To me, home cooking from my culture is my mom putting in all her love and her worry for my success into huge Vietnamese dinners every Sunday during college.

Home cooking, to me, is the satisfaction of diving into a bowl of bun thit nuong bigger than your face while listening to your parents swap stories with the owner of a local Viet store.

It’s the love my Ba adds to her food after Ong comes back from being harassed almost daily about being a veteran from Vietnam (no one asks which side he was on. No one cares that he helped over full 10 families escape with his military influence).

Home cooking is ignoring my middle school classmates when they ask me if I’ve packed dog for lunch today. (And then watching the same bullies instagram pictures of their “phoe”, proclaiming worldly foodie status.)

It’s the comfort of sharing banh trung thu and jasmine tea with another Asian floormate, sharing stories of the festival.

It’s also the hurt of bringing in special coconut treats for Tet and watching your classmates turn their nose up at it because “it’s too foreign.”

It’s the time and patience I put in to selecting the best family-owned shops or the best ingredients to cook for my boyfriend. Even though he’s American, he’s eager to try everything because he knows I pour all my love into it, and because he knows how much it means to me.

Home cooking, to me, is the struggles of adapting to American life after a war wiped out everything my family owned, bittersweet because it’s only a cheap substitute for what once was, and topped with hoison sauce and sriracha. It tastes differently to every Vietnamese family. But it’s a taste and a side of me that I’m extremely reluctant to share with everyone else.

Call me selfish, but I don’t think you’re appreciating my culture when you eat my food. You don’t know the first thing about it.