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.

Back then, mostly for budgetary reasons, we rarely went out to eat, and the only food we ever had delivered was pizza. Even going to a fast food restaurant like McDonald’s was a special treat. To save money, my mother would buy plain hamburgers at our local McDonald’s and bring them home. Then she would peel a slice from the block of American cheese in the refrigerator and place half a slice on each of the patties to make instant, low-cost cheeseburgers. To me, this extra care just made them more special.

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Then one day when I was seven years old, dressed in my favourite ruffled blue skirt with tiny white flowers, my father came into my bedroom to tell me that he and my mother were separating. He had crouched down to look me in the eyes as he told me this news.

Later, a judge determined that I would live in the house with my father, and my mom would move into an apartment nearby. I would stay with her every other weekend and have dinner with her once a week.

Finding freedom in the kitchen

At my mother’s place, I watched her slowly unburden herself from the pressure of cooking American cuisine. She filled her kitchen with Asian ingredients – fish sauce and sesame oil and peppers. She began making Vietnamese and other Asian recipes more and more, involving me in the process as I got older. We developed rituals around cooking, often spending the better part of a day visiting different markets to gather ingredients – lemongrass and jicama, shrimp and pork, fish sauce and peppers – and then preparing an elaborate meal. Usually, I acted as the sous-chef, chopping, stirring and handing items to my mother. In addition to fried spring rolls – her specialty, which we have made together countless times – we also made pho, the traditional Vietnamese noodle soup. We cooked curry chicken and pad thai and banh xeo, a savoury Vietnamese pancake, and other dishes too.

As a parent, my mother could sometimes be cutting and cruel – often berating me with harsh language if I didn’t do well enough in school or underperformed in some other way. But when we cooked and ate together, we found common ground. As her American-born daughter who resembled my white father, I began to understand more of my mother’s Vietnamese heritage – and therefore my own. I began to see how cooking traditional Vietnamese cuisine was a way for her to connect her old life with her new one. She would share stories of cooking with her own mother back in Vietnam, where they rarely made elaborate feasts. Instead, they made simple meals of meat and fish and rice – but they were nourishing, for the body and for their relationship. Cooking those foods with me allowed her to plant a foot in two worlds, like all immigrants have to do.

Our shared Quarter Pounders

Over the years, our rituals have changed. Now that my mother is in her 80s, I pick her up and drive her to run her errands. We go to the bank, where she insists on standing in line, leaning on her cane, so she can chat with the tellers. We go to her favourite grocery store, where she always looks for the tiny smelt she likes to fry up as a snack, and then the post office, so she can dutifully stamp and pay her bills the old-fashioned way. Then, rather than spending the day shopping and cooking, I take her to McDonald’s, the way she used to take me. But instead of economising with simple hamburgers, we splurge and order two Quarter Pounders with cheese, one for her, one for me.

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This particular food tradition started a few years ago when my mother confessed to me one day – somewhat sheepishly – that she missed cheeseburgers. After years of living alone and fortifying herself with simple Asian meals, she rarely made burgers for herself or took herself out for a fast-food version. So we started hitting the drive-through nearly every time we ran errands together.

Sitting in the car together, I often wolf down my sandwich in about four bites. As someone who limits their fast-food intake, it always feels like a guilty pleasure. My mother, by contrast, eats slowly. Savouring. She might comment on the freshness of the bun, whether the cheese is melted and how sweet and crunchy the onions are. Every time, her review is the same: “delicious”.

Connection

For many, McDonald’s, started in 1940 by two brothers emerging from the Great Depression, has become synonymous with an affordable, reliable meal.

In Asian countries, McDonald’s has represented the kind of “Americanisation” that has, at least in the past, been thought of as largely positive.

In a 2021 essay about the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish in The New York Times, Jane Hu wrote, “In the wake of post-Mao economic reforms, the belated introduction of the Golden Arches to China represented a whole ethos about what constituted the good life.” James L Watson, in a 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, noted that McDonald’s franchises have been embraced in Asian countries for being associated with all that is hip or desirable about the US, but they have likewise been targeted in protests when anti-American sentiment is high. “Like the Stars and Stripes,” Watson writes, “the Big Mac stands for America.”

In the US, because it provides entry-level jobs for workers and opportunities for advancement and its global popularity speaks to the promise of success, McDonald’s has served as a symbol of the kind of pluck and grit that feels both quintessentially American and also emblematic of the immigrant experience. As Vietnamese writer Phan Quang Tue told The Washington Post, after arriving in the US after the fall of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City), “I savored the concept of equality at a McDonald’s restaurant where everyone, rich or poor, would receive the same burger and fries after paying the same amount, then about 89 cents. To me, it was and remains what I would call ‘McDonald’s equal treatment’.”

But for my mother and me, our shared Quarter Pounders have become a point of connection as essential to me as the bowls of pho, plates of spring rolls and other Vietnamese dishes we have eaten together over the years.

Once, eating cheeseburgers allowed my mother to feel American. Now, it shows that she is free – to be and do and eat whatever she wants – and that’s far more important.

So it should be for all of us, immigrants and otherwise, torn apart by war and politics, by oceans and generations. We prepare and eat the food of our homelands, original and adopted, and make feasts to toast the past and the future and the people we love. But we can also just go out for a cheeseburger because that can mean something too.

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