When I was a girl growing up in Maryland, my dinner table was often laden with typical American fare – meals like fried chicken, yeast rolls and green beans followed by ice cream sandwiches or pie for dessert. Or maybe lasagna, burgers or beef stew served with a tall glass of cold milk. What was less typical was that these dishes were prepared – carefully and lovingly – by my Vietnamese immigrant mother.
It was the 1970s, and like many Vietnamese immigrants and refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War, my mother felt a strong urge to be “Americanised”. She had met my father at a United States military base on Okinawa, Japan, where he was working on wartime intelligence and she had been hired to teach Vietnamese to American soldiers. For her, marrying an American and escaping the war – and being the first of her siblings to do so – was something to be grateful for. One way to show that gratitude, she later told me, was to stifle and suppress the things that made her seem different. So she spoke only English at home and cooked food that would please my father’s Midwestern American palate, avoiding ingredients that he might have thought were too spicy, too complicated or too unusual.
