pivotal influences stood out for me as I followed the breathless pace of her narrative.

First, Nguon encountered Chan, a young man in similar straits who radically did not believe women to be inferior. He insisted on her keeping pace with him as they fled one precarious situation after another, survived acute hunger and jungle diseases, or worked long hours at tedious jobs to raise more travel money.

Second, the pair encountered the international NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, where they learned urgently needed paramedical skills and worked on and off for a number of years. Those skills would help them create new lives focused on helping others.

Thrown together in times of dire necessity, Nguon and Chan’s survival partnership gradually grew into a life relationship as well. They never made it out of Southeast Asia, instead returning to Cambodia to become rebuilders of their all-but-lost culture. Since then, they have established educational, medical and entrepreneurial programs, raised children of their own (who did, in fact, get to study and live overseas), and eventually created stable lives after decades of deprivation, fear and frustration --- experiences that Nguon emphasizes belong to all Cambodians of their era.

So where do the book's nearly two-dozen recipes fit? Nguon shares them whenever a certain food played a major role in salvaging the mental or physical health of those among whom she found herself, in both good times and bad. Each dish comes with deep and indelible memories, especially the eponymous “slow noodles.” Its lessons sustained a life that otherwise might have dissolved, as forces much larger tried, but ultimately failed, to eradicate Cambodia forever.

You will never read another food-inspired memoir like SLOW NOODLES.