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

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