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Just hours after losing a cameraman he had worked with, a journalist in Gaza covered the killing of his relatives live on television. Khaled al-Madhoun, a Palestinian TV personality, was fatally shot by Israeli forces while he was delivering aid to a distribution center.

My dinner table was frequently filled with typical American dishes when I was a girl growing up in Maryland, including fried chicken, yeast rolls, and green beans, followed by ice cream sandwiches or pie for dessert. Or perhaps a tall glass of cold milk with lasagna, burgers, or beef stew. My Vietnamese immigrant mother prepared these dishes lovingly and carefully by hand.

My mother felt a strong urge to be “Americanized,” just like many Vietnamese immigrants and refugees who came to the United States after the Vietnam War. She had been hired to teach Vietnamese to American soldiers at a United States military base in Okinawa, Japan, where my father was working on wartime intelligence. For her, being the first of her siblings to do so and marrying an American meant a lot to her. She later told me that one way to express her gratitude was to suppress and suppress the things that made her seem different. Therefore, she prepared meals that my father’s Midwestern American palate would enjoy, avoiding ingredients he might have thought were too spicy, too difficult, or too unusual. She also learned to speak only English at home.

We rarely went out to eat and the only food we ever had delivered was pizza, which was mostly for budgetary reasons back then. Even visiting a McDonald’s fast food establishment was a unique experience. My mother would bring plain hamburgers home from our neighborhood McDonald’s to save money. To create quick, affordable cheeseburgers, she would take a slice from the block of American cheese and place half a slice on each of the patties. They seem to have been given more attention, but this care only serves to make them more special.

My father then informed me that he and my mother were splitting when I was seven years old, dressed in my favorite ruffled blue skirt with tiny white flowers. As he explained this news to me, he had slumped down and looked me in the eyes.

Later, a judge made the decision to let my mother move into a nearby apartment and that my father and I would live there together. Every other weekend, I would spend dinner with her and attend dinner with her.

Having some freedom in the kitchen

I watched my mother slowly let go of the pressure of making American cuisine at her home. Fish sauce, sesame oil, and peppers were all used in her kitchen. As I grew older, she started making Vietnamese and other Asian dishes more frequently, involving me in the process. We developed a daily routine that involved cooking, spending the better part of the day going to different markets to gather ingredients like shrimp and pork, fish sauce and peppers, and then cooking a lavish meal. I would frequently serve as my mother’s sous-chef, cutting, stirring, and handing items. We also prepared pho, the traditional Vietnamese noodle soup, along with her specialty, which we have made numerous times. We prepared other dishes like savoury Vietnamese pancakes, curry chicken, pad thai, and banh xeo, among others.

My mother could occasionally be cruel and cutting, frequently berating me with harsh language if I didn’t do well in school or did something else well. However, we found a common ground when we cooked and ate together. As her American-born daughter, who resembled my white father, I began to learn more about my mother’s Vietnamese heritage and consequently my own. I began to understand how her new life and her traditional Vietnamese cuisine could be merged when she cooked them. She would share tales of how her mother and mother in Vietnam, who hardly ever cooked elaborate meals, cooked together. They substituted simple meals of rice, fish, and meat for their relationship and for the body. Like all immigrants do, cooking those foods with me allowed her to establish herself in two different cultures.

Our common Quarter Pounders

Our customs have evolved over time. I pick up and drive my mother, who is in her 80s, to run her errands. She insists on leaning on her cane while waiting in line at the bank so she can chat with the clerks. To dutifully stamp and pay her bills the old-fashioned way, we visit her favorite grocery store, where she always searches for the tiny smelt she likes to fry up as a snack, and then the post office. Then, in the same way that she used to take me, I take her to McDonald’s so we can spend the day shopping and cooking instead. However, we decided to spend more money on two Quarter Pounders with cheese, one for her and one for me, than on simple hamburgers.

My mother confessed to me one day, somewhat skeptically, that she missed cheeseburgers, and this particular food tradition began a few years ago. She frequently made burgers for herself or took her own fast food version after years of living alone and fortifying herself with simple Asian meals. We almost always ran errands together, so we started going through the drive-through.

I frequently wolf down my sandwich in about four bites while driving with my partner. It always feels like a guilty pleasure for someone who restricts their fast food intake. By contrast, my mother eats slowly. savoring . She might question the bread’s freshness, whether the cheese has melted, or how tender and crunchy the onions are. Her rating is always the same as “delicious.”

Connection

McDonald’s, which was founded in 1940 by two brothers after the Great Depression, has become a staple of a good-looking, reasonably priced meal for many.

McDonald’s has been associated with the kind of “Americanization” that has historically been viewed as largely positive in Asian nations.

The late introduction of the Golden Arches to China, according to Jane Hu, in a 2021 essay about the McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish in The New York Times, “represented a whole ethos about what constitutes the good life.” In a 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, James L. Watson noted that McDonald’s franchises have been praised for having ties to all that is hip or desirable about the US, as well as for being targeted in protests when anti-American sentiment is high. The Big Mac represents America, according to Watson, “like the Stars and Stripes.”

McDonald’s has served as a symbol of the kind of pluck and grit that feels both quintessentially American and emblematic of the immigrant experience because it offers entry-level jobs for workers and opportunities for advancement and because its global popularity speaks to the promise of success. After settling in the US following the fall of Saigon (here now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnamese writer Phan Quang Tue said, “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. It was and is still regarded as “McD’s equal treatment” in my opinion.

However, our shared Quarter Pounders have grown to be just as important to me as our shared plates of spring rolls, pho, and other Vietnamese dishes that we have prepared together over the years.

Cheeseburgers once made it possible for my mother to feel American. It now demonstrates that she is entirely free to do whatever she wants, and that is much more crucial.

For all of us, immigrants and non-immigrants, torn apart by war, politics, oceans, and generations, should this be. We prepare and consume the food from both our original and adopted homelands, and we also prepare feasts to celebrate the people we care about. However, we can also simply order a cheeseburger because it can also mean something.